Spoilers THE ORVILLE S1, E12: "MAD IDOLATRY" - SEASON FINALE

The would depend where you lived. Bronze Age Egyptian wall paintings show people of various races.

 

Yeah, it depends a bit on the local geography. Some Mediterranean cultures traded widely across sea lanes and could be surprisingly cosmopolitan.

 

Yeah, but this was people from every race. There was a white person, a black person, an Asian-looking person, groups of people who'd be living on completely different sides of the planet. Egyptians may have encountered other olive-skinned people, white people, and dark-skinned people. But it's unlikely they encountered many black people.

 

Uh, have you ever looked at a map?

 

I'm gonna leave this here

 

Treker4747's point, if the casting matters at all, isn't entirely unobservant. That little group looked more like the inhabitants of an isolated rural village somewhere - probably seeing like, a dozen strangers in a decade - than like traders. Very rough, basic dress and equipage.

The episode seems to be a little vague about any notion of what the "Bronze Age" was, other than being a long time ago. These folks go from there to a 14-century culture in 700 years.

 

True. As a isolated rural community they probably should be more homogeneous.(but that's not true of Egypt) But Orville seems to play by Doctor Who rules.

 

You know, I don't think they should get back together. If the show decides to tease them getting back together for years then finally does it I will be disappointed. I am rooting for them both to meet someone else and move on.

For people of radically different skin tones to be together in the Bronze Age I guess what's necessary is for people from different latitudes to have migrated recently then gotten along better than humans. That's perfectly plausible.

One of the two Trek episodes this episode remixed just won a voting game on the Voyager board. Gotta give Orville writers credit, they know the right episodes to copy.

 

Moonlighting was a lot of fun when it was teasing a relationship between Maddy and Dave, but it fell apart badly when it finally happened.

 

So is it time to start crying "SJW's shoving diversity in my face?!" yet?

 

Allowing that premise, selection shouldn't be difficult. Orville likes to do broad, high concept science fiction stories. Those are rarer than hen's teeth in modern Trek.

 

Nomadism was still quite extensive during the Bronze Age. There is no reason why people of different complexions could not encounter one another (although some combinations would be more likely than others).

 

I honestly didnt care what the bronze age aliens looked like.. they WERE aliens to us anyways, so they could look like whatever the casting department/writers/art and design team wanted them to.

I didn't even notice the variation in race/skin color at that point in the show until it was mentioned here. I was immersed in the story, where the writers and producers wanted me to be. The variances in race in the cast was not the point of any of that episode.

 

Given the current political climate, I think I'm inclined to prefer diverse casting over scientifically plausible...

 

I'm not going to put down a message show because I disagree with the message. I will say I found this to be far better than WHO WATCHES THE WATCHERS for the fact it's actually a good deal less condescending to the people who are on the planet. The idea that "native people" aren't so incredibly stupid that they were "warped" or "contaminated" by Kelly and would have built their own religion is a better message than "They're teetering on the verge of going back to superstition!"

 

To be fair, aren't they kind of different premises in that regard? We don't really know how far along the civilization that Kelly interacts with is, but isn't it possible that they were mostly done with religion until a miracle fell into their laps?

I guess the only evidence we have to the contrary is that the future versions of the aliens say "If it hadn't been Kelly it would have been someone else." But isn't that a little bit like Darulio(sp) suggesting that Kelly cheating on her husband with him was involuntary? Telling people what they want/need to hear?

 

One word - Nubians. A.K.A. "The Black Pharaohs".

X-Files kinda went there too with a somewhat ham-fisted Mulder/Scully ship. For some reason, it seems to rarely work out in genre television.

 

I kind of liked the way Northern Exposure escaped it. When Joel and Maggie finally had sex, they expected the rest of the characters to make a big deal about it in the show's typical fourth-wall-breaking style. They were met with universal indifference.

 

This series sort of presents us with a different way of having to watch the show, you have to watch with a much more.... "Metaphorical" bend. You have to watch it sort of like you'd watch TOS, you have to not try and take things too literally and not think about them too much lest the entire thing falls apart. "Should the Stars Appear...", "Majority Rule," and this one all have fractures in their frames that if you poke at too much you're going to collapse it.

So, we have to watch the show with in mind the allegory they want to gives us to say something about our own society and culture. TOS did episodes with aliens being Nazis, 1920s gangsters, religious fanatics and a planet full of children. There's all kinds of really goofy stuff in there that doesn't hold up to scrutiny when you think of this as a "space show with people seeing aliens." I mean, a society finds a book from Earth, left behind by a visitor, and they base their entire society around mob/gangster tropes? It's kind of silly but you're not supposed to read into it that much and just take the allegory being sold.

So that's what we have here. We're seeing a story showing the progression of religion, from some event happening to primitive people, to Theocratic dictatorships, to present-day events with wars and battles over secularism. It's illogical that this society would have taken pretty much this exact path to the point where one of their nations, seemingly, has an America-like freedom- of religion stance to the point religion being in public schools is seen as a problem. Hell, it's illogical that everyone just assumed this planet at some point would achieve space travel. Who's to say they wouldn't destroy themselves on the way there? Or that the planet would've have had an ELE with an asteroid or something?

Don't rummage the details, you have to take the allegory they pitching.

 

^Actually, while watching the episode I wondered whether it would end with the civilization destroying itself.