I was really disappointed with the most recent series of Orville. I feel they moved from social commentary to being preachy and smug.
The biggest example of this is the time travel episode in season 3. You have someone who has established a life and has kids and real character growth, who wants to be able to live the life they established after being abandoned for 20 years. On the other hand you have Seth McFarland saying that it’s bad. There isn’t any real discussion of what right is, it’s just McFarland saying that he’s right and then circumventing any resistance. It ends with McFarland being smug he did the right thing and having no self reflection on the damage he did.
To be clear, I’m all about social commentary in my sci-fi but I feel like anything interesting is diluted to make it a closer parallel to earth. The Moclans went from a unique all male species, to having a rare minority that allowed for discussion of trans rights, to in season 3 being 50-50 split and a tired gender war trope.
I think the Orville has gotten lazy and moved further and further away from having interesting plots to talk about big ideas and moved more towards character driven drama and lazy hamfisted commentary.
I liked that time travel episode and its moral dilemma, even if basically aborting the children seems morally dubious. Why didn’t they offer to just take his family with him into the future? Other than that, I felt it was brilliant. Also I like “preachyness” if what’s being preached is the right message, and they mostly preached the right message IMO in The Orville.
Rapist is a bit far, but I agree the morals would be different if he had met a random woman rather than one he lucked into knowing everything about in the future.
At the same time, I think they tried to pick a plot point that was relevant today, while at the same time conveniently setting up a new bad guy since the Kaylon were “removed” as a threat. I also don’t see it as the most implausible situation, since both Orville (and star trek) can basically change your gender at will, it’s not the most absurd situation that a culture is so macho that they have been genetically altering all children at birth to make it 100% male
That time travel episode was great, it explored the concept of the “temporal prime directive” and how hard it must be to adhere to it better than any Trek show ever has.
I don’t think they said the Moclans are 50/50 did they? Just that more women are born than the government would like to admit. Which is still a fairly good trans analogy when you consider how many trans people in the past probably never lived their truth as either the science to transition Wasn’t there, or they didn’t think society would accept it.
I feel the same about the last season. It seems to me they don’t make enough effort to think their ideas properly through anymore and just preach without applying logic, which is not satisfying to me. For those reasons I now prefer the Lower Decks. LD episodes seem much more creative to me and I like the diversity of character interactions and relationships.