Discovery and "The Orville" Comparisons
- Thread starter Jedi_Master
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Well, that's a different argument, and what I was referencing earlier. It's making a "cantina scene" on the bridge.
Imagine this:
Now this Airiam girl from planet "augmented alien" is supposedly going to be getting featured in an episode where she has an actual role to play. That'd be good. The strange creatures on the Shinzou were just there for decoration. The cantina scenes in Star Wars have a different function than showing the bridge crew at work in Star Trek.
For instance, the "cantina effect" is used quite well in DS9 where it fits. They're on this frontier outpost where all sorts of weird creatures show up, some regularly, like morn at the bar, but the Starfleet and Bajorans are made up of mostly humans and Bajorans, and don't distract from the story.
Imagine this:
Now this Airiam girl from planet "augmented alien" is supposedly going to be getting featured in an episode where she has an actual role to play. That'd be good. The strange creatures on the Shinzou were just there for decoration. The cantina scenes in Star Wars have a different function than showing the bridge crew at work in Star Trek.
For instance, the "cantina effect" is used quite well in DS9 where it fits. They're on this frontier outpost where all sorts of weird creatures show up, some regularly, like morn at the bar, but the Starfleet and Bajorans are made up of mostly humans and Bajorans, and don't distract from the story.
oops we learn they have transporters in the future in orville though
Teleportation is a gimmick that shows up in all kinds of sf in the media, from Lost In Space to Stargate.. to Orville....Stargate and Trek, though, are the only long-standing properties that I can think of that have made it a standard part of the protagonists' tech toolkit. So it's a bit too closely identified with Trek.
Obviously not.
But Discovery has only had like 7 episodes, if it had a full 100+ episode run im certain there would be some stinkers
Then there's the gender ratio.
TOS had, to be generous, two women out of seven continuing characters most of the time.
TNG, two of eight most of the time.
DS9, two.
Voyager, three.
Enterprise, back to two.
The Orville, three of seven.
Discovery, two.
That's probably one of the reasons if not the main reason for not making such technology part of the Orville. But transporters are a technology that originally wasn't supposed to be in Star Trek (TOS) either. The transporter was "invented" only because of the budget constrictions; they couldn't afford the shuttles. Nowadays that problem obviously doesn't exist. But there's that other problem of being probably too similar to Trek. I actually think the lack of the transporter (technology) makes the show even more "realistic".
Actually they don't. [SPOILER warning] They do acquire a teleportation device from the future in one episode, but it's lost soon after the timeline is restored.
So, the Trek transporter has obviously not been invented yet in the future of Orville.
It was first pointed out nearly five decades ago that transporter technology is completely out of sync with the rest of 23rd century Federation tech - what they're shown as able to do would have massive influence on how everything else is done, and no one thought it through. At all. It was a production convenience and nothing more.
Doing a "reset" on that piece is a point in The Orville's favor.
They still have those pesky replicators, though, which they're smart enough not to explain in terms o the workings.
Doing a "reset" on that piece is a point in The Orville's favor.
They still have those pesky replicators, though, which they're smart enough not to explain in terms o the workings.
C- actually. But I don't grade shows like that. A zero is no redeeming qualities, a five is average, and a 10 is absolutely perfect. The average Trek episode is a five IMHO. Maybe a six to reflect that average Trek is a bit better than average TV in general. Certainly not a 7 or 8.
My own personal ratings so far for Discovery:
Vulcan Hello - 5
Battle at the Binary Stars - 4
Context is for Kings - 6
The Butcher's Knife... - 6
Choose Your Pain - 8
Lethe - 6
Magic To Make... - 8
Si Vis Pacem.... - 6
I remember reading years ago that TV networks believe that if you have a main cast which is more than 1/3rd female, people start thinking of it as a "woman's show" and men stop watching it. This is why Trek has never had a 50/50 gender balance.
They really don't. The function is to show variety. A variety of aliens visit the cantina, a variety of aliens visit DS9, and a variety of aliens work in Starfleet. This has really only been shied away from with Starfleet characters for budget reasons. With bar scenes Westmore usually just got away with rough mashups of existing makeup pieces because they wouldn't need to be seen up close. It would have been harder to do that with people working side by side with our crew, but now we have the budget to create full alien designs just for background characters.
TAS, TMP, and the JJ movies already did this. In fact, there was literally an alien with a shiny prosthetic over his eyes in the briefing scene in TMP. No one said "What's his deal? Does it give him x-ray vision? What's his purpose?" Okay, maybe they did, but it didn't distract from the story. If Geordi was never anything more than the guy who says "course plotted", and none of the characters treated his prosthetic as exceptional, then his "function" would have simply been to show that this is a thing humans can do now, and we would have accepted that. Then we have actual aliens like the Bolians who have been running around Starfleet for years, but we've never really gotten a Bolian-centric story. We don't need one. We just accept they are part of that society.
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The Federation might be of planets, but Starfleet is primarily a human organization. So traditionally, when Star Trek shows extravagant creatures on the bridge, they have a purpose, be it story; or just to meet them and find out what they're about. If Geordi was a background character that was only there for decoration, and we never learned why he wears that thing on his eyes, I would see that as a negative. Perhaps if it wasn't related to Discovery, you might, too.
It sounds like you are simply in the business of defending against any criticism, legitimate or not, trivial or important, and even against simple observation, whether the person you're arguing with is taking a neutral position or not. You are saying "Yes! They are decoration. And that rocks!"
Good, because that's what I said, just without the enthusiasm.
Is there a positive balance to be found somewhere between necessity and superfluous? Can a thing be overdesigned? Has that word any meaning? Are you simply arguing taste?
It sounds like you are simply in the business of defending against any criticism, legitimate or not, trivial or important, and even against simple observation, whether the person you're arguing with is taking a neutral position or not. You are saying "Yes! They are decoration. And that rocks!"
Good, because that's what I said, just without the enthusiasm.
Is there a positive balance to be found somewhere between necessity and superfluous? Can a thing be overdesigned? Has that word any meaning? Are you simply arguing taste?
In case the bold highlight wasn't clear, I was responding to your assertion that the cantina aliens and the bridge aliens have different functions. Now given that you equated the latter to Geordi being a background character, something you've now explicitly stated you would see "as a negative", it seems that this is not a neutral position. But even if it were, it wouldn't change the fact that I disagree with that assertion.
I'm not sure why you have such a strong reaction to me disagreeing with you. You seem to be treating this whole discussion as some kind of tribal war. Maybe a side effect of spending too much time in this thread, which if I'm not mistaken was originally titled "Discovery versus The Orville" (there's a reason I've avoided it for so long).
To be clear, I have not suggested that "decoration" is a good thing, assuming "decoration" means having no function at all. Again, with aliens, the function is to show the diversity of Starfleet. In Geordi's case, it's to show that disabled people can also work in Starfleet. The eye thing with Detmer also has a function, which is to show damage caused by war.
These functions could be, and are being fulfilled without requiring the characters to be central. If anything, that is the neutral position: I don't much care either way if they become central characters or not. If they do, and they turn out to be likable characters for several seasons, I might even say that keeping them as background characters would have been "a negative" in retrospect.
Reaching.
Out of a main cast of how many?
Disco's bridge crew seems to be majority female. The crew in the Spore area may be majority female. The fist sec officer was female. We don't know much about some departments like engineering and medical.
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