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.
Well it also tested the Federation by putting it on the breaking point with a galactic war. Which I approve of and think was very interesting, but it wasn’t saying things like replicators are made from recycled shit or that poverty still exists on Earth like NuTrek did.
Damn, very well said. The rejection of a utopian setting in NuTrek, even in shows like SNW which pays lip service to it, is a major turn off for me because Trek was always good as utopian sci fi. And yeah DS9 challenged it, but it didn’t outright reject it either. The new shows totally dismiss it, whereas here’s The Orville dialing it up to 11.
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.
Yeah the humor in season 1 turned me off and I wasn’t sure if I liked the show at first, it tapers off in season 2 and mostly evaporates in season 3, so those seasons were far better.
The Orville does the utopia a bit better. For example no prisons in the future and the post scarcity, socialist no money utopia is ironically taken more seriously in The Orville than in Star Trek where it almost seemed embarrassed by it at times.