News Seth MacFarlane’s The Orville

[tharpdevenport]

I thought they were going to find a bunch of women, too. Like un-wated babies in China, hiding in exile or abandoned by the parents.

But I guess, being a space-faring species, if any didn't get the surgery, they'd have been sneaked off world or forced off world by the Moclan government.

 

[Sparkle Fabulosa]

If Bortus still feels so strong about this, can't he just reset his kids gender, which takes 5 minutes, and seems to need no recovery time, and RUN.

Take the baby and RUN!

Maybe he thought about doing that but realized it wouldn't do any good. Klyden and the authorities would most likely search for them which would result in the baby having the surgery done anyway.

 

[B.J.]

Yet the show also recognizes that being right doesn't magically change the world. Any culture that's entrenched in some moral failure is almost certainly immovable by argument as a whole.
.....
So no, they did not upend Moclan society through pithy arguments. But they did convince Bortus by showing him a story with a message rather than lecturing him - the latter offended him and made him put up a wall against argument. The former got the point across. And they did sow the seeds of social change by revealing that the Moclans' most revered literary genius was actually a woman. This may well lead to eventual cultural evolution within Moclan society and defeat their entrenched dogmas.

But Bortus and Klyden's child will not be the vanguard of a revolution.

Yes, I think you hit the nail on the head here! In the real world, societal change does not happen overnight, and the first instance of that change rearing its head is almost certain to fail. But, as in all cases, the wheels are now in motion. It may take generations for change to actually happen, but the question is now out there.

Does anyone else find this 100+ page thread difficult to get through? Maybe give Orville it's own mini-forum?

I did mention that perhaps we should give each episode its own thread, which some people agreed with. I guess somebody forgot?

 

[Venardhi]

By the way, it wasn't just "a" well-known writer. It was the same esteemed writer that Bortus had quoted earlier in the episode, which by Moclan tradition required a literary quote in reply, that Grayson chose to be the lyrics of "Survivor."

Yeah, I got that, It still didn't have any impact for me though. It was too easy, too pat.

 

[Phoenix219]

When they started looking for females via sensors, I totally thought they were going to find evidence of many females mixed into the population right under their noses, and it made me think of the classic TOS episode What Ships Are For.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Which is something that also happened 3 weeks ago on Star Trek Continues.

 

[Matthew Raymond]

I think I finally get what Orville is. Everyone was saying it was a parody/homage, but I think it's a bit more of a parody/critique, exploring both the strengths and the flaws in Trek with both humor and reason. If they can perfect this in the series, this may be the true "sweet spot" for the show.

When they started looking for females via sensors, I totally thought they were going to find evidence of many females mixed into the population right under their noses, and it made me think of the classic TOS episode What Ships Are For.

Oh, yeah, that was a "classic" alright!

Which is something that also happened 3 weeks ago on Star Trek Continues.

Darn it! You let the cat out of the bag!

 

[unigolyn]

When they started looking for females via sensors, I totally thought they were going to find evidence of many females mixed into the population right under their noses, and it made me think of the classic TOS episode What Ships Are For.

Q willing this show will have multiple seasons to flesh the Moclan culture out more, and I wouldn't be surprised if the "a female is born only every 75 years" line is propaganda and about half the the population turns out to be altered like Klyden was, and it's such a taboo that hardly anyone mentions it. After all, modern day Earth has plenty of countries whose official position is that there are no homosexuals among their population.

The odds that Klyden and his child were a convenient statistical aberration is low, and Klyden only found out about his own birth sex because of off-world influence. And their child's sex only became a public issue because of off-world influence. I bet half that council we saw was born female.

 

[Phoenix219]

Which is something that also happened 3 weeks ago on Star Trek Continues.

That was the episode, and that was my joke / compliment to STC.

My brain has definitely blurred some scenes, and I can hear Vic's speeches in Shatner's voice. Once I actually had to sit and think, which "Apollo" episode the quote that mankind remembered him, but not as a god came from. I conflated them in my head. But, yes, this Orville made me think of STC-IX' plot twist.

 

[Guy Gardener]

My brain doesn't have room for new episode titles.

I've been calling everything "SPACESHIPS!!!" for years now.

 

[Cyrus]

Ok, The dancing bandito was hilarious. As someone mentioned earlier the western holodec scene reminded me of three amigos.

Another hilarious moment in the series was Justin the Ogre in the first episode.

 

[BillJ]

Finding the woman and her turning out to be a well known writer fell flat for me.

I wonder if that wasn't a nod to D.C. Fontana. Who had to use initials for writing TV early on because it was mostly a male dominated field.

 

[Amaris]

Ok, The dancing bandito was hilarious. As someone mentioned earlier the western holodec scene reminded me of three amigos.

Another hilarious moment in the series was Justin the Ogre in the first episode.

Yeah, that caught me off guard.

 

[Guy Gardener]

I wonder if that wasn't a nod to D.C. Fontana. Who had to use initials for writing TV early on because it was mostly a male dominated field.

Kira in Far beyond the Stars too?

 

[Mudd]

As much as I didn't buy the Rudolph Epiphany, I got a great laugh out of Bortus' "Of course - if Rudolph had been euthanized as his father wished..." and Gordon and John's "Uh, I don't think that was ever the plan..."

 

[Guy Gardener]

I like the Family Guy where...

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[Mudd]

The odds that Klyden and his child were a convenient statistical aberration is low, and Klyden only found out about his own birth sex because of off-world influence. And their child's sex only became a public issue because of off-world influence. I bet half that council we saw was born female.

Yeah, that occurred to me too.

Of course, the child's gender was probably hereditary.

 

[Guy Gardener]

No, I thought that too, and it's a serious problem.

If the female gender is dominant, and every pairing of a trans male Moclan and a male Moclan will result in a female birth, then OBVIOUSLY there has to be a clandestine agency to steer trans male Moclan to breed with other trans male Moclan, so that "hopefully" their "aberrancy" will get lost and forget where the first class genepool is.

Something similar, actually the exact opposite, was done in Australia a hundred years ago.

Mixed heritage children were forbidden to breed (by the government) with anyone else of mixed or full aboriginal heritage, in an effort that their grandchildren could pass for white extremely well.

But it's still about the government restricting love connections to engineer racial purity.

 

[Mudd]

No, I thought that too, and it's a serious problem.

If the female gender is dominant, and every pairing of a trans male Moclan and a male Moclan will result in a female birth, then OBVIOUSLY there has to be a clandestine agency to steer trans male Moclan to breed with other trans male Moclan, so that "hopefully" their "aberrancy" will get lost and forget where the first class genepool is.

It may be recessive. This would make females rarer - it means Bortus carries the gene as well. There's a 100 percent chance that Klyden does, and a who-knows-what chance that Bortus does.

If the gene were dominant, with Klyden being as adamant as he is on the matter he'd have been anxious to avoid having a child altogether.

 

[Guy Gardener]

We were told that a female birth happens once every 75 years.

We don't know average Moclan life expectancy, but it's clear that the official sources are lying about the odds, and covering up all the trans operations they are doing, if parent and child were both born female, or that is a massive deviation from the statistical forecast.

Remember the DS9 episode where it was revealed that the trill Symbiosis commission were admitting that it was half the species which was compatible with symbionts and not 1 percent like all the literature swore was the gods honest truth?