The Orville appreciation thread - IE, the actual new Star Trek

[IDanceonTrannyGraves]

Spoiler

Even if he killed them, he likely wouldn't be able to stop the others. And they were his closest friends.

True.

Spoiler

But I can't believe they told him. Ed, Kelly and Talla were the villains this episode.

 

[God of Nothing]

True.

Spoiler

But I can't believe they told him. Ed, Kelly and Talla were the villains this episode.

They really were.

 

[FatMebius]

Good episode. There's some shades of The City on the Edge of Forever here, but it's a good twist on it. Less "the Nazis will win" here and more "Well, just don't know the ramifications here, so better stick to the rules we have in place." It's nice to see the Captain make a really hard decision like that too. Janeway only killed my nigga Tuvix. Ed straight up killed a whole family.

 

[Johan Schmidt]

Those and other episodes made me glad that the show doesn't have transporters, as super science teleportation solves a lot of problems rather easily.

Transporters in Trek, and even the ones used in Stargate; were always just sidelinned anyways. It was always a case of 'we could beam them up/beam down, but the [INSERT RANDOM SCIENCE WORDS] is preventing us!'. The best example of this was the Wraith from Stargate, which entirely lacked shields. So the first time they fucked around, the SG teams just teleported nuclear bombs into their CIC's, and they found out. Next episode, the Wraith has mysteriously developed a transporter blocking energy signal.

Without transporters, it makes the show feel slightly more grounded, and also prevents the crew from looking retarded since their equipment is entirely stopped by random space dust.

 

[Crusty Ben]

Spoiler: orville + slight spoilers for SNW finale as well

Between the SNW finale and this Orville episode, I think I've had my fill of time traveling jumpsuits for a while. I'm glad the the cone thing broke in the end. Hopefully it's some time before we revisit it. I did like how it was done here though, not too heavy, not too complex.

It is funny how the themes have aligned again between SNW and Orville on around the same week. We had the hiding in a gas giant/brown dwarf thing as well a couple of weeks ago right? Are we running out of sci-fi tropes?

 

[Atlas Sneezed]

Goddamit, I never would've thought McFarlane would ruffle my feathers this way. This episode hit way to close to home. It's like in season 4 he dropped the comedy, and like others said, tries to present both sides in a TNG like fashion, but in each instance it takes the wrong answer because of liberal views. Not woke, but still liberal.

If that was the trade, I'd rather have the comedy back. Now I hate the main characters, and I liked them up to this episode.

Spoiler

Mercer gets to pine for his autistic demonspawn, but aborts a perfectly happy family because of temporal rules of unknown consequences. Fuck off

 

[Stoneheart]

Transporters in Trek, and even the ones used in Stargate; were always just sidelinned anyways. It was always a case of 'we could beam them up/beam down, but the [INSERT RANDOM SCIENCE WORDS] is preventing us!'. The best example of this was the Wraith from Stargate, which entirely lacked shields. So the first time they fucked around, the SG teams just teleported nuclear bombs into their CIC's, and they found out. Next episode, the Wraith has mysteriously developed a transporter blocking energy signal.

Stargate sg1 used teleporters way better, but i dont see your problem with the wraith signal jamming a teleporter.

 

[Johan Schmidt]

Stargate sg1 used teleporters way better, but i dont see your problem with the wraith signal jamming a teleporter.

No problem with it. I was just saying that even in shows where they have transporters, most of the time they work in ways to move them out of the way, because it does ruin storytelling when you have the power to just teleport away if there is danger.

 

[Gimmick Account]

I don't understand why they went to talk to him in the first place. If they were gonna refuel and it was always an option to finish the trip, there's no practical or ethical difference between going back in time in one or two jumps; in fact you can only possibly create a moral issue IF you decide to contact the guy during your stopover--independently of his whole family backstory which they would have been ignorant of, you're still creating a dilemma out of finishing the trip to save the guy who sent the message ASAP versus a version whose been presumably tortured for a decade by a virtual timeline you weren't there to preserve anyway.

Even if they weren't sure if they could refuel... then they wouldn't be in a position to help. Cross that bridge then. You have a fucking time machine, there's no rush.

Spoiler

Mercer gets to pine for his autistic demonspawn, but aborts a perfectly happy family because of temporal rules of unknown consequences. Fuck off

I know it's not intentional but it's almost felt like a theme this season that he creates more problems than he solves by being a nutless indecisive captain with no sense of authority, so I'm not even holding him to a usual standard. Like him and the bimbo compensating by teaming up to kick around the ginger bridge gimp just feels perfectly in-character.

 

[Crescent Fresh]

This 100% could have been an unintended oversight, and Ed and Kelly definitely were pieces of shit this episode (compare last week when they went against orders just for Topa’s surgery), yet there’s an out given by the time travel logic the show talks about.

Spoiler

When they get back to 2015, it wsn’t a bullseye. They arrived a month after Gordon time traveled.

Yet, Gordon only sent the message and the coordinates six months after arriving. They created a time paradox and a new timeline, and the other Gordon still lives.

No idea whether this could ever be followed up on, yet it’s there.

I don't understand why they went to talk to him in the first place. If they were gonna refuel and it was always an option to finish the trip, there's no practical or ethical difference between going back in time in one or two jumps; in fact you can only possibly create a moral issue IF you decide to contact the guy during your stopover--independently of his whole family backstory which they would have been ignorant of, you're still creating a dilemma out of finishing the trip to save the guy who sent the message ASAP versus a version whose been presumably tortured for a decade by a virtual timeline you weren't there to preserve anyway.

Even if they weren't sure if they could refuel... then they wouldn't be in a position to help. Cross that bridge then. You have a fucking time machine, there's no rush.


I know it's not intentional but it's almost felt like a theme this season that he creates more problems than he solves by being a nutless indecisive captain with no sense of authority, so I'm not even holding him to a usual standard. Like him and the bimbo compensating by teaming up to kick around the ginger bridge gimp just feels perfectly in-character.

Imagine if they didn’t seek him out over the stopover as part of protocol, yet by insane coincidence, the highest concentration of the thing they needed to refuel happened to be in the same town he moved to, or something else that ends up with an encounter that never should happen, and it’s a big moral thing over whether or not to erase it.

Instead, it’s “one side is 100% right, fuck those three.”

 

[Stoneheart]

I was just saying that even in shows where they have transporters, most of the time they work in ways to move them out of the way,

well it was a very logical was of ending the Teleporting nukes. they didnt just forget about it like trek does all of the time.
It has been a known problem in trek for some time, even roddenberry knew it and fixed it in Andromeda.

I dont think the Orville had any Stargate influence. Stargate was fucking funny, atleast the OG series.

 

[Gimmick Account]

Imagine if they didn’t seek him out over the stopover as part of protocol, yet by insane coincidence, the highest concentration of the thing they needed to refuel happened to be in the same town he moved to, or something else that ends up with an encounter that never should happen, and it’s a big moral thing over whether or not to erase it.

Yeah exactly, it wouldn't take much at all since it'd be a total non-coincidence for the guy who can build and perfectly aim a hyperspace communicator from whatever was in his pockets and coconuts to go where the time travel fuel is.

The total lack of effort in bothering to even try justifying plot contrivance is one of my major complaints this season. This one wasn't nearly as bad as the characters plodding unquestioningly between scenes in the not-Q episode but fuck, it takes 10 cunting seconds to make your story hang together logically when you're writing in a genre where you can make up science words and space law at will.

 

[40 Year Old Boomer]

Spoiler

The big takeaway I got from this episode is that Ed and Kelly have never truly felt love, only infatuation. Gordon's reaction at the end of "how could I be so selfish?" also flabbergasted me. Bug the biggest crime is that they weren't three months late and having the egg salad sandwich pop back up to at least lighten the mood a little at the end of a heavy episode. That damn thing better show up in a later episode and have consequences of some kind.

 

[Stabmaster Arson]

Spoiler

The big takeaway I got from this episode is that Ed and Kelly have never truly felt love, only infatuation. Gordon's reaction at the end of "how could I be so selfish?" also flabbergasted me. Bug the biggest crime is that they weren't three months late and having the egg salad sandwich pop back up to at least lighten the mood a little at the end of a heavy episode. That damn thing better show up in a later episode and have consequences of some kind.

Spoiler

Irritatingly, they will probably explain it by saying the machine is broken.

 

[khaine]

Man, that was a great episode. Low stakes

the new episode is very very good.

Spoiler: spoiler

i realy liked what they did with time travel, very personal, low stakes, brutal on an emotional level without burning a character and the ending was just perfect with the way they went back to the future.

++

This was a fantastic episode. I loved that it was low stakes, and yet so powerful.

 

[Gimmick Account]

Spoiler

Bug the biggest crime is that they weren't three months late and having the egg salad sandwich pop back up to at least lighten the mood a little at the end of a heavy episode.

I initially thought that sandwich was gonna be the crux of some actual science fiction, riffing on trek time loops by creating a predestination paradox that'd make it impossible to die in the attack or something, but nope.
Apparently unimportant just like the major attack on a secret highly important research facility and all the people who died on their sister ships (I think some blew up anyway, I always get distracted by thinking about how ugly they look when there's more than on screen) that the characters and chain of command immediately stopped caring about.

 

[Quantum Diabetes]

Fun Scott Grimes fact: I was running that “sound recognition” app for reasons and it thinks that him screeching like Steve from American dad was a cat.

 

[Stab You in the Back]

Finally got caught up with the new episodes.

I said it before and I'll say it again: Klyden did nothing wrong.

Poor guy is trying to raise his kid right and this fucking bitch keeps trying to indoctrinate him into getting a sex change. Its fucking sick. Then they all do an illegal surgery on the kid and why Klyden tries to stop it, he gets assault by the robot. This shit is almost as bad as when Kelly and Ed erased Gordon's two kids from existence.

The Union are villains this season.

 

[MembersSchoolPizza]

So, something that occurs to me is...

Spoiler

It may be nothing, or it may be Chekov's Gun territory, but we're told early in this episode that they are pretty sure timelines are deterministic based on observer will. The whole reason Gordon landed in 2015 to begin with.

When it's fading to black, Gordon says that their family's love is stronger than time. And remember, they didn't go back to the future with the time travel McGuffin.

I'm wondering if the alternate-reality Gordon survived. Possibly went deeper underground to try to avoid showing up in history... But also possibly left some legacy. Starting up a secret think tank to solve the Kaylon problem, or something.

Maybe I'm just a hopeless romantic.

Also...

Finally got caught up with the new episodes.

I said it before and I'll say it again: Klyden did nothing wrong.

Poor guy is trying to raise his kid right and this fucking bitch keeps trying to indoctrinate him into getting a sex change. Its fucking sick. Then they all do an illegal surgery on the kid and why Klyden tries to stop it, he gets assault by the robot.

Yeah, just like those monsters who pushed Brenda Reimer into getting a sex change, right?

 

[Saint Agustin]

I believe that Gordon still has his life in 2025 and that there is now 3 parallel timelines: one where Gordon doesn't time travel, another where he does and is stranded and the third where they got it back.

The only string is the ship, the only atemporal thing that is.

They were really clever to show the picture of Gordon's family at the end of the scene without vanishing or any of that, making a wink that this is a parallel universe.

And I say this because

A-logs The end of the episode show Gordon back in the Orvile in present time.

B- it would have created a time paradox to interact with Gordon if in the future they went to the past to retrieve him, making his whole family paradoxically.

C- At the end the only thing that changed its temporal space time location was the ship, not the characters, so therefor we can infer the tether for every time causality was the ship (making Gordon an unwilling, yet contrived time travel passanger)


D- nothing of note really happened and nothing really advanced in the story. Not even the relationship with Isaac and Charly or even Time Permanent Gordon.

E- Quantum Time Theory actually believes in time paradoxes that serves a purpose to advence certain threads of time, if you will. Where you need the paradox otherwise you wouldn't be able to create the paradox in the first place. In that instance it creates a parallel timelines where the creators and the suplicants interfere for a brief period so they can untangle the paradox, yet firmly establishing it, creating two or three anachronistic variables at the same time, where both exists and don't exist relatively to each other.

F- The Sandwich didn't showed up. This is the biggest one, where the Chekhov's Gun didn't came back and we know it should. The current timeline is the one where Gordon ate the sandwich.

Gordon's Family are still present in a separate timeline, the one where they never went back to get it and he died on earth in the past.