IMO, it “counts” as Trek, so strong is its respect and homage to the essence of Trek. As Trek Sci-Fi it also did some things well and made its own contributions to the “Trek forum of ideas”. It tackled the “prime directive”, progressive issues around gender, went all the way with robot-organic romance, did a very Trek style take on AI war and I rather liked its take on a hyper technologically advanced species (the one that runs through time faster than our universe).
Very well said. There are elements of the Trek universe that The Orville IMO does better. The Prime Directive is one of them. And the show is much more bold on gender and queer rights issues, which Trek often ignored or at best just said “heres a LGBTQ character!” It almost feels like a distilled version of Star Trek.
Somewhat more uncomfortably, it stood as an affirmation of what those of us who have struggled with Kurtzman era Trek what we were actually looking for and remembering as the Trek we loved, and a reminder that style of TV can still work well.
Yeah I didn’t like Discovery at all and was disappointed in Picard, so The Orville filled that hole. Now that SNW and Lower Decks are out and are much better shows than DSC and PIC IMO, less so but I do still prefer The Orville even to them.