this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
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Put me in the "like it don't love it" camp. It is very clearly Seth MacFarlane's love letter to 90s trek, pulled some good ideas from that era's writers, and has more heart than it seems in the first couple of episodes. Some of the character work is actually quite touching, and it seems like they're having fun with the show, so it's rarely a slog. Overall though, it is way too uneven to be great or even really good.
Seth is not a great actor, and several members of the cast are MUCH worse than him, like "low-end dinner theater" bad. The set design, costume, and prosthetics are pretty weak, and Seth's sense of humor just doesn't work for me, so in a context where he's trying to find the right balance with a Star Trek show, it hits even more awkwardly. It's also very specifically SETH MACFARLANE'S love letter to Star Trek, so there's way too much emphasis on 1980-2000 American pop culture, and I say that as someone who's only a few years younger than him. It's distracting how narrow the set of references are in a show that traffics in them so liberally.
There's also something just a bit off about the messaging of many of the more serious episodes, like Seth feels a need to come down on a definitive answer to the moral questions that come up. I dunno, I am having trouble recollecting specific scenes, but it's a lingering feeling I have. I almost imagine 20-something Seth in a dorm room at RISD screaming at Picard that he should have just shot that Romulan!
I definitely agree about the messaging. The Orville's idea of social commentary is: here's some aliens that built their society around a thing we don't like for no reason, they're total dicks for no reason, therefore the thing is bad.
The Moclan gender issue has been praised as an allegory for trans and intersex issues. But my problem with it is it ONLY works as an allegory. Their society makes no sense at all taken at face value, and has been portrayed inconsistently depending on what point the writers want to make. Why would a naturally hermaphroditic species adopt the human concepts of "male" and "female" in the first place?
I do like the show. It's entertaining, and a sincere attempt to recreate what worked about Star Trek in a way that Disc and Picard weren't. But the social commentary is just not well done. The Orville writers aren't visionaries or philosophers on the same level as the classic Trek writers.