THE ORVILLE S2, E4: "NOTHING LEFT ON EARTH EXCEPTING FISHES"

Discussion in 'Science Fiction & Fantasy' started by Serveaux, Jan 11, 2019.

  1. Mr. Adventure

    Mr. Adventure Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    I had an idea that due to further Disney extensions to public domain laws these songs and movies are just now entering the public domain for the first time by the time of the Orville so that's why there is a renaissance of vintage material. Maybe new IP has become prohibitively expensive in the future.

    She's my Uptown Krill
     
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  2. Serveaux

    Serveaux Fleet Admiral Premium Member

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    The show has at least ten more episodes to run.
     
  3. Trekker4747

    Trekker4747 Boldly going... Premium Member

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    I'm going with "seamless fastener" along the lines of what was in TNG. We weren't supposed to "see" or acknowledge the seams we can see in the fronts/backs of the uniforms as they were there for the actors to get into costume. In Trek's time/logic there were seamless fasteners and the zipper was obsolete. This is very, very nicely displayed in the episode "Ensign Ro" when Ro takes off the tunic to her standard female uniform variant. It normally looks like (and is) a single-piece jumpsuit but in the episode we see her take off the "tunic" part by peeling it off like a jacket and giving it to a young orphan girl. There's no seams on the uniform where the tunic closes in the middle or is separate from the one-piece pants/overalls.

    I suspect the same is supposed to be the case here, with there being seamless fasteners and any seams we *do* see we're supposed to ignore as they're an artifact of production.
     
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  4. Serveaux

    Serveaux Fleet Admiral Premium Member

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    That's not what "truism" means.

    Same reason I suppose that on Trek all musical taste froze in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
     
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  5. Trekker4747

    Trekker4747 Boldly going... Premium Member

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    Well....
     
  6. JD

    JD Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    It always kind of bugged me on Star Trek, how we only really got one character (Tom Paris) was interested in 20th Century culture. With so many significant changes happening in the last 100 years or so, you would think it would be a bigger deal in Star Trek's era.
    When it comes to pop culture, like movies and TV shows, with so much of it being digitized now, it would still have to be pretty easily accessible to people in 200 or 300 years. By that time I would think reading Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings would be the equivalent of reading things like Dracula and Frankenstein today.
     
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  7. Trekker4747

    Trekker4747 Boldly going... Premium Member

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    I think a large part of that is just that it'd seem to silly or "contrived" that these people we're following, living 100s of years in the future just happen to be into stuff relevant to *us* *today.*

    It's already sort of silly when it happens on Orville, like when they were watching an episode of Seinfeld in one episode, or the stop-motion Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer (though, I really like how that was used in that episode.)
     
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  8. The Wormhole

    The Wormhole Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    It's better they did it this way. After one episode, the majority of us had it figured out Janel was a Krill, had they milked it out over the course of a whole season or even half a season, it would just get tedious for everyone in the audience to have figured out what the characters on the show are somehow ignorant of. Just as it was on Disco with Ash Tyler really being a Klingon, or Lorca really being from the Mirror Universe.
    Television has changed, and priorities have changed. In TNG's day, the priority was to crap out as many episodes a season hoping to beef up a syndication package. Even then. the Star Trek shows went way overboard, doing 26 episode seasons when most other shows were only doing 22-24. And then take into account the average Trek episode in the 90s took 6-8 days to film, with the actors working from 7am to 11pm those 6 to 8 days until 26 episodes were filmed, with a short break for Christmas.

    These days, shorter seasons are more en vogue as binge watchers find this easier to digest. And I should think the actors are more accepting of a work period nearly half of what it would have been in the 90s
    Star Trek had problems predicting future technology, just take the stacks of PADDs for example. Even First Contact thought that in the 2060s music would be stored on transparent hexagonal discs as opposed to digitally.
     
  9. Serveaux

    Serveaux Fleet Admiral Premium Member

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    TNG did not, BTW, have three seasons of "mostly good episodes." Throughout its run it had a mix of good, average and the occasional bad show - some years, more than occasional.

    Star Trek fans simply exaggerate the virtues of the shows they like. It's part of being a fan.
     
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  10. UssGlenn

    UssGlenn Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    I mean, that's still a digital medium, it's just not "in the cloud". Which he wouldn't be able to access after leaving Earth anyway, even if the infrastructure survived WWIII, which it probably didn't.

    I expect most digital storage was wiped out in various EMP incedents and general poor storage conditions during and following WWIII. Spock does say records from the 1990s are fragmentary. CDs and hard drives can be surprisingly fragile when stored improperly. What survived more commonly is physical media, which means only the really popular stuff post 1990 are backed up in enough places to survive by random chance.
     
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  11. FormerLurker

    FormerLurker Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    As discussed before, this IRL is predicting a common type of technology to the era of production, but, again as discussed before, it can be explained in-universe. The reports contained on the PADDs must pass muster on a chain of custody beholden to internal security. They're not on a given vessel's "cloud" because each report must get approval from the captain before the information in it can be released to that type of storage. That's why it's only the captain's desk that has the stacks of PADDs on it.
     
  12. Ar-Pharazon

    Ar-Pharazon Admiral Premium Member

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    A zipper in the back doesn't explain how it goes between the nose & belly connections :lol:

    If we had gotten more Tharl, it might have been explained. Such a missed opportunity.
     
  13. RJDiogenes

    RJDiogenes Idealistic Cynic and Canon Champion Premium Member

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    Wow, those guys are brothers? I had no idea.

    Nice idea. It would be funny if they inserted some explanation into the show, even if it's just an off-the-cuff remark.
     
  14. The Wormhole

    The Wormhole Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    TNG's only truly good season was the third, though I give the first two the benefit of the doubt in that they were still trying to find their way. The fourth and fifth got trapped in a rut of being dry and bland episodes with a few good ones scattered here and there. The sixth and seventh seasons were a step in the right direction, there were some genuinely interesting episodes those years and in the seventh in particular they seemed willing to break away from tradition, but it was ultimately too little too late.
    But then, couldn't some stuff be kept in the ship's computer banks accessible from a computer terminal, rather than being in the cloud? Take Tapestry for example, when Picard becomes a junior officer, he's supposed to deliver a PADD to Geordi with statistics on it. He accidently gives it to Worf, and later Geordi gets pissed off about Picard dealing with his existential crisis rather than delivering these statistics. Couldn't Geordi just get this information from a computer terminal in engineering?
    Except, it's not only the Captain's desk, and it's not always classified information. Remember Voyager when they were lugging an entire crateful of PADDS containing the logs Seven of Nine's parents made about the Borg. Or when Starfleet first sent letters to the crew from their families, Neelix went around the ship delivering PADDS to them with the letter on it. Doesn't the crew have e-main accounts the letters could have been sent to?
     
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  15. JRoss

    JRoss Commodore Commodore

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    Fantastic episode. The series has yet to really have a bad one. Even the slower paced ones are entertaining. Man, I love this show.
     
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  16. FormerLurker

    FormerLurker Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    Once again, chain of custody issues. The information on the PADD is Chief Engineer's Eyes only until La Forge has seen it. Only then does it get uploaded to a terminal in engineering. Probably by La Forge. Remember how the Internet works. All the information on the main computer is in the ship's 'cloud'. All anyone needs to do is break the encryption to see it, and that violates the custody protocol. So it stays on the PADD until the intended recipient sees it first.

    Again, everything on the main computer is in the ship's 'cloud'. Do you want just anybody to have access to your private e-mails? So they get distributed on PADDs. The crateful of PADDs Seven's parents left? That's probably just how they recorded the information in the first place, and Voyager's crew hasn't had the opportunity to enter the information into the main computer yet. It's all either chain of custody, or private data storage issues. It isn't wrong.
     
  17. JirinPanthosa

    JirinPanthosa Admiral Admiral

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    By the way...

    I don’t read every Orville thread so I don’t know if this has been mentioned.

    But does anyone think Krill are supposed to be...American? With the whole manifest destiny exceptionalism thing.
     
  18. Astra

    Astra Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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    Last edited: Jan 20, 2019
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  19. JD

    JD Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    I guess. I'm not saying they should have done it constantly, like The Orville is, but it still would have been nice to see something a bit more recent in between all of the Shakespeare and Conan Doyle.
    Oh right, I forgot his second esophagus is attached to both his face and stomach.
     
  20. Awesome Possum

    Awesome Possum Moddin' Admiral

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    A character secretly being a spy is an old trope, nuBSG even had it as a major part of their premise before both Disco and Orville.
     
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