There is a fine line between being influenced and being derivative, and more than half the time Orville falls on the derivative side.
You mean getting screwed with by the Murasaki Quasar and landing on a planet with a sick population? "The Galileo Seven" (Star Trek) and "The Quickening" (Deep Space Nine). I'm sure I could find other episodes that match the basic parameters, at least in part.
I don't recall "Coming of Age" involving Wesley putting himself through a test, much less going to the rather extreme measure of having his own memory wiped so that he wouldn't know he was testing himself. It's easy to say A is a rip-off of B when you paint with a broad enough brush.
Vast improvement from last week's episode. A nice tribute to the classic Next Generation scenario of isolating a character that makes said character think he or she has gone crazy as bad shit happens around them. Plus, it was a great character piece for my favorite character, Alara. ...but now I'm going to have nightmares because of that fucking clown.
Not only that but what they did with Alara was what was important to me. We got deep inside this character and got to know her. We know she is inexperienced and that led to a crew member dying and this episode was all about how she dealt with that grief. So what if the plot had been done several times before. The journey we watched Alara go on was this episodes strongest point.
I will say I did like the resolution how Alara felt she needed that to prove to herself she wouldn't freeze up. But, I think they made it too obvious too early it was all a simulation. Sure, it wasn't 100% definite until a main character died, but I thought even before the simulation started "I bet this is the kind of episode where Alara tests her fears in a situation that isn't real". I didn't know if it was all a hallucination, or a coma dream, a warp bubble, or alien parasites or whatever, but they just made it way too obvious even before they started killing people. @DonIago I don't think my brush is super-broad there, it's a simulation intended to test somebody's fears. There's differences in the context, but the execution was extremely similar. When you have a show that cops the entire aesthetic of another show, it feels derivative when you do the same premise. In a show like Stargate where the aesthetic and the characters' attitudes are very different, you can do a time loop and it will feel like a totally different episode than Cause and Effect. When you do it with a show that feels like a Star Trek fan production with names changed to avoid lawsuits, it feels derivative. So yes, Orville has to go farther away from specific episode premises from Star Trek than a show like Stargate does to not feel derivative.
Overall a pretty strong episode that, while it reaches for some pretty old tropes, makes up for it by being entertaining. Old trope #1: Was it really necessary to drag out the whole "Every time a character is afraid of something, it must be due to some unremembered childhood trauma" thing? A fear of fire doesn't require Alara to have survived one as a baby. She can be afraid of fire because, duh, it's fucking fire and it can both hurt and kill you. An officer tormented by guilt for allowing someone to die was a worthwhile thing to explore. It's something Trek couldn't have done the same way with Worf, Yar, Odo, or Tuvok, all of whom were too hardened to respond the same way, but it fits with Alara's youth and inexperience. It also made particular sense for her character -- both as security chief and as the physically strongest crewmember, she must feel like she's the one who's supposed to rescue everybody else. So everything about her reaction rang true. "Everybody's biggest fears are coming true" is a pretty time-worn SFF cliche, but I didn't see the twist coming. And the mechanism for creating the "stuck on the holodeck" situation wasn't anywhere near as contrived as the ones TNG and Voyager kept coming up with.
Except McFarlane didn't write the episode. I think it was a straight up acceptance of the fact that those letters are hard to write. What the hell do you write about someone who died in the line of duty that doesn't sound like the typical boilerplate of dying in the line of duty. How do you personalize it when you don't know the guy well? It's tough. Yep. Would've been a better route to take. Of all the homages to do, a holodeck story was not needed! Ah, that would explain so much! Like, why he's defending this one so steadfastly! Kidding, kidding! Ah, no. The Orville is being good at being The Orville. Discovery is great at being Discovery. We don't need, and it wouldn't be good, to have two identical shows! That's alright. We shouldn't all feel compelled to like the same things. That would be boring too. It's great that there are two very different shows to enjoy.
I got the impression her parents were just a-holes that had spent her life underestimating her because she didn't want to do what they wanted her to do.
I wasn't all that impressed with this episode. It just didn't keep my attention. Just like the Dr. Crusher warp bubble episode couldn't
I’m rewatching the episode and I love the scene where Mercer rejects Alara’s resignation. He has the utmost trust in those under him. It was a beautiful scene showing how much of a captain Mercer has grown into.
They clearly said that her daughter is a little "slow" and they made a comparison with other "deficient people". Until now Kitan seems intellectually at the same level with the average human, so the average Xelayan probably is more brillant. Yes, the parents are a-holes, but I don't think they are making a false testament (from their point of view) about Kitan. I mean, when she replied she said something about how military is an honorable career, and not "It's not true that I'm slow!"
I don't even remember how far I got. Somebody told me that the first one I didn't see was about a planet of plants. Plus which, he made himself the super-scary Big Bad. Do superior AIs exhibit Freudian behavior?
No. They're probably like Vulcans and value intelligence and learning more than they do physical activity so when someone isn't academically heightened or excelling they're considered "slow" where Alana seems to be at least as smart as everyone else on the ship and not what we would consider to be "slow." The Xelayans obviously value intelligence over everything else. Their race isn't also "super strong" unless in a planetary environment the meets the "average." Xelaya has higher gravity than the average and one would need super strength to just stand on Xelaya. When Alara is not on her planet she's super-strong simply because she's operating in much lower gravity than she's used to. (Granted, this wouldn't really give her the ability to mold titanium like it's clay and like with humans in lower gravity environments would have a number of health effects on her muscles and bones, but waving that away that's the reason why she's "super strong."))
Kitan is Suprrgirl. Her people aren't super smart, her father is just a nagging snob for whom Alara can't measure up.
This is wrong. Adding a few lines to a script would not require someone to get a writing credit for the episode. According to the WGA, for a production executive to go to arbitration to earn a writing credit: "At the time of the credit arbitration, the production executive or production executive team must assume the burden of proving that he/she/ they had, in fact, worked on the script as a writer and had assumed full share of the writing. In the case of original screenplays, if the production executive or production executive team is the second writer he/she/ they must have contributed more than 50% of the final script to receive screenplay credit. His/her/their contribution must consist of dramatic construction; original and different scenes; characterization or character relationships; and dialogue." Now, anyone can throw in an inside joke, and given that the credited writer is a long-time MacFarlane colleague, I assume that she can dish it out just as well as he. However, MacFarlane could have inserted the joke himself without ruining the bylines.
There's a Star Trek comic that deals with this very subject. "Once a Hero...", written by Peter David (issue #19, DC Comics second run), deals with Kirk trying to write a letter about a redshirt who gave his life in the line of duty. I do wonder why Mercer didn't talk to Chief Olsen when writing the letter? The Chief had been long time friends with Payne.