The Orville

A three-minute preview has been released for the upcoming Hulu-exclusive season, which has been delayed to June 2, 2022:

I liked this show, I had forgotten about it honestly.

I lost interest when it stopped being a comedy and tried to be straight Star Trek.

I felt like it always wore it's Star Trek influence on it's sleeve. It also seemed people liked it because of that.

I love its Star Trek influences but it should be a comedy about life in Star Trek, not attempting to be Star Trek.

It was great as a comedy, not so much trying to be dramatic.

Also the Kelly/Mercer thing is THE Romantic Plot Tumor.

I think it worked better when it moved more Trek, honestly. A lot of the early episodes had a lot of jokes that barely had any energy and just seemed to be there because "it's a comedy". When it hit more of a Stargate balance of "these are serious events, but the characters have an easy and funny camaraderie where they'll quip and snark while still doing their jobs", that's where it worked out.

That being said, yes, the Kelly/Mercer thing just doesn't work at all. Adrienne Palicki was doing her part of it fine, but Seth Macfarlane isn't anywhere near good enough a live action actor to pull it off. Their chemistry is also really off. When the show is like "they're good friends!" I can buy it. When the show tries to act like there's attraction, it fumbles.

It reminded me a bit of how the Librarians kept insisting that Eve and Flynn were madly in love but Rebecca Romjin and Noah Wyle just straight up did not have the right chemistry to make it even remotely believable. Friends? Yes. In a committed relationship with each other? Hell no.

Edited by Zendervai on Feb 9th 2022 at 8:12:30 AM

I could buy them as Exs if that makes sense.

Edited by Cortez on Feb 9th 2022 at 9:49:22 AM

I'm still convinced the comedy aspect was there because they thought they could not sell "Sci-Fi by Seth Mc Farlane" without it.

It's super obvious that that's the case. Like I said before, the first season is full of jokes that have no energy and just feel like they exist to justify the comedy label, and the jokes per minute rate (which is an actual thing in some circles?) is incredibly low. A lot of them are like the mint exchange in the pilot which has zero energy and goes by so fast that it doesn't even register properly and, in general, there's huge stretches of time without any jokes or what jokes they have don't land.

Like, the whole Avis thing. It's a weird joke to begin with and then the show just...kind of ignores it after the car rental thing is brought up a couple of times. It's very clearly just there to add an extra joke to an episode that doesn't really have much room for jokes and if the episode came around later, they would have picked a different name.

I know this has been discussed before but do you think that Seth Mac Farlane has become a Scapegoat Creator?

Edited by GAP on Feb 26th 2022 at 11:01:31 AM

I dunno, I mean there's a very good argument a lot of this show is on him both good and bad since he's both the main actor as well as creative force. This is more his baby than just about anything.

It seem as though whether it is Family Guy, American, Cleveland Show, Ted or anything else, Seth seems to be the scapegoat for everything wrong with those shows. What also doesn't help was the series rot and controversy that occurred in those shows.

We have another new trailer for The Orville:

IGN managed to interview Seth MacFarlane for 8 minutes about the upcoming season.

The first episode was released, and it’s a good one. And just like in proper TNG form, it’s covering some juicy topics: namely, can robots commit suicide, and just how does the crew of the Orville move on and trust Isaac after the events of season 2?

The budget for season 3 seems to have been drastically increased, and it shows; the Orville itself has far more little details, the stage settings look better, the space suits look more sturdy and rugged, the CGI isn’t just brief snippets of re-used material - ‘’everything’’ has improved. Unfortunately though, I much prefer the original ship’s look - after the overhaul, the hull now looks too metallic and cluttered.

That was a heavy way to start the season.

Agreed.

And of course, seeing Yaphit is kinda hard, all things considered.

I'm not 100% sure the significance of the guy ripping out a part of Issac and breaking it open. What did that accomplish?

Yeah, that kinda seemed pointless. Wouldn’t simply scanning it have the same effect? Destroying the chip also prevents them from using it in the future, meaning if the chip later turned out to be critical for another purpose then Isaac’s screwed.

Plus, after thinking about it, I think the writers rushed things. Wouldn’t it have worked better to save Isaac’s revival a few episodes further into the season? Bringing him back from his suicide kinda significantly lessened the impact, and feels like a cheap cop-out from what was a poignant scene.

Edited by SgtRicko on Jun 3rd 2022 at 1:38:56 AM

They probably have other plans for him this season.

Episode 2:

Damn. Nothing kills an old flame like having their Dn A rewritten to turn them into a bug man.

The inside of the station looked very much like the inside of a Wraith hive ship, but with orange/red lighting instead of blue.

Hey, guys, if you had environmental suits, maybe you should have used them the first time you went over?

I'm actually surprised the crew didn't find a cure to turn everyone back to normal. Given how thorough the transformation was, that would have felt a little cheap.

Yeah, same. If this was TNG-era Trek, they would have come up with the cure. I wish they’d have acknowledged all the crew they lost, though, even if only to get a sense of how many there were. There was the admiral, the lieutenant, and the nurse, but the others were completely faceless redshirts.

I give props to Seth that the Krill repeatedly warned them and our heroes just sort of blew them off, which has catastrophic consequences.

Yeah, they considered the words, but "myths have basis in fact" got beaten down by "no exploration without risk" and they went on ahead anyway. I think the move to streaming helped add that bit of nuance, anyway; they had room for the scene in a 65-minute episode.

They could have used a bit of that time to justify the lack of environment suits, too, maybe with a line about not wanting to scare whoever sent the distress signal with armor and helmets when their scans showed a perfectly (too perfectly) breathable atmosphere.