Will The Orville ever get transporters?

[JedGelt67]

Orville borrows heavily from Trek, but no more than any other scifi franchise has borrowed from each other. SG-1's use of the transporter and it's use of Treknology has been highlighted as tech given to them by super advanced aliens. It's used differently and it also breaks differently.

 

[Mudd]

Orville borrows heavily from Trek, but no more than any other scifi franchise has borrowed from each other. SG-1's use of the transporter and it's use of Treknology has been highlighted as tech given to them by super advanced aliens. It's used differently and it also breaks differently.

Yeah, but even so SG-1 felt the need to hang a lantern on their core borrowings from Trek. In their world, Star Trek is a TV series.

Further evidence that the SG universe is our universe is that no one has heard of Farscape.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

Orville borrows heavily from Trek, but no more than any other scifi franchise has borrowed from each other. SG-1's use of the transporter and it's use of Treknology has been highlighted as tech given to them by super advanced aliens. It's used differently and it also breaks differently.

I would disagree with that. Yeah, SG-1 borrowed a lot from Trek, but that's not the same thing as directly mimicking everything about the Trek aesthetic. SG-1 had a lot of premises that came from the Star Trek well of premises, like they did a time loop episode. But they approached it in a way Star Trek never would. Orville approaches it in exactly the way Star Trek would, but with more humor and deadpan.

The area where Orville has most 'Made it their own' besides having the MacFarlane style of humor of just regular guys carrying on in an irreverent way that highlights the absurdity of pop culture and/or social interactions is the times they've directly countered Star Trek episodes. For example, when they conspicuously make a humanist retort to the prime directive. To me that's the biggest signature of what's uniquely "Orville". But everything else is so close it'd be considered plagiarism if they didn't conspicuously admit it was plagiarism.

 

[Crisp Conditions]

I hope they don't get transporters. They don't need them. Ninja'd to the ninja.

 

[Mudd]

Yeah, the idea that they have to "work around transporters" on The Orville is a bit backward - rather, Star Trek has always had to work around the existence of transporters. Any time they'd be convenient for a quick trip or rescue that would upset an otherwise well-constructed predicament, their unavailability has to be accounted for.

You need to go somewhere a bit distant? You have to get in a vehicle, or saddle up a mount, and take some time to get there. Or, if necessary and possible, walk. There's not a thing about that which begs explanation; it is, in fact how the world works.

 

[Crisp Conditions]

Orville borrows heavily from Trek, but no more than any other scifi franchise has borrowed from each other. SG-1's use of the transporter and it's use of Treknology has been highlighted as tech given to them by super advanced aliens. It's used differently and it also breaks differently.

Plus, the Goa'uld had the transport rings since the original movie, which the SG-1 team had used on occasion during infiltrations and such.

The Stargate film was, by the way, when Russell and Spader, on their first encounter with teleporter technology, played the trump card that Trek fans had always wondered about: Why doesn't Kirk just beam a bomb over to the Romulan ship (or Klingon ship, etc.)? IIRC, Janeway finally got around to that in "Dark Frontier" and used it on the Borg.

 

[Unionized Elf]

Star Trek has always had to work around the existence of transporters. Any time they'd be convenient for a quick trip or rescue that would upset an otherwise well-constructed predicament, their unavailability has to be accounted for.

Reminds me of Ron Moore's audio commentary for a first season episode of his BSG in which the crew are conducting search and rescue when Starbuck crashes on a planet. In it Moore talks about how liberating it was to do this storyline outside of Trek, since in Trek they'd have to waste lines of dialogue on exposition on why they can't be beamed up and why ship sensors can't penetrate the atmosphere to pinpoint exactly where the missing officers are. In BSG, there's no transporter, and the search area has crappy weather.

 

[Mudd]

Yep.

Star Trek is fossilized now with so much nonsense that large parts of the storytelling is nothing more than rote and ritual.

 

[Cyrus]

They don't have transporters, but the Universal Translator works very well.

 

[Owain Taggart]

Which is part of the irony, given that TOS did it to to save money from having to use the shuttles. Here, they could use it once by giving a reason that it's a new experimental form of transportation along with having a specialist aboard (like Daystrom in TOS), have a catastrophic accident happen with a humourous situation, and due to both embarrassment and technical mishap, it's never used or mentioned again.

 

[DonIago]

Or at the top of every episode they can send a new crewman played by a celebrity through the transporter and have something horrible befall them...

 

[King Bob!]

I hope they stay away from transporters. They are (Trek's various versions) simply magic and really don't belong in sci-fi.

 

[Amaris]

I love The Orville's state of technology as it is. Lots of fantasy tech, but still looks plausible enough to work. Transporters tend to go well over the line in that regard, though, because in a real universe where transporter technology exists, death no longer does, at least not in any way we'd understand it, and as a result, such a society would be so fundamentally different as to be nearly unrelatable.

 

[JedGelt67]

I love The Orville's state of technology as it is. Lots of fantasy tech, but still looks plausible enough to work. Transporters tend to go well over the line in that regard, though, because in a real universe where transporter technology exists, death no longer does, at least not in any way we'd understand it, and as a result, such a society would be so fundamentally different as to be nearly unrelatable.

Not really, in star trek, plot deaths are always permanent. Only TNG and Voyager really played with transporter tropes; TOS, DS9, Ent, DSC and all the Trek movies, including the 2009 series, use the transporter exactly as originally envisioned: a means of traveling instantaneous from Point A to Point B without the use of a landing craft.
ST09 did introduce transwarp beaming which IMO was a plot mistake but its not hard to build in rules of the tech into the shows premise.

 

[Amaris]

Not really, in star trek, plot deaths are always permanent. Only TNG and Voyager really played with transporter tropes; TOS, DS9, Ent, DSC and all the Trek movies, including the 2009 series, use the transporter exactly as originally envisioned: a means of traveling instantaneous from Point A to Point B without the use of a landing craft.
ST09 did introduce transwarp beaming which IMO was a plot mistake but its not hard to build in rules of the tech into the shows premise.

The nature of transporter technology is such that it creates eternal youth, or at the very least can be used to create clones of one's self.

TOS had "The Enemy Within," where Kirk was split into two halves. That's not just transporting from one place to another.
DS9 had "Our Man Bashir" where transporter patterns were uploaded into the station's holosuites so they wouldn't be lost.
ENT had "Daedalus," where a man's son is turned into a "ghost," making him capable of existing outside of his mortal body.
DSC hasn't really broached it yet, but it's only a matter of time.

 

[Mudd]

Only TNG and Voyager really played with transporter tropes; TOS, DS9, Ent, DSC and all the Trek movies, including the 2009 series, use the transporter exactly as originally envisioned: a means of traveling instantaneous from Point A to Point B without the use of a landing craft.

Also good for splitting crewpeople into their good and evil halves, and sending them to Mirror Universes. TOS rules.

 

[JedGelt67]

The nature of transporter technology is such that it creates eternal youth, or at the very least can be used to create clones of one's self.

The transporter is never seen making people younger; except to cure Dr. Pulasky where she aged unnaturally.
Also, aside from what's clearly shown to be a freak accident and nearly impossible to duplicate in Second Chances, the transporter has never been shown to clone anyone.

One example from ENT and DS9 each. Sending people to the Mirror Universe, especially as seen on DS9 is simply an extrapolation of the existing technology.
I"ll concede TOS.

 

[Amaris]

The transporter is never seen making people younger; except to cure Dr. Pulasky where she aged unnaturally.
Also, aside from what's clearly shown to be a freak accident and nearly impossible to duplicate in Second Chances, the transporter has never been shown to clone anyone.

One example from ENT and DS9 each. Sending people to the Mirror Universe, especially as seen on DS9 is simply an extrapolation of the existing technology.
I"ll concede TOS.

Your first example nails the entire issue: It reversed Pulaski's aging by using an older DNA sample of herself. She kept all of her memories, just reduced her age drastically. That's a miracle.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Tom Riker survived on that planet by eating transporter clones.

 

[JedGelt67]

Your first example nails the entire issue: It reversed Pulaski's aging by using an older DNA sample of herself. She kept all of her memories, just reduced her age drastically. That's a miracle.

In episode they viewed it as merely a correction from disease using a novel transporter technique. It's not standard and is never mentioned again; aside from the freak accident (way too many of these lol) that turned Picard and Co. into children.
Again, the fact that a handful of episodes showing that crazy miracles can be accomplished merely by the press of a button on the transporter console does not establish that these miracles are done routinely; in fact all exposition states otherwise; that such tinkering with transporter technology generally incurs failure EXCEPT when conveniently required by the plot of the episode in question.