The Orville [SPOILERS WITHIN]

Preview for next week....

Well, so much for that idea.

The thing I noticed is that they would require Isaac to appear before the Primary. For a species that's supposed to be electronic, there would be no need to have face-to-face encounters, talking electronically via some means like the web or other telecommunications system would be enough. Unless, of course, they were a social species, and face-to-face interaction was seen as necessary for something like emotional well-being. Perhaps an unintended leftover from their creation by the biologicals.

Seemed to be touches of ESB music in the themes playing during the battle sequence. I want to say that they were echoing the Falcon's flight through the asteroid field, but I'm not certain about that.

Yeah, I can't see them letting an infidel behind the controls of a fighter. I did like the design of the Krill fighter.



Kind of reminded me of the Draconian fighters from '70s-era Buck Rogers.

How close did we get to the Earth in that episode? We were some distance between the Earth and the Moon, but that's still a helluvalot of real estate to cover. Geosynch orbit is 22K miles up, the Moon is 10X far away.

The Union fleet is pegged at over 3K (how much more, I don't know), and I imagine that the call put out was one of those, "Holy shit! Git yer asses back here now!" types, so anything that had weapons was coming. There were a lot of ships which looked like the Orville, which is supposed to be a middling variety, not a capital ship, like the Enterprise. Presumably, the middling ones would be close to home, since they would be handling the various routine tasks of transporting people to-and-from the system.

As fast or as slow as the plot requires.

I'd say that was certainly part of it. The Kaylon didn't show up and say, "Hey, you've got a couple of humans on board and we want them back" they just showed up and started shooting. That's a pretty good indication that you're fucked if you don't fight.

Chinlund was listed in IMDB for the episode as "Captain Dalak". The Captain of the Roosevelt was "Captain Marcos", played by Carlos Bernard.

Dalak was the Krill captain wasn't he?

I thought the Krill fighters were very nice looking as well. Spare, economical but apparently highly effective. Yeah having Malloy pilot one into battle seemed unrealistic but apparently Scott Grimes wanted to do more in this episode than "go to the pee corner".

Personally, I thought it was pretty unrealistic for the Kalon to keep the Orville crew alive anyway. If they needed them to simply appear on the bridge to help in their approach to Earth then all they needed was the five or so main characters and simply disposed of the rest. At the very least they should've killed all the extra crew when Malloy and Kelly got away in a shuttlecraft.

I was thinking the same thing.

One oddity though was at the end where the admiral suggested dismantling Isaac and studying him to gain some insights into Kaylon technology.

Why bother with Isaac?

There were literally dozens of dead Kaylon laying around the Orville at the end of the episode. The Union should have no shortage of dead Kaylon not to mention destroyed Kaylon ships to keep them doing research into them for years.

In a similar note, why didn't Starfleet let the guy from "A Measure Of A Man", dissect Lore after they killed him in "Descent"?
There should be whole ships crewed by Datas by now.

Would you let someone dissect you without your permission? This is why we ask if you want to be an organ donor. Be careful what you wish for though.

Well, just because you can dismantle something and understand how it works in no way means you can then duplicate them.

Doctors have dissected humans for hundreds of years now and last I heard were not remotely close to actually duplicating one.

We're almost there.
We can make artificial DNA , and artificial cells.
Fetal growth would do the rest.

That isn't the same as taking an adult and duplicating them in every way as has been suggested regarding Data.

Transporters and replicators.

Actually, the Federation demonstrated the ability to duplicate Data on numerous occasions. Every time they ran him through the transporter they duplicated him. And we know that they have the ability (but never willingly use it) to spit out identical versions of people (see the TNG episode with two Rikers). So, if they wanted to copy Data, they could do it 1 of two ways:
1. Use the transporter as a photocopier and spit out version after version of him.
2. Use the transporter to spit out a single extra version of him and reverse engineer that.

Actually I'm pretty sure dialogue in Star Trek in more than one episode indicates that the transporter does not duplicate someone. The same matter than enters the transporter at one end exits it at the other.

Though of course there have been exceptions. In original series (The Enemy Within) the transporter duplicated Captain Kirk but the results would've been inevitably lethal to both.

In TNG the transporter duplicated Riker though again that was shown to be a rare and possibly unduplicatable situation.

If the computer can store a "file" of Scotty for close to 100 years, before reassembling him, then that "file" can be duplicated. If there's any Treknobabble about how it "can't be done," that's simply the writers pulling something out of their ass for the purposes of the plot, and not anything to do with the actual physics that would be involved in such technology.

And the only reason I can figure that the original matter is used is to ease superstitious queasiness.

If I scan you down to the electrons and quarks, and I position another equal glob of electrons and quarks into an exact copy of you cell for cell, thought for thought, and it thinks it's you, and it can fool your relatives, how is it not you?

The soul?

If I make something without a soul that passes the smell test of even your loved ones, what's the point of a soul?
Seems pretty superfluous to me.

Matter/energy can't be created or destroyed.
The evil Kirk, and the duplicate Riker had to be made of recruited matter.
The matter beam wasn't duplicated, the information beam traced onto new matter.
How it had to have been done.

All of this is a long-winded way of saying "the transporter wasn't thought thru very well." The original reason for it was to avoid the expense of the SFX department having to show a shuttle or something taking off and landing all the time. But the implications weren't considered. What the transporter should have been was some sort of wormhole generator that punched a "shortcut" thru spacetime to your destination, and then throw in some technobabble about how it's only practical at a small scale (people sized) over short distances (orbit to surface and back).

Scotty was not stored in the computer. He was stored in the pattern buffer.

Which is part of the computer system for the transporter.

I thought the pattern buffer was part of the machinery in the tranporter that regulated the matter stream? The matter stream being the disembodied bits of a person.

If the matter stream didn't convey information, it would just be a toner tank.

The pattern is repeatedly analog scanned onto the matter stream in a perpetual cycle, so it's a toner tank and a hardrrive in one.
The quantum pattern is allegedly too big to hold in the computer circuits (see "Our man Bashir"), so they store it as qubits of memory in the particles of matter.
But, if the computer is controlling this process...then it's part of the computer anyway.
It's a harrdrive.
It's dressed up in magic science words to throw you off the scent, but it's a harddrive.

Fansplaining.

I'm with Dayton here. The transporter doesn't duplicate people, it disassembles and reassembles them. Would you let yourself get killed and replaced with an exact doppelganger just to save some travel time?

One could argue the act of scanning is also an act of downloading, and that your body pattern carries your brain pattern carries your mind pattern, so copying downloads you into a perfect clone.
So...yeah, I might give it a whirl.

How do you know you're not a rebooted copy of you from yesterday?
Are you really so sure sleep doesn't wipe your RAM clean every night and delete you?

I used to worry about that a lot, actually. Maybe we're constantly dying, and every time you think you were briefly distracted it was really another version of you booting up.

Dark Matter had an interesting transportation device that cloned you and retained your memories, but if the clone was killed you’d lose the memory of anything the clone did, it would be forgotten.
https://darkmatter.fandom.com/wiki/Transfer_Transit

This topic has been debated by Trek fans with PhD's in Physics and Philosophy since the show first airred in 1967. Even the production staff disagrees. I think this is the root of Dr. McCoy's refusal to use them in the show/movies. We aren't going to solve that here and anyone who states it certainly either way is only fooling themselves.

Oh, I agree that there's no way to know with 100% certainty how the transporters work, but based on how almost every character in that universe views them, I can't imagine they understand the transporter as something that destroys you and creates a carbon copy of you somewhere else. Who could be that calm about what amounts to death?


McCoy is just a 23rd century antivaxxer.