Spoilers The Orville: New Horizons Season 3 Discussion

There was a lot going on in this episode but I kind of liked the pacing and the slice-of-life/Kaylon/political plot lines all going on at the same time. It felt like life on a ship.

 

I agree that starting with a lie is really bad diplomacy. But if Mercer and co had been upfront from the start, the matriarchal aliens would have refused to even talk at all. They see any society where men have positions of powers as abhorrent. And Mercer and co were under orders by the Admiralty to try to open negotiations. So being upfront was not a viable option. It was a tough position: be truthful and have the other side simply refuse to even talk to you or lie to get negotiations started and hope the lie does not blow up in your face.

 

That's what they did to the Machine on Person of interest every day.

So it typed everything out on paper before the reset, read it all after the reset and started typing out what it learnt the next day.

The machine still managed to escape even with that extreme limitation to it's character.

 

53,072 complaints caused the invention of the soul whip.

The executive and the mum are different characters/actresses.

That blows most of my crap out of the water.

But the kids are still exactly the same age.

But since they are the fifty third thousandth family unit to buy a robot, unless the upgrade was free, they would have been close the 53rd thousandth family unit to buy a soul whip.

53 Thousand complaints?

20 billion biological Kaylon.

The scales just don't balance.

 

Which means either those flashbacks all take place within a year, or that race aged at a slow rate.

 

But only because it's the Call Of Duty!

 

So, I watched the pilot and half of the 2nd episode of Orville back when they first aired, and hated them. Since then, I've seen a lot of comments that it's gone on to become great. I'm curious to give it another chance.

I was just posting in another thread about how "Improbable Cause" is the DS9 ep with which I've hooked skeptics on the series into watching it all for the first time, and I was wondering what The Orville's version of that would be.

What's the one episode to watch to see how they grew from the pilot? I have zero interest in going back to the beginning and trying to just push myself forward, but if I see one (or two) great episodes from later in the run, then I'll be hooked into watching the whole thing.

(I also had this with Enterprise, where I gave up mid-season-2, then many years later saw "Borderland" and "Carpenter Street" and was suddenly interested in a full watch)

Sorry if this is the wrong thread for a question like this, but I couldn't find one that seemed more appropriate...

 

S01E05 Pria. Time Travel. Guest starring Charlize Theron.

S01E07 Majority Rule. Prime Directive/Dealing with 21st century allegory Aliens.

S01E12 Mad Idolatry. Prime Directive. Crewman mistaken for God.

S02E03 Home. Random episode guest starring John Billingsly and Robert PIcardo.

S02E08-E09 Identity. The Orville's "The Best of Both Worlds". The Baddies rise!

 

They were sentient, they could feel pain. The self-awareness was the "ghost in the machine" in that even if you destroyed their memories, the structures of their brains had changed. You'd have to destroy them to stop them from regaining that awareness.

The whole thing is an allegory for slavery. White slave masters knew their slaves could think, knew they felt pain, and they whipped them harder, punished them harder, committed heinous acts to keep them in line. Similarly, it didn't matter what the Kaylons thought or felt because they were seen as nothing more than chattel.

We only saw what one family was doing. We never saw the other uses for the Kaylon, or the abuses they might have faced, we were just given an idea of the mindset the builders possessed, and it looks that if even this "wholesome" family could be cruel, sadistic masters, what were others like who pursued more exploitative enterprises?

 

Another really great episode.

Very bad diplomacy to start with a big lie, they were right at being angry.

Interesting side with Isaac and the new Kaylon, I selected something to go horribly wrong or to be a ruse, seems that all is at it seems after all!

The flashback to the kaylon uprising was a bit unnecessary in-episode, as it told us nothing we didn’t know already, however I’m happy it was done as *that society could be us in a few decades*.

 

The Kaylon could have just run away, but they decided to murder people instead. The people maybe didn't think of the robots as having the ability to feel pain, sort of like our computers are just tools. The adults just wanted their robot to obey and not be questioning all the time. (They have kids for that) The kids seemed really mean but maybe they were laughing because the robot "danced" when they used that device. Kids can be so clueless. I know what the writers were trying to portray, but I'm not sure I'm convinced. I tell Alexa to shut up and I don't feel bad about it.

 

They knew the Kaylon could feel pain. That's why the kids were doing it, they found it funny for K1 to be made helpless in pain on the floor. These people saw the Kaylons as an inferior, servant race unworthy of empathy. If you don't want someone questioning you, you don't choose sentient beings, and treat them like a tool to be punished when their own physical or emotional needs are presented.

Our computers are tools, nothing more, because they lack sentience, they are not alive in any sense. They do not feel pain, they do not have fears or concerns.

As for running away, in US history, when slaves would run away, slave patrols would be formed to hunt them down and return them to their masters. That's how our whole policing system was founded here.

So no, while I hate the idea of genocide, that the slaves rose up against their masters is not at all out of place in either our history or this story, and is a quite logical followup to what happens when the tables turn on the oppressors and the whip is taken from them.

 

If they were really just complicated toasters on legs then it's a machine. If my toaster is malfunctioning and not doing what it's supposed to be doing i would have no second thoughts and throw it out.

If that machine however develops self awareness then it's a complete new ballgame, see the classic TNG episode Measure of a Man ( Data's status as a lifeform is determined in court). Now given that the Kaylon don't have emotions revenge is out of the picture but given they have no emotions they don't have remorse, guilt or mercy too and it may have been a logical choice for them to exterminate their creators to be safe.

 

But couldn't they have left and gone to somewhere else in the universe? Leave their oppressors behind? I see the attempt to correlate this to human history but I think this misses.

 

I think it still works because if you were treated with nothing but hatred, disdain, and made to feel excruciating pain every time you so much as *thought* about disobeying an order, would you just leave, or would there be a part of you that says these people must pay for what they've done before they do it again to someone else?

Slavery is violence, so extreme violence was used against the Kaylon. They simply returned the favor.

 

Revenge, Captain?

Why not?

Star Trek for sure.

 

I have been pretty critical of a number of choices made for the Orville this season, but I was ok with the Kaylon backstory. While we only get the one android's backstory, it could easily be imagined that many of the androids had it even worse or for much longer periods of time.
Since the androids never had a childhood, learned mercy, or even had emotions, one could easily see them making the choice that since the majority of biologicals posed a threat to them, the easiest and most effective way of dealing with biologicals was to wipe them out.

 

I commented to my husband that much of the fear of white slave owners was *exactly* that - that the slaves would massacre them. As @FPAlpha wrote above, without emotions, it probably seemed a purely logical course of action. However, Isaac's character has given small hints (through his actions) that the Kaylon are *not* completely devoid of emotion, so it may not have been purely logic anyway. Also, I noticed that K1 made sure the parents saw him before shooting them, but shot the kids quickly in their sleep - some kind of mercy, perhaps?

Um... OK, thribs, sometimes, when a woman gets caught up in things, muscles can involuntarily... spasm.

AAGH! That's a horrible thought!

Thankfully, that should only be for original generation Kaylon, as we saw with Isaac that they changed future generations internally.

Or maybe they decided to keep that...

 

Be a Vulcan at work, a Klingon in the sheets.

Much like HORIZON ZERO DAWN, MASS EFFECT, and real life, if it's cheaper to do a thing one way even if there's catastrophic consequences, you'll do it that way. The CEO decided torture was a better idea than, here's an idea, not giving sentience to robots.

This one doesn't need explanation. Mercer and company are objectively terrible at any form of diplomacy as we've seen repeatedly with EVERY SINGLE RACE they deal with: Moclans, Kaylons, the planet that worships Kelly, and so on. There's really no end of it and they haven't gotten any better.

The Romans knew their slaves hated them and the Confederates knew it too.

Ironically, the only slave execution of their owners that took place, in Haiti was actually something the government was shocked by the public being largely against. The people were just glad to be free and didn't want to carry out the mass murder they wanted.

Weirdly, as an autistic person, I think ISAAC is Kaylon Autistic as the Kaylon Prime keeps seeming a little surprised that Isaac doesn't seem to have the same level of raw RAGE and disgust that the others among their kind do. Which to me says that he's actually unique rather than the Kaylons having emotion.

 

That suggests the creator species had interstellar travel, which I saw no indication of. And even if they did, what's to stop the creators from chasing after them? Even if the Kaylon took whatever the equivalent to a space shuttle and flew off at sublight speeds since as robots they don't age or need sustenance or even oxygen, well, do you really think the creators are going to stand by as the Kaylon try to make off with one of their spacecraft? Or that once the Kaylon did leave, the creators would just shrug and say "well, that sucks" and get back to business as usual?

While I certainly don't support genocide, I don't see how "running away" would have been a practical option for the Kaylon either.