The Orville of Star Trek

A comedic parody, and you think its weapon targeting subroutine might need calibration, but I say it's right on the target.

I have held up on writing about it until the official Star Trek series Discovery is aired, so I can see a parody would look like.

From the first two episodes, it already looked more or less like an actual Star Trek series to me, if you try to leave out plot holes, characters, bad jokes, and slightly low budge set designs out of the final productions.

The intro couldn't be far from the official series, it has the same style if you don't look at the ship design.  And speaking of the artistic design of the USS Orville (ECV-197), it's unique, definitely not looking like a Federation ship.

The stories, despite a few flaws, are actually quite good and grasping the concept of Star Trek, that is to bring up some challenging issues.

Here are a couple of examples.

First example, in Command Performance, the zoo of featuring less intelligent species, would that really happen?  Or is that happening in our world, just in different forms?

It might be presented in somewhat comedic fashion, but if you only focus on those bad jokes, you are definitely missing a chance to exercise your brain, to start a debate of a moral question, whether it's human's view or Calivon's.

Second, in About a Girl — I think Abort a Girl is a more suitable episode title — a species can only allow males in its society, if a female is born, which does happen, she must be corrected medically as it's morally right for the species, but in human's eyes, that's plainly wrong.

Now, the negative points.  Same in Command Performance, an unexperienced officer Lieutenant Alara Kitan (Halston Sage) has the conn and she has to disobey a direct order from an admiral after obeying it, so she could rescue her Captain Ed Mercer (Seth MacFarlane) and the first officer Commander Kelly Grayson (Adrianne Palicki).  There is nothing wrong with this plot, the problem is how it's executed and if it's the story is told in sensible way.

From what I've watched from this episode, it's forcing the story and the character to go to that direction, not completely natural, organic, or flowing.  The acting of the actress isn't good, but that's not the issue here when the script has flaws.

Same flaws in the About a Girl, during the tribunal, when Grayson tries to make a case that female is as capable as male, it's the same problem, forcing the direction, the analogy really doesn't make much of logical sense.

Settings, the universe it is in, since this is new and comedy, I really don't expect that it would have as rich backgrounds as Star Trek, but perhaps as the show goes on, it might start to build up a good world of future.

You can see a few Star Trek characters in The Orville, Issac is like Data, Worf is split into Alara and Bortus (Peter Macon), Gordon Malloy (Scott Grimes) has an excellent piloting skill and personality like Paris but without the charm.  But definitely not a character like Yaphit, which has the ability to form a long, round shape of something, such as an arm for handshake or something totally different function, which Yaphit wants to use on Dr. Claire Finn (
Penny Johnson Jerald).

The set design, let's just say the shuttle looks pretty spacious, which is not in a good way, and the mess hall, or whatever it's called in this show, a high school cafeteria might look more sci-fish.

But, this is a comedy, I can forget those when I am watching it.  It stimulates as Star Trek does, and why I like this show and will continue to watch.  I usually would skip comedy shows, but not this one, because it does have something in it.

And the most recent episode Pria featuring Charlize Theron as Captain Pria Lavesque, quite a well-done episode, despite the story isn't completely inventive, Pria is like a mix of Vash and the episode A Matter of Time in TNG, but it's very enjoyable, because I definitely was not seeing a leg coming, or missing, and falling down out of nowhere.

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