The Orville [SPOILERS WITHIN]

I wonder what the numbers for DSC are? I know the numbers for the Orville are pretty good. The thing is, is there's a pretty good sized gap between Enterprise and DSC, younger people haven't experienced television like we did in the 90s. All they have had is BSG, Breaking Bad, Smallville, Sons of Anarchy, so on and so forth. They never saw a Boy Scout version of Superman, they never experienced an uplifting future series. It's all dystopia all the time. But they like MacFarlane and so they gave this a shot and are seeing a new type show that resembles Star Trek and maybe are now going on Netflix and watching TNG for the first time, maybe. I really want to see the numbers for DSC just as a comparison. A lot of Trek fans on line are liking this a lot more, so we shall see.

they see happy with the numbers
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-10-11/are-trekkies-the-key-to-cbs-s-future

For me, I don't see them as direct competitors - they are not similar shows. TO is a refreshing basically nostalgia milking episodic throwback with many good qualities and one (for me) painfully annoying one. ST is much more a modern, almost cutting edge, model of TV storytelling. Comparing the two is almost like comparing Lethal Weapon (which, by the way, is the Master Class in doing a drama with natural comedy woven into the script, if TO could do it so well it would be a true treasure) and Westworld - they are not trying to be the same thing.

I have to agree. The ending was a thinking point about the effects of killing and war. I also think the allegory fits Christianity and the way it works also. It directly attacks the use of religion for influencing society. The ending statement that by trying to be humane to protect children while annihilating the adults is only going to lead to future hate. The children are never going to see that mercy as mercy because they will live with the loss. I think that message is skilfully directed at the atheists, agnostics, and Christians who keep faith out of government but still mercilessly kill their opponents. It also brings in the idea that they were protecting themselves from a very real attack so the whole issue of morality is a quagmire where you may not have a good choice.


Extremely well presented and there were still a couple of comedic laughs. This might be more like a MASH type program where it explores deep moral conflicts with humor and drama.

When I saw the Krill children aboard the ship it made me think about ST:TNG and the idea of children on the Enterprise. I wonder if anyone in Starfleet ever wondered that (aside from the danger) what the effects repeated exposure to traumatic events would have on them.

It appears to me what I suspected is true though. MacFarlane clearly sold his show to Fox as a "comedy" and even a "parody" targeting Star Trek and other science fiction series. But MacFarlane apparently has no desire whatsoever to do a comedy much less a parody. I think his ambition is for "The Orville" to be "his Star Trek" taking the things he thinks were best about the franchise as a whole.

I agree to the idea that he is doing something we with it, but it think it will be more mash like. If you look at the characters of MASH they were all quirky military characters. You had Henry the easy going leader. Then potter the wise and lovable stickler leader. You had Klinger the guy trying to get out who crisscrossed. You had Charles the snob. You had hot lips the lovable bitch. You had Frank burns the incompetent sycophant. Radar was the kid. The list goes on and on. The Orville has its own characters we can easily get a grasp on which are being expanded upon through the plot. If he continues to have some darker endings while having the humorous daily interactions of the main cast it would really be more MASH like because tng and the whole star trek universe was a bit more utopian when you considered the federation. Voyage had darker episodes but you had to strip the federation from the plot to get there, and even then their was still always the altruistic ideals of Janeway and the federation influencing their actions. The union has no established high morals. It seems like the union might have a lot of problems because it has not reached the supposedly enlightened state of the federation. That would make it more like MASH in that the forces commanding the Orville and it's crew are not so evolved like the forces we have in our present world or like the forces at war in korea and Vietnam which influenced MASH.

Jesus agrees!

I scoffed when my friends told me that Orville was carrying the Star Trek torch better than Discovery. But I'm only at Episode 4, and I concede the point.

Episode 3 is easily on par with TNG's The Measure of a Man.

Love it.

they're not. Just ding so differently.

Which is fine (as soon as Gordon dies a violent death)

You know I am a bit bothered they skipped this week. To add insult to injury I decided to watch a movie I had avoided since the nineties because I always thought the premise was stupid because there was no show this week. The movie is called the phonebooth and is about some guy who answers a public phone and gets held hostage by a sniper. So I was laughing at this dated piece of shit movie and I get half way through and the cable goes out. So now I do not even know how this stupid movie ends, and I am not ever going to watch it again. Maybe it is on Netflix and I can fast forward to the point cable crashed on me, or perhaps some awesome person would do me a favor and spoil the ending for me.

Stupid cable.

Stuart "Stu" Shepard (Colin Farrell) is an arrogant New York City publicist who has been courting a woman named Pam (Katie Holmes) behind the back of his wife Kelly (Radha Mitchell). He uses the last remaining public phone booth in the city to contact Pam. During the call, he is interrupted by a pizza delivery man, who attempts to deliver a free pizza to him, but Stu rudely turns him away by insulting his weight. As soon as Stu completes his call to Pam, the phone rings. Stu answers, to find that The Caller, who knows his name, warns him not to leave the booth, and says he will say hello to Pam for him. He also says he will call Kelly, leaving Stu panicked.

The caller tells Stu that he has tested two previous individuals who have done wrong deeds in a similar manner (one was a pedophile, the other was a company insider who cashed out his stock options before the share price collapsed), giving each a chance to reveal the truth to those they wronged, but in both cases, they refused and were killed. To demonstrate the threat, the caller fires a suppressed sniper rifle at a toy robot sold by a nearby vendor; the damage is unseen by anyone but Stu, the caller, and the vendor. The caller demands that Stu confess his feelings for Pam to both Kelly and Pam to avoid being killed. The caller contacts Pam, and puts her on line with Stu, who reveals that he is married. The caller then hangs up, telling Stu to call Kelly himself.

As Stu hesitates, the booth is approached by three prostitutes demanding to use the phone. Stu refuses to leave, having been warned by the caller to stay in the booth and not reveal the situation. Leon (John Enos III), the prostitutes' pimp, joins his charges, smashes the side of the booth, grabs at Stu in a headlock and starts punching him. The caller offers to "make him stop" and asks if Stu can hear him, which Stu just answers positively, causing the caller to misunderstand Stu and shoot Leon. Leon staggers away before collapsing dead in the street. The prostitutes immediately blame Stu, making a scene over Leon's body, accusing him of having a gun as the police and news crews converge on the location.

Police Captain Ed Ramey (Forest Whitaker), already suspecting Stu of being the killer, seals off the streets with police roadblocks and starts trying to negotiate to get him to leave the booth, but Stu refuses, telling the caller that there is no way they can incriminate him; the caller proves him wrong, calling his attention to a handgun that was planted in the roof of the phone booth. Both Kelly and Pam soon arrive on the scene. The caller demands that Stu tell Kelly the truth, which he does. The caller then orders Stu to choose between Kelly and Pam, and the woman he does not choose will be killed.

While on the phone with the caller, Stu secretly uses his cell phone to call Kelly, allowing her to overhear his conversation with the caller. She, in turn, quietly informs Captain Ramey of this. Meanwhile, Stu continues to confess to everyone that his whole life is a lie, to make himself look more important than he really is or even feels. Stu's confession provides sufficient distraction to allow the police to trace the payphone call to a nearby building, and Ramey uses coded messages to inform Stu of this. Stu warns the caller that the police are on the way, and the caller replies that if he is caught, then he will kill Kelly. Panicked, Stu grabs the handgun and leaves the booth, screaming for the sniper to kill him instead of Kelly. The police fire upon Stu, while a smaller force breaks into the room that the caller was tracked to, only to find the gun and a man's corpse.

Stu regains consciousness to find the police fired only rubber bullets at him, stunning but not harming him. Stu and Kelly happily reunite. As the police bring down the body, Stu identifies it as the pizza delivery man from earlier. Stu gets medical treatment at a local ambulance; as he does, a man with a briefcase (Kiefer Sutherland) passes by and says that he regrets killing the pizza deliverer and warns Stu that if his new-found honesty does not last, he will be hearing from him again. The man disappears into the crowd with Stu unable to call out because he has been sedated by the paramedics. As he does, someone else is being called from that same line. The audience could only hear him say, "Hello?" and the film ends

What the heck?

Thank you, I knew it was keifer all along. I am surprised st u didn't figure it out since keifer was a pretty famous actor with a recognizable voice back then.

So, this latest episode is a bit like Black Mirror.

I think the episode "Majority Rules" really nailed it both message and drama wise. And McFarland seems to have nailed down the "poignant final scene rich with meaning" kind of thing.

Yep - same concept as the Bryce Dallas Howard episode. A society based on social network likes.

in many ways a direct rip. McFarland isn't exactly breaking new ground in creativity.

For me this was the worst episode yet by far. You could just as easily have told the same (unoriginal) story without doing the "OMG its just like earth history!" thing. I now want John to join Gordon in the "dies a horrible death" scene. And the episode could have ended in one act if they'd taken the obvious tactic of hacking the feed (not making up shit but literally manipulating the vote totals) in the first place.

I suspect that was done for budget reasons. It's cheaper to do it that way than to come up with a whole load of sets, etc. MacFarlane is pretty clever when it comes to saving money. A lot of the desert shots in the NDT version of Cosmos were unused footage from A Million Ways to Die in the West.

It would have only worked if they'd figured out the meaning of the feed in the first act. It wasn't until the second act that they figured it out.

Yes. But all episodes so far have enormous plot holes. (The zoo episode didn't grapple with language/intelligence, 'male' was ill defined on the homonormative planet, the generation ship could have been saved without overthrowing their culture, and the Krill undercover plot ignored the very cultural differences it was supposedly about in order to happen in the first place). As long as they take the liberty to be this sloppy with their stories, they can never be effective morality plays, nor effective SF. It's as if they have taken out the jokes but left in the lack of sincerity.

all true. In some shows and some episode I note plot holes and think "meh, whatever, I was entertained" - but if I'm not entertained, then it glares at me.

This one was on the verge of losing me the moment that had to explain to the audience how it was possible for this to look just like earth of centuries ago...and it lost me completely as soon as the idiot mounted the statue. After that, every flaw glowed in neon for me.

Yes. It was amazingly stupid for Lamarr to do what he did.

They should make him a joker but not an idiot like Malloy. He really should have known better. They could have made a stronger statement about the planet by having him do something that's not good but just not as dumb like grinding a statute.

Like maybe he should have been the one to offend the "Kelvic" people instead of Alara and her hat.

And really as soon as they stepped out into public they should have noticed the badges and dealt with that immediately.

This planet must not be unified though. They have a military and wars otherwise the Chuckles the dog bit wouldn't have worked. So maybe other nations do not have this system.

Plus 10,000,000 is a pretty easy number to reach if everyone is voting. One could probably hit ten million quick. Especially if you were a celebrity.

A world like this would not reward risk-taking.

And crime must be rampant. All you have to do is buy a new badge. Obviously the badges are not tied to a person in a way that you can not escape from it. God help the man who loses his badge down a toilet. LOL

On buying the badges.....

That's a take on people opening new accounts to escape the old ones. You get to start fresh. As long as no one can tie you to the old badge.

But if you're like the lady in the cafeteria and don't know that you can get a new badge or don't know where to get one you're stuck forever with the bad things you've done in your twenties.

Or if you're unlucky enough to hit a million votes before you can get a new badge you're arrested.

The Admiral may have felt that was too much interference. Plus the way this society works they are probably on the lookout for hacking.

Plus I think you missed the point of this episode.

This is a society that accepts opinions as facts. We saw the bit over the pollution issue when the one guy talked about the pollution and the other guy said you can't deny facts because 74% of the vote says that the report on the pollution is false.

Look how easy it is for a persons life here to be ruined over a single mistake. We might not kill people but we use social media to ruin people's lives.

Look at the hosts on the show. Notice they only read the down votes? That they are hostile to Lamarr from the start but especially after he stupidly pulls a bullshit apology. They are virtue signaling to the audience. They are probably farming up votes for themselves.

Look at how we turn people into permanent outcasts like the lady in the cafeteria who had over 500,000 down votes. According to her it was something she did when she was way younger.

Look at how fast everyone in the cafeteria stood up to record the incident between the man and Alara.

Look at the guy who got down voted for accidentally bumping into someone.

Hacking votes is a way too easy answer for this episode.

Using Issac, a bot, to spread fake news to gin up support among the mindless mob was a commentary on the current state of our world and how we are failing as a society to think critically about things. We are way too quick to judge, condemn, and figuratively execute those who make a mistake or those who haven't made a mistake but we assume they did.

This episode is why I like books. Why you ask?

Because a book unlike an episode can go into far greater detail about the world setting.

Who came up with the voting system? How'd they get the society to go along with it? What are the detailed rules? The unwritten rules? What's up with the counterfeit badges? They still have a military and wars? And the military wears the badge?

You can never get rid of downvotes?

What happens if you accumulate a million over time? You're a troll basically like John Castle? Do you still go to jail?

There are so many questions......

I have a couple of questions:

1) What is you get millions of down votes....but millions of up votes as well? I thought that was one of the points of those feed inserts for Lamar. You could see his up votes rising rapidly at the end? I figure that they were going to factor it in to the episode but the director literally overlooked it at the end.

2) I thought Lamar dry humped the statue BEFORE any of them had the "up/down badges". Yet the video feed that later identifies him mentions his badge number being recorded?

It appears as if the up votes mean nothing since up votes do not erase down votes.

No. They had them on when he did it. They met the guy at the news stand before they walked by the statue.

Given that the down votes on the badges have the potential to result in life altering treatment it would stand to reason that the up votes would either

1) Serve to counter some of the down votes
2) or result in some kind of reward in the future. Perhaps those with the most up votes (and few down votes) are promoted into positions of power.

That said I think this episode does a good job of countering the idea of "pure democracy" and "wisdom of the masses".

And Lamar is an ass. Of course he and Gordon are both written that way.

Of course, in a country where you can buy new black market badges for pocket change at the local kiosk, any sane person struggling with downvotes should just buy a new badge -- especially if they're an alien from space with no other means of being identified.

On a more sombre note,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System

it's actually a complete ripoff. but a good one.

What's "Black Mirror"?

an extremely good british tv series. but you won't like it. requires a brain.