THE ORVILLE: S1, E7: "MAJORITY RULE"

No fun.

 

Yeah, but it's such an obvious solution I had to wonder why they didn't at least try. I mean, they could always have given it a shot and failed, and then resorted to the strategy they used.

 

That gets into a whole different plotline though. If the vote can be hacked, then the whole system isn't really "majority rule" it's being run by the equivalent of Russian hackers. I think it would muddy up the core message of the episode too much.

 

I think that would've ruined the metaphorical angle they were going for.

Think of it like this: How many times in the last few years have we seen a YouTube video go viral of someone doing something insensitive, dumb, mean or whatever but also something that, ultimately, doesn't matter only for in the wake to have that person's life shaken up or even ruined? A guy goes through a Chick-Fil-A drive thru and is an ass towards the clerk, video goes viral, and he ends up losing his job and having his whole life shaken up. A kid films himself using a ball retriever as a light saber, video goes ultra-viral, and the kid pretty much had his life utterly shattered and ruined and it took him several years to fully recover from it emotionally and to come out on top.

This kind of crap happens all of the time, some story breaks or video goes viral about someone being an ass and they're suddenly flooded with death threats and have their job threatened. It really is a case that if you could give a person's Facebook profile a "down vote" you'd see it skyrocket in the wake of some meaningless event, counter that you'd likely see it soar if you encounter someone doing something kind, cute, or whatever. (Though, I'm not sure if in this analogy it'd correct a misdeed like it does in the show.) A lot said in this episode of just the "social stigmata" a person can get from doing something and having it captured and broadcast for the world to see. One lapse in judgment or little mistake can ruin someone's life. Not to the point of being lobotomized, but, come on, people are quick to say such a person should suffer in some manner for being a bit of an ass it's not too far-fetched if such things were possible.

A lot to be said in this episode and works nicely as an allegory to our lives today.

It's interesting to me that some of these episodes almost feel like "Voyager Episodes" just something about the tone and look of them feels a lot like Voyager but, somehow, this show is pulling it off and getting away with the light-hearted and meaningless episodic fluff more than Voyager could, the characters here are also -I feel- a lot more likable in some regards.

Again, good episode with quite a bit to say in such a simple little story, another with a somewhat "tragic" occurrence (the death of one of the "operatives" and the uncorrectable lobotomization of the other) in it.

We do see in this episode there does seem to be "something" of a "Prime Directive" like thing here on the Admirality having to allow a ship to reveal itself to the population and them determining if a population is "advanced" enough to accept it. It's not a cold, hard, line since Mercer so easily skirted it by brining up the barista girl, but there does seem to be something of a process here for dealing with primitive planets.

I wonder, it wasn't clear in the episode, but do the "Down Votes" ever get reversed? Because, even though it doesn't matter for him, Lamar being a couple votes away from the procedure I'd hardly consider a win if a couple more taps on the badge gets him the lobotomy. I wondered if "Up Votes" negated the "Down Votes", every "yes" takes away a negative or something, but maybe the only way for a vote to get reversed is for a down-voter to vote up? But then how would the badge know who is placing the vote? Perhaps the downs fade away on their own as time passes?

I dunno, good episode, though.

 

This was the best Star Trek episode I've seen in a long time. I've got to say they are doing a good job with this series, better than I had originally hoped for.

 

Oh, and I'm happy that Lamar got a "focus" episode finally. It looks like Dr. Finn will next week as well (though I have no idea from the trailer what that episode will be). So far Isaac and (arguably) Malloy are the only characters who haven't gotten their own individual episode to shine in.

 

Did anybody catch the tag line at the end? Looked like it said "Based on...." and was gone before I could make it out.

 

It's Planet Reddit.

So when do we get to hear Bortus sing?

 

Hard to say. It didn't look as if the up-votes negated the down-votes; during LaMarr's final vote, his up-votes were climbing rapidly, but the down-votes were still going up, albeit more slowly. As for them fading away, maybe, but certainly not quickly. Remember the middle-aged woman at the cafe with over 500,000 down-votes, claiming she had received most of them in her 20s? Of course, we don't know just how many she got way-back-when, so it's possible the number may have declined. Actually, that would fit the metaphor: as time passes, any particular scandal tends to diminish in peoples' memories.

 

I thought it was an excellent episode. Had to rewind and check to see if I was watching the right show before the intro.
*On a side note, my second post since 2006. Jeesh the ultimate lurker I guess.

 

Does anyone watch Black Mirror?

 

The planet may have an extreme social structure, but at least it seems like a person can make a pretty nice living as a barista.

 

OMG! Two words: Black Mirror

Seth MacFarlane must have really liked that episode on Netflix that he decided to copy the concept. But he can be forgiven since this show is as good as Trek.

 

The episode got better as it went, but I still thought it was still a bit too "On the Nose" for my tastes. Still, I thought Lamar shined and I'm glad we got an episode about him, even if it wasn't really much character development.

 

I suppose the voting system was more incredibly difficult to hack than the public feed. Remember, they had very little time and they wanted to leave the tiniest footprint as possible. As the publicist said, none had never recovered from a 9,000,000 score, so it is reasonable that they checked the voting system after the surprising outcome.

 

Great episode this week. This reminds me much more of a Doctor Who episode. LaMarr is like the companion imprisoned by a bizarro world visited by the Doctor. The world depicted in this episode of Orville with the voting system is the kind of world you would see in the new Doctor Who. It's surreal and metaphorical at the same time. Even the solution which included showing the Tardis to a "local" and learning from her and using the system to his advantage could have been concocted by the Doctor.

 

I... upvoted this episode.

Yeah I know, 15 Million Credits, Nosedive and Meow Meow Beanz, but this is a similar concept done as a fun TOS style show.

 

So, everyone's doing stories about gossip, Internet Outrage and the abuses of social media?

Imagine that.

Star Trek can't do this stuff at all well any more, because shows like this only work and are entertaining if the parallels to our world are so close that TPTB fret about whether they're breaking the show's plausibility in some trivial way.

 

I've never seen Black Mirror (not even what it is), but from what I've read elsewhere, McFarlane wrote this episode over a year ago, long before the other aired.

 

This show is peaking at the good (****) level for me. This was good. There was a lot going on in this episode. It wasn't just the Facebook Planet or a hybrid of "The Return of the Archons" and "First Contact." It was a quick encapsulation of the problems with both pure democracy and relativism generally. It was also a direct criticism of the world we have today, by its observation that this planet closely resembles 21st century Earth. I really liked the end: instead of voting in ignorance over a matter that was peripheral to her own life, she shut off the feed (Feed) and went about her day, taking a small step towards improving their world.

I can't express exactly what is keeping this down from the excellent tier for me. With respect to this one episode, part of it is just how stupid LaMarr was. It's obligatory stuff it seems to get the ball rolling.... Maybe Seth knows something I don't. I would have gone for something more subtle as the infraction, but then I would have totally missed the opportunity to have J Lee grinding what looked like an uptight white puritanical nightmare of a woman. Gosh, when I put it that way, it does sound excellent....