New Series--The Orville

[Lord Liaden]

Hey, Picard told Laforge to make Barclay his best friend. It's not like Picard was doing it. It's always easier to give good advice than take it.

[Cassandra]

There are hints that someone will die on The Orville.

 

I'm betting it's Issac because he can easily be replaced by another robot.

[Hermit]

Noooo

Not Isaac!

 

Who will rule as our benevolent inorganic overlord? He's like the best of all skynet options

[Cassandra]

They'll just get another robot, maybe this one will be named Gopher.

[Starlord]

How about this one?

 

[Starlord]

Perhaps Orville is exploring how amorphous green blobs become supervillains.

[dmjalund]

2 hours ago, Starlord said:

Perhaps Orville is exploring how amorphous green blobs become supervillains.

which is a step up from Star Trek where they start out in the planet-eating phase!

[bigdamnhero]

"Mad Idolatry" was officially the most Star Trek thing I've seen since TNG went off the air. Well done. I also got a genuine belly-laugh out of the opening with lonely-Ed trying to find someone to drink with. I'm glad I stuck with this show.

[zslane]

It was pretty deft how they began to bring Ed and Kelly back together, and then navigated away from it by the end.

 

I'm really curious, though, what their universal translators sound like to a listener. For instance, what did that little "bronze age" girl hear when Kelly spoke to her? I mean, first you have the sounds physically emerging from her mouth, which are presumably acoustically cancelled somehow, and then you have the translation coming from...somewhere...and amplified loud enough to be heard over a distance. Does it sound like a digitized re-creation of her voice, distorted for alien phonemes? I mean, it must sound pretty bizarre (in direct contradiction to what we the audience hear). And how does the translator know how to translate into a language it's never encountered before?

[Cassandra]

12 minutes ago, zslane said:

It was pretty deft how they began to bring Ed and Kelly back together, and then navigated away from it by the end.

 

I'm really curious, though, what their universal translators sound like to a listener. For instance, what did that little "bronze age" girl hear when Kelly spoke to her? I mean, first you have the sounds physically emerging from her mouth, which are presumably acoustically cancelled somehow, and then you have the translation coming from...somewhere...and amplified loud enough to be heard over a distance. Does it sound like a digitized re-creation of her voice, distorted for alien phonemes? I mean, it must sound pretty bizarre (in direct contradiction to what we the audience hear). And how does the translator know how to translate into a language it's never encountered before?

 

See Star Trek Deep Space Nine "Little Green Men" for the answer to your question.

[mattingly]

One of my favorite episodes.

"We know all about you: baseball... root beer... darts... atom bombs."

[zslane]

1 hour ago, Cassandra said:

See Star Trek Deep Space Nine "Little Green Men" for the answer to your question.

 

Well, thanks, but I was looking for a direct answer here to save time (and pain)...

[slikmar]

I thought the episode was very well done and enjoyed it. Only thing that got me was that little girl had the best memory for faces, bodies and clothing of anyone I have ever met. Then, she must have grown up to be an artist who could recreate said image perfectly, to the point that the lady coming out of the house with the baby recognized Kelly immediately.

[Starlord]

9 hours ago, bigdamnhero said:

"Mad Idolatry" was officially the most Star Trek thing I've seen since TNG went off the air.

 

Possibly because the main plot was taken directly from this Voyager episode.  I would agree that after Kelly did one of the dumbest things in the history of dumb, that Ed's handling of the affair was very "Kirk-like" (I'm James T. Kirk!  I'm right!  Orders be damned!). 

 

For my part, despite nearly every episode directly plagiarizing old ST episodes and some unbelievably stupid moves on the part of the crew, I am growing attached to most of the characters and they keep me coming back.

[zslane]

I think the most dramatic instance of a TOS officer making a career-ending move on behalf of a fellow officer (and getting away with it) was when Spock violated General Order 7--a court martial-able offense--in The Menagerie. However, I would say that the plot and substance of that two-part episode was far superior to Mad Idolatry in nearly every way. But maybe that's not really fair; after all, The Orville is not trying to be as good as TOS, it is merely trying to be a loving send-up of the (much inferior) TNG.

[Spence]

10 hours ago, Starlord said:

 

Possibly because the main plot was taken directly from this Voyager episode.

 

Not untrue, but I don't really see anything on TV or in the theater these days that I cannot point to a show in the last 70 odd years and say the same.   Or read a book for that matter without having read an older book that has already done it. 

 

I have boarded the bus where being original is no longer a prerequisite, but rather how they tell the tale.

 

I really get a kick out of watching the younger crowds face when I dredge up the original of a "new cool show" and they realize the "genius" movie maker really just remade an old movie/show with better technology.

 

Edited December 10, 2017 by Spence

[Starlord]

1 hour ago, Spence said:

 

Not untrue, but I don't really see anything on TV or in the theater these days that I cannot point to a show in the last 70 odd years and say the same.   Or read a book for that matter without having read an older book that has already done it.

 

 

Fair enough, but this was pretty specific.  Particularly so, since this is sci-fi where the uniqueness of each mystery is important to the show and not some weekly sitcom or police procedural where you just change the characters.  It's nice to do a 'funny star trek', but nearly every episode has been a close copy of a previous star trek story.  McFarlane is not even making an attempt at some originality.

[Spence]

54 minutes ago, Starlord said:

 

Fair enough, but this was pretty specific.  Particularly so, since this is sci-fi where the uniqueness of each mystery is important to the show and not some weekly sitcom or police procedural where you just change the characters.  It's nice to do a 'funny star trek', but nearly every episode has been a close copy of a previous star trek story.  McFarlane is not even making an attempt at some originality.

 

Actually, I wasn't referring to the "sitcom or police procedural" I was referring to scifi.   For a while, back in the day when we watched TNG, we would bet on who could find the Outer Limits, Twilight Zone or other 50-60's show/movie they cribbed.  Though to be fair, sometimes we had to find the "source" in an old Amazing Tales or Galaxy magazine serial.   But generally speaking the earlier Treks did a great or even in my opinion fantastic job retelling tales from a new perspective.  But over all they were like any other show/movie.  They are written by people who read and watch TV.  And because of that, they are influenced by the old and more often than not are a retelling.

 

Now to be clear, this is not a bad thing.  It is actually a necessary thing, since if they only made shows that were 100% original, the industry would be dead.

 

For myself I hold to three standards:

1) Based upon. 

2) Inspired by.

3) Re-setting of a novel/movie into another period, but keeping the theme intact.

 

I can illustrate how I view things with a few examples

 

Based upon:  The studio advertised the movie Starship Troopers as "based upon" the novel.  It was not, the result was craptacularly bad.  even the claims of "satire" don't hold up, mostly because satire is "the use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices" and V'idiots basic view of a military is already satire.  So in effect he made a satire of a satire, which is just stupid.

 

Inspired by:  Once again I'll use the movie Starship Troopers.   It was a fun romping bug hunt by two dimensional idiots and probably was inspired by the book Starship Troopers or a similar property.   Except for a few names, nothing in the movie was like the book.  But when something is inspired by something, they do not have to be even close.

 

Resetting a property:  Ran, Akira Kurosawa's reinterpretation of William Shakespeare's King Lear.  Takes place in Japan and Kurosawa does a brilliant job of taking the Shakespeare and re-tooling it into a completely different setting.   

 

Orville is very obvious in doing #1 and #2.  But then they are not trying to act like they aren't.  They are having fun and being very obvious in where they gain their inspiration and I am fine with that because it is one of the only shows on TV right now that is just fun to watch. 

 

Do they slide in a opinion or statement here and there? 

Absolutely.

But they do it with humor cake and a punchline cherry on top, rather than as a two by four with splinters....

[Starlord]

Eh, I stand by what I said - nearly every episode is a close copy of a previous star trek story.

[Spence]

5 minutes ago, Starlord said:

Eh, I stand by what I said - nearly every episode is a close copy of a previous star trek story.

 

Yup.......

Never said you were wrong

[DShomshak]

15 hours ago, Starlord said:

 

For my part, despite nearly every episode directly plagiarizing old ST episodes and some unbelievably stupid moves on the part of the crew, I am growing attached to most of the characters and they keep me coming back.

Yeah, it's reached the point where I feel confident that if you put any two of the main characters in a room together, something interesting would happen. The Orville reminds me of Firefly that way -- and I hope that McFarlane takes advantage of the longer run that Firefly was, alas, denied, top develop interactions between all the characters.

 

Dean Shomshak

[DShomshak]

Tangentially, the discussion of originality reminds me of a chapter in Chuck Klosterman's But What If We're Wrong?  about changing literary fashions. Right now, "originality" receives great reverence -- or at least people pretend it does -- along with "authenticity." I think it's part of Romanticism's re-interpretation of the artist as a Very Special Person. But critical standards change. (As Klosterman notes, Moby-Dick spent decades being dismissed as a tediously overwritten sea story before a new generation of critics decided it was a monumental work of transcendent genius.) It is possible that some time in the future, critical standards might shift again to an approach that values technical skill or mastery of form over doing something new just to be new. I imagine serious scholars debating how and in what ways The Orville used the tropes and plotlines of Star Trek, and whether the show advanced the forms or merely imitated. Right along with bitter academic debates on who wrote the definitive teen vampire romance series.

 

Dean Shomshak

 

 

[Cassandra]

I knew it was going to be Issac left on the planet, but it turned out not to be a sacrifice after all. 

[wcw43921]

In hindsight, he was the best choice to leave there on the planet--and not because of his longevity.  If Kelly had been left there, she might have been more proactive in her attempts to "fix" things, and could potentially have made them worse.  But Issac, I think, with his capacity to observe dispassionately, realized that the planet's people had the capacity to "fix" themselves, and that the best ting to do was let them do just that.

 

Hope that helps.

[Hermit]

Yeah. I half way expected there to be a return to "Eventually we built our own robotic overlords as is proper."