THE ORVILLE S2, E5: "ALL THE WORLD IS BIRTHDAY CAKE"

"If you're wondering how they eat and breathe, or other science facts..."

 

I imagine the Orville pitch went like this:

Seth: I want to do a homage to Star Trek the Next Generation.

Fox Exec: Yes, we'd love a Star Trek parody by you.

Seth: No, I don't mean a parody. I mean an actual serious sci-fi show.

Fox Exec: With dick and fart jokes.

Seth: What....is the difference between the budgets between doing it that way and my way?

Fox Exec: Million bucks an episode and guaranteed four seasons versus.....cancellation after six episodes

Seth: Family Guy Trek it is.

 

I'm going with "something, something Universal Translator." Whatever they're calling their planet it in their language it's coming out as Rebar II through whatever device our crew has that translates languages for them.

 

I haven't watched the entire episode yet, but I don't care for this replacement. I think her voice is annoying. Hopefully, she's just keeping Alara's seat warm for this season.

 

I've got to find this interview that MacFarlane did where he said that Fox surprised him by how receptive they were to this - the execs told him that they had already been looking to develop a property in this area.

A lot's made of his "strong relationship" with Fox, but the fact remains that this show is massively more expensive going in than any TV project they've backed him on before.

 

I was pretty sure that was going to be the new Chief of Security's solution. After all, she came up with it as she was looking outside the window... She should have seen the stars were different. The solution seemed silly, particularly given the altitude at which the sail was placed.

However, finding a black hole and uncovering why someone is believing in such a thing is always fascinating. And it's possible that they tried explaining relative star positions, and were assumed liar-ish or engaging in gish gallop by the prefect, because of the failing negotiations beforehand – it's very difficult to argue against something this idiotic. If something is so obviously false, arguments against it – let alone ones that would work – don't come easy.

The episode was otherwise absolutely exciting. See what you can do if you drop the General Order 1 crap, and use First Contact rules to make the story more exciting, rather than deliberately pissing on half of the storyline opportunities from the start.

Still can't believe the nerve these people had to arrest aliens over this. The episode would have been even better if their alien status had a bit more prominence, and there was more conflict between the two, Borthus seen as scarier, internal conflict over locking up aliens, the guy in charge at the camp sweating when he's alone because he's playing tough dickwad with aliens now.

Overall, this was great.

 

I don't know. When the basic story makes as little sense as this one did it's hard for the plot details to track well.

If a story works for me I don't usually nitpick it....

...and if a story doesn't work for me, unless I'm furious about it I don't usually nitpick it. It's not worthwhile. I've got big complaints about STD for example, but for the most part I don't care about the details of plot logic because if something fails big the rest is just bookkeeping. I did have a question last week about something that passed between Pike and Michael, but I wasn't looking to condemn the show on the basis of that scene. I just wondered about it. Maybe because the episode, while uninteresting, wasn't incompetently bad.

 

I do appreciate the absence of Roddenberry Rules like the PD, every fucking week.

On the subject of why the Regarians hated that constellation, I was guessing that something had come from that direction that had really damaged them. That would still have been a stretch, but I'd have personally found it a bit more plausible.

 

My thinking was that something heinous happened on the planet around the time the star collapsed, like one night back in the dark ages a citizen went nuts and started slaughtering his neighbors, and he was some huge farm boy so it took about ten of the local magistrate's men to wrestle the sucker to the ground, and as everyone is catching their breath and surveying the blood and carnage in this guy's wake, somebody thinks to look up and cries out: "Look! Up in the sky! A star has disappeared from Gilliac!" And then a witness who knew the murderer cries out: "Gasp! He was born Gilliac!" Then everybody goes "AIEEEE!" and the persecution begins.

And I realize how silly that seems even as I type it, but all of Astrology is silly, which is the crew's argument this episode.

 

Alara Kitan, whose plan to rescue Ed and Kelly had her acting as a sarcastic dog?
Alara Kitan, who at gun point, says that Kelly is "shiny and gross--have you heard of combination skin?"
Alara Kitan, who gifted Ed a jar of pickles, a symbol of his needs and deficiencies?

 

This is why you never skip the months of spying on new planets!

I guess this week the manatees came back with First Contact and Justice.

 

I enjoy the fact that the Planetary Union doesn't take the absolutist position toward the acceptability of interaction with new and troublesome cultures that the Trek knock-on shows did. It relates better to our world and offers more story potential than Trek does.

 

I'm not so sure about that.

Knowing many people deeply convinced in their astrological beliefs, and openly judging everyone they know by them, the story felt right to me as extrapolation of what might happen if that caught on and intensified, and as a mirror of what our own prejudices – historical and current – may look to outsiders. In that regard, it helped that it was completely ridiculous, unjustified, had no sensible explanation, and at first completely confusing as to what the hell was going on. Were they prejudiced against people of natural birth? Birth date? What on Earth?

I'm not saying the details we witnessed were realistic, but if the black hole formed before worldwide sea travel, causing multiple corners of their world to develop similar beliefs independently, only to reinforce them once they met, then they increased throughout history, and finally they had their Hitler win their equivalent of WW2... Maybe their trauma wasn't much trauma, as much as denial of what they were doing to the people they were locking up for no reason, and we were barely decades after that war had ended.

And the Orville crew didn't find any of that because it gradually got worse in their historical books, and they altered the historical record to fit the current worldview. The part where the Orville were reviewing their history, however, felt most off to me out of the whole thing.

 

That ending was just kind of lazy.

Lighting up a big lamp in the sky would not fool a civilization with modern telescopes. They would be a biiit suspicious when they try to measure the distance and notice in six months there's no wobble. At most they got the Jilliaks out of prison for a couple months and guaranteed they'd be violently recaptured later.

And there's the question to why the Union doesn't do the same research before contact that the Federation does. It seems like something like that should probably happen at almost every first contact without that step.

 

At the very least, the light shouldn't have been in low orbit. That was... stupid.

That said, if my interpretation is what's happening – there's denial about the atrocious treatment of those people, coupled with resistance to change – they wouldn't be going back to locking those people up. They used the new star as an excuse to change their ways, doesn't mean they'll change them back the moment they realise what's really up. At the very least, they'd find themselves in actual debate before they do go back – the very thing that was missing here. And more than a handful of officials would be party to the conversation this time around. (Am I giving them too much credit?)

 

A lot of "ifs" in there.

 

Overall not a bad episode. I like their first contact protocols aren't like tng but closer to tos type. The idea that they've got to get there before the krill makes sense.

 

What an exciting episode that would make.
"A civilization is reaching out into space for the first time."
"A potential first contact? I'd better get started writing up the paperwork and submit it to HQ so they can begin the deep cover investigation into the planet before proper contact can be made in a few years. Kelly, you have the bridge."

 

Unfortunately, no. That's not what the story was about. It was essentially a rehash of the religion episode where Kelly Grayson became a goddess. To me, it was a missed opportunity to introduce a pre-warp civilization into the wonders of the vast and populated universe. Instead we got a "religion/astrology is a detriment to society" plot.

 

That'a not a story.

A story is a problem, ideally a substantial problem that's deeply important to the protagonist.

Within that definition are good stories and bad stories.