THE ORVILLE S2, E5: "ALL THE WORLD IS BIRTHDAY CAKE"

That's conflict, which is a component of a story. The obstacle that the Orville crew must overcome was the extremism of the planet inhabitants. But there had to have been factions, organizations, government entities, philosophers, scientists, soldiers, etc. that didn't believe in astrology. Why not explore that aspect of this new civilization and perhaps aid the Orville crew in freeing Kelly, Bortus, and the Gilliacs from the camp? Regor 2 didn't have to be all black and white. This would have served as a first-contact plot.

 

There was no conflict in your premise as stated.

 

Did you read the rest of my post, or were you randomly picking parts you could argue with for the sake of argument? I provided an example of what could have been conflict in a first-contact scenario other than the rehashed religion/philosophy plot.

 

So, the Planetary Union...

they don't have dress uniforms, right..?

 

Technically, first contact is a setting, not a story.

 

I've always thought of setting as the time and place for the story, for instance, Regor 2, Space Age, etc. One could say the plot or storyline of this episode was about first contact, but then again I felt the episode focused more on the belief system of a society.

 

It is kind of a shame that Sol III never caught on I guess.

 

"Our people make first contact with a civilization" is a premise.

It's very broad.

"Our people make first contact with a civilization that's distrustful of outsiders."

That's still a premise, but it focuses it a bit . It still begs the question: "...and?"

"Our people make first contact with a civilization that's distrustful of outsiders, and one of our people is captured after clandestinely infiltrating their society" is...maybe the beginning of a story built around a substantial problem.

So is "Our people make first contact with a civilization and one or two of our people are arrested for accidentally offending them, putting both their lives and the mission in jeopardy." That's the beginning to a story, based on a premise, built around a substantial problem.

The latter example is "Justice," "Majority Rule," "All The World Is Birthday Cake," etc.

"Our people make first contact with a civilization, showing them the wonders of the universe" is a broad premise. Where's the "and?" The story problem had better be in the "and."

 

I think this is the worst rapeless Orville episode so far, the more I think about it.

Starting with that they barely even filed the serial numbers off the Trek source material this time, the MacFarlane spin wasn't a quarter as clever as in some of the other episodes. The downvote thing was clever, so was extending the "Mistaking us for a God" thing longitudinally through millennia. Astrology feels like they pulled a word out of a hat and plugged it into the "Crazy aliens of the week".

Every step of the episode required one or both sides to be incredibly stupid. The Orville crew putting themselves at the mercy of strangers without making sure it's safe first. Then the planet changing their belief system because they believed a giant space lamp was a new star in a way that 18th century humans wouldn't have fallen for the moment they noticed the star was in a different place if you just moved a few hundred miles.

One of the "Trek by numbers" episodes, without the humor and cleverness that usually makes it okay.

Also, one more thing, even if they released the Jilliaks, shouldn't they have still charged them for murder for the guards killed in the escape attempt?

Definitely the worst Orville episode in which nobody is raped by Blue Chris Traeger.

 

They like to use famous Admirals to name their Admirals: Halsey, Perry, Ozawa and Tucker.

This was a miss for me. Very much a weak TNG episode with heavy handed allegories. Not liking the new Security Chief. Too much of a "Bad Ass" cliche. She lacks the dichotomy the smaller Halston brought to the role of a super strong character. Might have been a better idea to make her a different species

 

I did like Mercer's speech, which he admitted plagiarizing from about nine different sources.

 

This season has been a disappointment. I enjoyed watching S1 as comfort food / nostalgia.

Aside from the episode where the Security Chief goes home, which was pretty well done and had some nice originality, this season has been a series of misses. Bad misses.

 

Issac says that their satellites and other sky-monitoring equipment was built more to study and track the position of stars rather than their spectral type or anything scientific about them. They should have driven this "home" more when Ed talking to the planetary leader says a star is "a ball of gas and dust [far] away" and having the leader seem confused on how Ed is describing these stars. That their planet hadn't even considered the scientific nature of the stars, just their significance in their positions in the sky.

When the suggestion was made to replace the star in the sky, I'd gotten the impression they were going to put something far, far, out in a similar place the star was if not something in the actual position of the star. (And do something to speed-up the light from the black hole's position to the planet's) Them putting a flat disc in orbit seems like it'd fail fairly quickly, I'd think all it'd take is for them to observe it from a slightly different angle than dead-on and see it's flat and not a spheroid.

But, I suppose, we can just assume the device is in a high enough orbit that all of their orbiting and ground-based systems will be sufficiently fooled. They say as much, that by the time they realize what's going on they may no longer care. So the device may be more sophisticated and doing things beyond what we see. The dialogue in the episode says that from their POV the star came back and any way they have of looking at it will confirm this. The device can "just" do this. It's a bit lazy writing, but there it is.

 

Eh, I think this one works much better because it's not explicitly religion. Just a wrong cultural value.

But ways they could have done this differently:

* Ed does talk about how the fact they're not born under the same sign and then realizes that the leader DOESN'T CARE. They only use astrology to control the masses and having studied the union, realize their control would be utterly borked if they let people contact other civilizations. It's just a way to break off diplomatic contact.

* First Contact! The Orville arrives...and so does the Krill.

* The Orville meets with the populace and finds out they have a dark secret. Maybe it's something a little less crazy like kidnapping Kelly but the fact they practice slavery (perhaps under the same astrological rules).

* Ed royally fucks up First Contact somehow due to his habit of being a judgemental prick.

* A plague spreads through the planet until we discover it's not from the Orville (which would be too dark) but terrorists who don't want First Contact.

 

I thought Ed did fuck up this first contact by being a judgmental prick...

 

Good point. Oh, well.

 

Not a bad episode, but definitely the first of this season to underwhelm me a bit. I wonder if maybe the astrology plot got a bit truncated in order to fit in scenes to introduce Talla? I think they needed a scene similar to About a Girl where Ed and Kelly talked about cleft palates, third legs, etc to show how they’d thought the problem through.

I’m not totally sold on Jessica Szohr yet, her best scene was when she grabbed the guy by the neck and shoved him up the wall. I’m hoping maybe she’s going to be more hotheaded and always suggesting violent solutions a bit like how Worf would. Although technically with Bortas that would mean having two Worfs on the show!

 

Trek writers would make it all work out when Picard does that.

 

Boy, you really hate Star Trek.

 

Talla is an interesting character. She's older, more experienced, and more opinionated & plain spoken than Alara. The latter can be good or bad for the series depending on what plot the show-runners have in mind for her in latter episodes.

While she's a Xelayan like Alara, I'm glad to see she's not just Alara's carbon copy. They need to set her apart from Alara with a personality of her own, so long-term Alara fans won't continue making comparisons between the two of them, although that's also inevitable.

As for Tharl, well, good riddance