Spoilers The Orville: New Horizons Season 3 Discussion

It's sad that some people can only find LGBTQ people and issues as acceptable if they've been othered to the point they're aliens. We have a long way to go as a society.

 

The irony is that the episode was actually “hitting [us] over the head with [its] message”, so much so Klyden lost it multiple times before he ragequit – there was no much subtlety or beating around the bush to be had. The only difference is they chose to use different imaginary actors. The claim cannot be taken another way than asking for exclusion of trans people, because that's literally the only thing it didn't do – have a trans person in this one.

Or in another one.

And a human.

 

Aliens as stand ins for LGBTQ+: Okay
Actual LGBTQ+ people, like you pass every day on the way to work or (gasp!) actually know?: OUTRAGE

I dispair for humanity. If the real thing bothers you, you've learned NOTHING from the lumpy forehead version.

 

Right Wing Response: "The Lumpy Forehead version is subtle. The Real Thing is Too Political. I prefer my sci-fi to be subtle rather than political." *Goes back to reading Heinlein.*

 

Not all right wing.

*goes back to reading Heinlelin*

 

Um...examples?

 

I miss that they don’t call it the anti banana ray anymore.

 

That was a good episode. They are a lot stricter with time travel than Star Trek it seems. It does feel like that if this was a season one or two episode, they would have had more fun with it. Had them watching American Dad for instance.
It was nice to see a literal time warp. That is science I actually understand and something we have seen in other sci fi franchises like Stargate. It was even in a Enterprise novel where Erica pushes her impulse engines on the Columbia to near light causing the dilation

 

That was a really good episode. I thought the scenes in the house with Gordon and his family were really well done and touched on some really heady philosophical concepts. It was interesting that the Union treats time travel so strictly. In some ways, it makes perfect sense because of how powerful changing the past is. You could literally erase people or entire civilizations from ever existing. Even accidental meddling could be disastrous if it means the Union never formed. So the stakes are extremely high. As Ed says, we do not have the right to play God with history. But does Ed have the right to erase Gordon's family in order to restore the original timeline? I really appreciated the last scene. Gordon having been rescued only a month later, does not remember his family. From his point of view, he sees it as a good move. Gordon is not mad at losing his family since he does not remember them. But you can see that how much it pained Ed because he knows what he did to his best friend, taking away his family he loved. There were some really touching and powerful moments in the episode.

 

As a take on "Children of Time", but with the crew taking the 'Odo' role, I thought it was a nice bottle episode. That said, it's another one where I don't know if the running time is necessarily justified - for character development I understand the whole b-plot of finding the dysonium (or whatever) particles, but they could have cut most of that and it would have been fine.

It's interesting to see them do sequels to older episodes though, I really didn't expect them to be heavily invested in the continuity this season.

 

I think it can be argued that this was The Orville’s “Tuvix” episode. There were already in the Union’s future, reading Gordon’s biography, so it hadn’t been ruined. At that point, why should anything still be in flux? (Other than author fiat, for drama’s sake.)

(I do love that we’re still getting little bits about what kind of future it is. Hunting is serial murder!)

 

I may need more time to digest this one.

First, I hate Ensign Charly a little less after this episode. She's still a jerk and definitely NOT trying to be at all professional regardless of what she states based upon her facial and physical reactions to Isaac at any opportunity, but at least she is given more motivation beyond, "I had a friend die against the Kaylon so I'm justified in bullying Isaac for the rest of eternity."

Regarding the time travel, I have a mixed reaction and may need to watch it again.

On one hand, the crew needing to strip Gordon from his family and his very life was a powerful choice, especially since they have to live with the choice and Gordon doesn't. On the other hand, I really wanted to see the actual consequences of having to "rescue" Gordon after a decade on Earth. Is Gordon stripped of his family and returned resentfully against his will? Can the crew take Gordon and his kids, but abandon the wife with knowledge of the future? Does the crew ultimately relent, allowing Gordon to live out his days and what does that ultimately do to the timeline?

By being able to simply go back further on a second try, it almost became a traditional Star Trek "reset button" episode in which there are no consequences other than the Ed and Kelly feeling bad. They never even had to interact with Gordon nor threaten him in 2025 if they could collect more material and time travel further.

The Gordon comment about why can't my kid be a founder of the Union was very Scotty-esque about transparent aluminum. "Why? How do we know he didn't invent the thing?"

As Charlie and Isaac walked into the biker bar, I also got some Terminator 2 vibes. I half expected Isaac to ask for a bike and have a biker attempt to put a cigar out on his chest. While it was lower key, the arm wrestling scene was quite entertaining. "Oh no, I'm losing..." That's all I have for now...

 

The opening bit with the sandwich is given a more thorough look in "Split Second" by Douglas Richards. https://www.amazon.com/Split-Second-Book-ebook/dp/B014TE4FUS If anybody's interested.

 

Would be hilarious if the season ends with Charlie and Issac hooking up.

You just know that sandwich is going to play a part in the finale.

 

Fantastic episode, real classic Trek. A beet prevedible at times but with some great twists.


Two observations…


1 I’ve wanted to see relativity used to get back to the future for something like 25 years. Every time our heroes were “trapped” in the past I was always like “just use relativity”, it’s great to see it used, finally. There is only small issue…when I thought of the idea in a fanfic decades ago I had the ship flying perpendicularly away from the galactic in order to avoid detection from the past federation: with relatively the faster you go the slower you appear to and I find hard to believe that the union doesn’t detect a ship so close to earth for decades.



2 at the beginning of the episode LaMarr comments that in case of temporal paradox a split in reality would happen. I found this strange on relation to previous Orville time travel episodes but ok. What I found really odd is that this thread wasn’t picked up at the end: doesn’t going back again to retrieve Malloy ten years earlier count as temporal paradox? I was expecting both realities to be happening in the end but it wasn’t mentioned.


Fantastic episode in any case.

 

I really hope there is a payoff there, because it just seemed like a random way to end the scene otherwise.

 

I wonder if we’ll see the 3 months in the future sandwich again.

Also if you pause, Gordon’s bio said he was married to her. They should have read it before they left.

 

I think we will. It would be a nice nod to continuity but also a nice gag. Maybe in the season finale, there will be a funny scene where the sandwich just randomly appears when the characters are in the middle of something important and Gordon is like "Oh look! There's my sandwich!"

 

Maybe it distracts a bad guy at an opportune moment