The way I interpreted that was the woman was someone so well known in their history that Steven Culp just assumed John was aware of her. His reaction when it's brought up in the interview was an "oh, shit, I should have thought of that" moment. Kind of like how you just assume someone in the US knows who George Washington is.
If someone dry-humped a statue of Abraham Lincoln, it would be assumed that the person would know who he was.
However, since John showed a lack of knowledge of the voting system, the Publicity Tour guy should have assumed he didn't know common things. But, I got the sense he wasn't that interested in seeing John vindicated.
Giving this one a soft four. I had a few minor issues with the relevancy of up votes and how stupid the offensive act was. But, overall, I loved the episode. Solid above-than-average StarTrek.
There's just no comparison that can be made with STD, the Orville isin a whole league above and you actually look forward to watching it.
There's this thing called an opinion. The nice thing about an opinion is that others are allowed to have a different opinion. Personally,
The Orville is a show that entertains, but I'm perfectly fine having sit on my DVR for days until I get around to it. I get giddy when I'm watching
Discovery on Sundays.
The Walking Dead is appointment TV for me, but I immediately switched to CBS All-Access once it was done, forgoing my usual Sunday night viewing of
The Talking Dead (which, come to think of it, is still sitting on my DVR).
I definitely enjoyed watching this week's episode, but in the middle of "Lethe," I thought to myself, I LOVE this series!
I give them props for what they were trying to do, but can anybody honestly say that if this were a Trek episode fans would let them get away with such major character stupidity and plot problems without eviscerating them for it? This show, which I have found endearing up to this point, is starting to use it's comedy/drama label as a crutch to mimic Trek, steal from it, yet skirt the consequences of its sloppiness. If you point the careless storytelling, then "it's a comedy, why are you taking it so seriously?"
It's a shame that
The Orville and
Star Trek: Discovery came out the same year. It's hard not to make comparisons. If
The Orville premiered last year or
Discovery did, I don't think we'd see as many direct comparisons.
1. Why would you go undercover on an alien planet with no information? They had no idea about the voting system until they got there. Alanna had no idea about the hat. Nobody seems to know anything. They know what 21st century Earth looks and sounds like, what cocaine and backup dancers are, but have no idea what money is?
Well, how else would you get information, then? Granted they could probably find out information from satellites or orbital observation, but I didn't have much of a problem with this.
3. What's the publicity officer even there for? He just stands around and is generally unhelpful. He provides expositional information when it's too late to do anything about it.
Personally, I think the system would die out if no one was corrected. Therefore, I think the publicity officer is there to at best just guide the person through the process and let them sign their own correction order, so to speak. At worst, the guy is deliberately trying to undermine his client and manufacture a situation in which they are guaranteed to get 10,000,000 down votes. Then, the public feels like they've performed a service.
We never see any down votes get reversed. The down and up votes just keep going up. So, I think the simplest explanation is that the badges are a running total of all the down and up votes you get in your entire life from 18 onward. So the down votes never get reversed. If I am right, then yes, Lamar was in trouble since he was only 7 votes away from getting a lobotomy. It was definitely time to get him out of there.
The coffee shop woman with more than 500,000 down votes all but confirmed this. She tried to excuse the count by saying most had been earned in her 20's. She looked 40-50, so one would assume that turning yourself around would alleviate most of those, if you could reverse them. I forgot how many up votes she had, but it wasn't nearly as much as the down votes. I'd assume a reversal might have left her with a more even score.
Their society probably voted that 10 million was the right number, high enough that it would adequately represent someone who did so many egregious things in the eyes of society that they deserved the correction. After all, 10 million down votes is a lot. The only way to get that many would be to either do one really really bad thing that the whole nation hates you or be a serial repeat offender that keeps racking up millions of down votes. In both instances, society probably feels that you deserve correction. Even the lady with 500,000 down votes was a far cry from 10 million. I suspect most people probably never get anywhere close to the 10 million. Also, keep in mind that it is a voting system that includes both down and up votes. So if 1 million people vote and you get 50% down votes, you get 500,000 extra down votes and an extra 500,000 up votes added to your badge too. Both votes get added to your badge. So the up votes do reduce the number of potential down votes, a person might get.
Irrelevant to the episode, but I do wonder what someone with 9,999,996 down votes does with the rest of their lives? One crappy afternoon could push them to the 10,000,000. And then, what? Does that trigger an automatic correction? Or is that only when they are on the tour? Surely a re-appearance on the tour would guarantee them getting corrected. Hell, John's "I'm a spaceman" bit at the end should have had the guards in the room come over and down vote him one at a time.
I was really hoping Kelly would down vote the PR guy for dooming John. Again, another irrelevant question, but what stops retaliatory down votes? For example, the guy at the beginning with the coffee. He got down voted for an accident. Why didn't he down vote the other guy for not accepting his apology? And are their rules about the voting? Could I try to block you down voting me? Can I run away if I know one is coming?
