zslane

Never underestimate an adversary with really strong Mental Illusions!

Sorry, but anyone who uses Twitter as the primary source for anything has lost me right from the start. The discussions that happen in these forums exhibit orders of magnitude more knowledge, articulation, and reasoned thought than 99.99% of the tweets ever sent. No one denies the thrill that a well-made, exciting movie provides, or the endorphin rush that lingers when you leave the theatre. The more salient question is what enduring effect the movie has on society. I would argue that it is still too early to tell in this case, but typically even a really good movie doesn't have much impact on the masses after the year of its initial success. Gal Gadot's version of Wonder Woman will surely enter the halls of pop culture icon-hood (like Lynda Carter's), but that does not typically translate into deeply penetrating social change. Hollywood seems very eager to pat itself on the back for making a huge leap of social progress or something, but I'm not convinced they achieved anything but a movie franchise that will do well financially and then fade into affectionate memory like, say, the Christopher Reeve Superman.

Of course not. But your objection takes my point beyond its intent or the logical boundaries I set for it. I never said The Orville "had to copy" everything verbatim. What I did say, many times, is that I am surprised and puzzled that they chose not to follow the same line of technological development as Trek given the extent to which they copied everything else (almost verbatim) from Trek. There's no mandate to copy, but there is a clear intent to do so anyway, and I'm merely pointing out inconsistencies where I find them.

No, I merely have to assume that copying Star Trek's most well-known and popular tropes is a guiding principle of the show, which it clearly is. Let me stop you right there. Star Trek technology is full of rubber science that defies "real world" scrutiny. It is pointless to use that as a basis for arguing whether something should or shouldn't be in a show like The Orville.

I'm regretting ever pointing out the incongruency... (facepalm)

Sorry, but I am not about to subject myself to eight and half minutes of tweets. Twitter has become a way of filling the 24-hour news cycle, not a vehicle for insightful discourse. The medium, in this case, undermines any potential message. At best, the movie gave the subject of "female empowerment" a brief, albeit brightly lit, spot on stage in the public consciousness. But like all things fueled by social media, as soon as something else more salacious came along, it became just another fading blip on the massive radar screen of pop culture. I loved the movie. I loved that it gave us a strong, idealistic woman with the power to back up her convictions, and that the film's weaknesses didn't overshadow its strengths. But I would be very cautious about getting all giddy over any enduring, wider social impact.

I think the incidence of cosplay related to a recent, successful movie always goes way, way up right after the movie lands. The number of little boys who showed up dressed as Iron Man during Halloween 2008 reached unheard of heights.

Really? It seems to me the revelation is that Hollywood finally had the (financial and creative) courage to show a female society in that form on screen, not that female viewers are awakening to a feeling of empowerment they never previously imagined.

Only if The Orville reverses the line of development (compared to Trek). In Trek, transporter technology came first and that led to replicators. The claim here, I guess, is that in the Orville-verse, it was the other way around. That still presents an unexpected incongruency with Trek. I'm not saying that you can't easily rationalize an explanation for the way things are on The Orville. I'm saying that it is surprising that they did so given the almost slavish devotion the show exhibits towards all of Trek's other tropes.

Okay, I have the genealogy order wrong. Replicators came from transporter technology. That makes the situation on The Orville even less logical.

In my view, a story isn't really a stereotypical time travel story unless the main character(s) travel to the past and change it (either deliberately or by accident), or travel to the future and obtain crucial information they use to solve a problem when they get back to the "present". I'm not sure if that pertains to Mon-El from the comics, but unless he (the tv version) somehow causes Supergirl to travel through time, and said travel helps solve some mainline narrative dilemma, his "offscreen" temporal (mis)adventures are essentially irrelevant.

Yeah, not all attempts to evolve a character to "keep up with the times" are successful. I think Spider-Man is another good example of An Upgrade Too Far...

All those issues are way beyond the intellectual interest of at least 90% of Trek's viewers. I say that because TNG widened the audience to a general audience base who doesn't give this stuff a moment's thought after an episode ends. The technological challenges of transporters in Trek are a non-issue even in TOS, and the philosophical questions are hardly introduced in any of the shows, and certainly not to an extent that most viewers would even remember them. To nearly anyone who has ever watched a Trek series, transporters are a ubiquitous and reliable way of getting characters where they need to, and nothing more. Furthermore, it has been established in Trek canon that transporters were a development that grew from replicator technology. They are not identical, but they are in the same genealogical line, and it is purely a straw man argument to say that just because they aren't identical technologies that it makes more sense for The Orville to have one but not the other, than it does for The Orville to have both just like Trek. Especially given the immense extent to which The Orville consciously strives to be just like Trek. (Everyone seems to ignore the significance of that last point.)

Actually, it is more the fault of Pasdar who plays the same character no matter what the show is, along with the director who allows it, and the producer who wants that. I'm merely making an observation that is pretty plain to anyone who has seen the shows he's been on in recent memory. Seems he's been typecast, and that is hardly the fault of the viewers capable of noticing.

Along with Ceti Alpha?

Adrian Pasdar probably would have made for a better Maxwell Lord, but that ship has sailed. And unfortunately for me, I'm still too used to him as General Blowhard from Agents of SHIELD; it feels like that character somehow slipped from the Marvel continuity into the DC continuity while nobody was looking.

I suspect that this new movie is about as historically accurate as Amadeus. And just like Amadeus, being inaccurate in many of its small details doesn't mean it can't also be a great movie.

Oh, I agree that the lack of transporters makes The Orville stand out from Trek in a refreshing way. I just find it surprising (and illogical) given how closely it clings to the skirt of Trek and it's tropes in every other respect (like, for example, replicators and holodecks, two technologies directly connected to transporter tech).

1. Cat is sidelined primarily because, according to reports, Callista Flockhart refuses to work in Canada, so far from her home. 2. It's Lena (Luthor), not Lana. You're conflating her (name) with Lana Lang. Easy to do with all the damn alliterative names DC (and Marvel) loved to use back in the day. But I agree with you and everyone else with a eyes, ears, and a brain: Kara has more chemistry with her than she ever did with James or Mon-El. 3. The mysterious character with superstrength is believed to be Reign, the new big bad for this season. Last we saw her (in the closing shot of last season's finale) she was being sent off in a pod as Krypton was dying, just like Clark and Kara. 4. Adrian Pasdar does arrogant blowhard very well. But I miss Maxwell Lord.

The granddaughter kept saying the film presents itself as a "true story", but the usual way Hollywood gets around blatant factual inaccuracies is to label it as "based on true events". Slippery wording makes all the difference.

I kind of feel that the plethora of potential problems of an impossible technology is really rather besides the point. TOS used transporters to keep production costs down. The Orville could be expected to use them in homage to one of Trek's most famous tropes. Both are meta reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with how easy it is to discredit or dismiss the concept on so-called "logical" grounds.

Spence, I think we're old enough to "get the message" without shows like The Orville needing to feed it to us on a weekly basis. However, there is a whole generation of viewers who are only now beginning to wrap their brains around social issues, and sometimes the only way to get new ideas past their indifference or their biases is to sneak it in the way Trek did. But you're right about one thing: if the show can't find a way to be entertaining to those of us who don't need the lecture, then it will lose us as viewers.

At least the Supergirl writers haven't used time travel to turn the show into complete, incomprehensible nonsense.

It does in the Star Trek universe, and this show is a devoted homage to Star Trek. Given all the other similarities (including replicator technology), the lack of transporters makes little sense to the average viewer (who is probably a ST fan).

That shot from Superman Returns was inspired by an Alex Ross painting for Kingdom Come, if I'm not mistaken.