Still not sure I buy the reasoning that Alara had to leave: they have artificial gravity onboard, so how much work would it be to set up a higher grav room for her to do a workout every day?
That was exactly what they did for her at the end, they found a way to set up an area of stronger gravity in the simulator, but she decided to go back to Xelaya to be with her family instead.
Screenrant is really not much more than clickbait - it's in that gray zone with shit like comicbookmovie.com, where everything they publish is late and third-hand but they make a big fucking deal out of it.
Zap2It.com isn't a bad site for following reasonably detailed, specific daily ratings figures.
The Orville has at least three things going for it that make at least one more season likely - the first is the much discussed 14 million dollar tax incentive that brings the cost of the show down considerably, the second is the network's relationship with MacFarlane (the impact of which is honestly fairly limited, I'd think) and the third is that Fox owns the show. It was the fifth best performing show on the network overall last season, so we'll have to wait and see how it does this year in that context.
An article I read the other day also said that it does have good on demand/streaming numbers.
It's fun to see the effects of gravity on Solea, but it would have been nice if they worked harder to visually distinguish it. I'm sure in the hands of a human that grass is lead razorblades. But I wish they'd worked a little harder to make all the trees and such look a little more like they were surviving in super gravity instead of just letting us use imaginations that all those things are just way tougher than they look.
Also can't help but feel geographic features should be a little flatter? Buildings should maybe have more support columns?
It's a scifi show on a planet with super gravity and they made it look just like Earth so we had to use our imaginations that everything was actually way stronger and tougher, instead of using it as an opportunity to imagine the visual implications of that gravity. Seems like a waste of the genre.
Also now I'm hoping Gates McFadden and Alex Siddig somehow show up playing Soleans.
It's Xelaya and Xelayan.
I have mixed thoughts.
The Alara stuff was very sweet. A nice send off (which I hope is not really the end).
I still have the sense of...meandering. Three episodes in and I really don’t feel like anything has happened. Not every week needs to be an “out of this world adventure”, but I feel the momentum from Season One has slowed a bit.
Next week looks like a more “conventional” episode, so we’ll see.
PS: That soup scene...yikes!
I'm almost starting to feel like we've gotten a bit of false advertising so far. All Seth talked about in the promotional interviews was how much bigger the episodes were going to be, and how there was going be a ton of action this season, but these first three episode have all been fairly small scale, with very little action. I've been enjoying them, but they definitely don't feel like what he was talking about there. Maybe they just saved the budget on these early episodes so they'd have more for bigger episodes later. Next week's definitely looks like a bigger action heavy episode.
I loved this one, some nice character work for Alara building to a nice farewell, and a nice bit of action with her and her family being held captive. The whole cast really did a great job here, it was especially fun seeing Robert Picardo and John Billingsley. The scene with the sauce was done perfectly, it seemed nice enough at first, but the menace built up until Cambis force Ildis to put his hand in the sauce.
I like animals, and sci-fi creatures so I liked the scenes with the Xelayan horse creature. both Solana petting the one on the beach, and Alara's fantasy.
I was a bit surprised they had Alara go back to the ship, and then go back home again, but I guess they must have wanted to give everybody else a chance to say goodbye.
I loved the jar of pickles at the end.
