I think it points to Star Trek fans taking Star Trek a little too seriously when they can't accept something like "A Night in Sickbay" in the universe.
Who can't accept it in the universe? It's there, it just suuuuuuucks, and makes Archer look like a bigger angerball doofus than he already was.
I know the dog and cat to human relationship is not quite the same, but it's been a while since I've had a dog, so I'm talking about my cats. I love my cats. If they were to get sick and nearly die I would be very upset. It might even affect me emotionally at work. But, if I was the captain of the ship (or a boss at a company) whose job it was to serve as the rock that the crew looks upon for guidance and stability, I would suck it up in my quarters or office before going out to deal with them, and I wouldn't lash out at my coworkers and subordinates and treat them unprofessionally. That makes you look like an infant.
If I was dealing with a notoriously nitpicky and tedious species with tons of rules of conduct and laborious traditions, I would not bring my cats down to the planet to roam free and possibly use the base of one of their sacred trees as a litter box. That would either make me look like their world's most ignorant jackass, or it makes it look like I was deliberately hoping for another incident to express my petulant rage about and break off these important negotiations for the plasma doohickeys, because again, I'm behaving like an infant.
If I took my cats to the only person in the region who could care for them, or who would even bother to make the effort, I would not angrily question their qualifications, I would not question whether they cared about saving my pets because they themselves did not own pets and did not come from a society that cherished pets, and I would not camp out in their office and then angrily whine about the manner in which he provided for the care and feeding of the creatures in his care. That would make me look like a... wait for it... infant, and a dick. A dickfant.
And all this is before we get into the juvenile as shit scenes with Archer's double entendre Freudian Tourette's Syndrome with T'Pol where he keeps accidentally saying "breasts" and "lips" instead of "best" and "list" because he's currently living in an Adam Sandler movie.
It's the most juvenile elements people complain about from
The Orville minus being a show that has never, ever set that kind of tone before, so unlike in Orville, it's completely out of left field. Nor is it funny or even trying to be played for laughs, it's just embarrassing. We're supposed to feel bad for Archer as he behaves like an uncultured menace to his crew and an alien species because his doggy is sick. I was already irritated by Archer's tendency to scream at everyone and act like an impatient and occasionally bigoted dick, but this episode took it to new heights.
They were striving for something that I don't think a lot of the audience "got". It was out there by Trek standards of the time.
That's so dismissive. It's not the movie
Primer. It's not some Enigma Code that we have to decipher. Just because people didn't like it doesn't mean they didn't get it. It's not deep. They're not going to be writing literary analysis on it in a hundred years, contemplating whether the true meaning of the dog pissing on the tree was symbolizing man's loneliness in an increasingly disconnected world. It's a dumb man and his dog story... in spaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaace. They could have done a nice man and his dog story. I'm a sucker for that kind of thing. They could have just read Jimmy Stewart's poem about his recently deceased dog from Carson and stuck in some space aliens and it would have been better than this.
Kids these days.... (Also, get off my lawn!)