The Orville and What it Isn't

I'd like to take a moment to talk about Seth MacFarlane's television show, The Orville.  I've written about this a couple times on Twitter and Facebook, but somehow it keeps coming up so I'm going to nail down my problems with it here so I can link it in the future and not have to re-hash my same arguments.  I've yet to come across a meaningful refutation of any of my points - hopefully putting all my thoughts in one place will present a more organized point for rebuttal.

To be perfectly fair, I gave this show only 3 episodes before I quit.  Upon initial review, I actually really enjoyed the third episode, entitled About a Girl.  But the first two episodes were basically garbage to me, and it didn't take me long to realize that, despite some smoke and mirrors, the third episode was more of the same.

So, starting at the first episode, the show is just extremely shallow.  The whole gimmick is built on this very old "wife is caught cheating on husband because he works too much" shtick.  The only way that they tried to add any kind of twist to it was to have the alien ejaculate some kind of spore when they were caught.  Which... really didn't change anything.  It was very cookie cutter.  The relationship MacFarlane's character has with his ex-wife through the rest of the run is predictably boring comedy moments of being forced into a confined space with your ex-wife.

The other characters have interesting designs, as do the ships.  In fact, to the show's credit the design is a love letter to Star Trek: The Next Generation (which is MacFarlane's favorite Star Trek, despite his appearance in Enterprise).  But as characters they are, strictly speaking, just more tropes thrown together to make a predictable comedy crew.

I'm not even editing these gifs, it just does it to itself.

This is not to say that the actors don't do a good job of being funny - they are, basically, entertaining to watch.  But there's no nuance to anything.  Everything feels very bare bones, and it kind of feels like maybe that's because MacFarlane doesn't let or encourage the actors to find anything interesting about their characters outside of the written tropes.

I don't really even remember the story of the first episode aside from MacFarlane's character being assigned his ex-wife as a first officer and it turns out she doesn't hate him.  That's how bland it is.  I can remember the first episodes of every Star Trek series, regardless of quality, because the adventures themselves pushed limits.  Which is what The Orville should have been doing.  But I'll come back to that later.

The second episode is a very classic "human zoo" scenario.  And who are the two characters that are placed in close quarters captivity to increase the drama and hilarity?  If you guessed that it was the captain and his ex-wife, you're correct, Scooby Doo.  It was the captain and his ex-wife.  There was sort of, kind of, almost a decent story in there about the struggles of command.  But it didn't really push any boundaries, either, and I think this is largely because the characters are just empty comedy shells to funnel jokes through.

So then we come around to the third episode.  About a Girl.  Any time I bring this up as a point of contention, people like to assume it's because I'm trans.  Because the little girl ends up being assigned male at birth.  I'm not gonna lie, I ugly cried after watching the episode because of the decision of that council.

But let's look more carefully at the episode.  The cracks become very obvious very quickly if you apply any sense of logic to it.  The Moclan people in the show are depicted as having only one gender (presumably only one sex as well).  They call this gender male, likely for ease of understanding to the audience, and because the designers elected to create the character as masculine rather than a nonbinary androgynous alien.  Okay, that's... a choice.  Nothing really inherently wrong with it because science fiction does have to remain accessible.

The Moclan character, LtCdr Bortus (played by Peter Macon), lays an egg which hatches into a child that does not, presumably, conform to traditional Moclan anatomy.  They label this anatomical abnormality "female."  Okay... accessibility... but... actually that doesn't make too much sense.  What would female even be for a species that, presumably, only sees this anatomical abnormality once every 75 years?

Often the decision of whether or not to reassign the infant surgically (in the context of this episode) is tossed up as a trans issue.  I'd like to point out that... no, it isn't.  Not in the way that they're talking about it.  It's actually an intersex issue.  The IS community really does need more light shed on this subject, and it would have been a really good idea to explore the ethics involved in a debate that is far more common for IS people than it is for trans folk.  Because you can't discover if you're trans until later in life - but doctors do usually identify IS children at birth.  And, as a result, there have been a lot of gender reassignment surgeries done on the spot.  On babies.

Way.

I don't think the writers really knew they were writing about an IS issue, though.  Because the debate shifted from whether or not you should perform surgery on an otherwise healthy infant very quickly to whether or not it is okay to be a woman.  And somehow the Moclans don't... like... women?  Even though they don't have them.  Maybe they've seen other women from other planets and...

...I don't know, it just doesn't seem very plausible to me that that's the reason the whole species dislikes the female gender.  Especially because in a big galaxy fully of all kinds of organisms, you're going to encounter more than two genders.  They don't address any of that nuance at all.  We stay focused on the binary male/female dynamic, and the debate is from the theoretically progressive humans/everyone else and the repressive Moclan.

So the "creative solution" here is to trick LtCdr Bortus into watching the old Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer cartoon from Earth so that he understands that sometimes differences make someone special.  (Again this is not a trans-specific thing - anyone can be different for any number of reasons).  When that works, they host a trial a la To Kill a Mockingbird.  The nest egg they bring in?

The only Moclan female alive.  Who turns out to be a great writer, thinker, philosopher.  Bully for her.  Him?  Her.  She identifies as female, that's good enough.  Not sure why exactly, for reasons outlined above, but again that's nuance lost to either time restrictions or unimaginative writers.

But what's this?  Oh, yes.  The only bit of the show that could be construed as relating to the trans issue.  LtCdr Bortus's partner is a "trans male."  Only... no he isn't.  Again, his story mirrors that of IS babies - born with abnormal genitals and then reassigned to a certain gender.  They often find out later in life that they were born intersex, and live most of their childhood into puberty (when they start noticing that their bodies aren't doing the same things as their peers) before finding out that they were not born as their assigned sex.  Sometimes this causes dysphoria, and they may shift away from the gender they were assigned.  But that's an intersex issue.  That's not transgender.

Different people experience dysphoria for different things, even if they're seemingly related or similar.

So then what was the trial about?  The trial was about women's empowerment.  That's a hugely important issue in and of itself.  But it holds no bearing on the ethics of performing gender reassignment surgery on an infant with uncommon genitals (which is all a "female" Moclan can be, biologically speaking).  The episode wanted to be a lot of things, and it wanted to say a lot of things.  But, because it's just a lot of tropes mashed together with no actual substance to tie it together, it ended up saying absolutely nothing.

None of this addresses the further problem that LtCdr Bortus and his partner have decided to raise their baby on the Orville.  On the spaceship.  The spaceship that belongs to the interspecies union of planets.  The one that's filled with an assortment of non-Moclans.  Who wouldn't ostracize a child for having genitals that don't conform to its species' norm.  Probably because they won't even know.  And not only are extremely rare children sort of a staple of Star Trek (the show the Orville is supposed to be a love letter to), they are most often some of the most pivotal characters in the show (Spock, Data, Bashir, Kes, Mayweather, and Burnham).

So I am disappointed with the outcome, not because it didn't make sense for the trial - unjust trials are a powerful narrative tool.  Executed properly, they make a very important point to an audience.  But the trial was on the wrong subject entirely, and was really pretty unnecessary since the thing the Moclans feared was that the child would be reviled on their homeworld.  Which the child was never obligated to go to, nor would it likely feel any attachment to, having been born in spaaaaaace.

I want to make it clear that I don't think using tropes in a show is bad or wrong.  Tropes can be extremely useful shorthand for getting ideas across in a short amount of time.  But you must temper your use of them carefully to avoid building stacked cliches, and it is important to sometimes subvert your cliches to allow your audience to feel smart and keep your world feeling believable.

Since I stopped watching the show, I've gotten some brief synopses of the subsequent episodes from my boyfriend.  Although he enjoys watching the show, and I would never begrudge him that, I have heard absolutely nothing in those reports that leads me to believe that it is becoming anything like interesting or meaningful.  At its best moments, it falls just short of being worthy of any of my attention.

If you like the show... well... more power to you.  Get your laughs.  You deserve them.

LLAP.

Discovery Discovered

It's finally here!  The new Star Trek!  How did it do?

Well I've had two episodes to consume and consider and there are some things I think are really great and there are some things that really just baffle me.  Here's your content spoiler warning: I discuss the first two episodes with the assumption that you've either seen them or don't care about me citing some very specific things about the show.

Let's dig in!

First of all, the intro is ... interesting.  I got bubbles of uncontrollable joy at the very beginning of it, but really nothing about the opening is enough to really hold my focus.  The artwork is of a very cool style, and is evocative of the human aspect of exploration a la Enterprise, as well as the technological developments on display because "Hey guys, look at these cool models we rendered!"  Maybe there's another point to that, but it's not very clear what it could be.  Especially when you feature a phaser pistol as one of the objects in the introduction, the first time any Star Trek has made overt reference to the already confused application of phasers in the wild frontier of space by a theoretically peaceful organization in an intro sequence.  Really lends credence to T'Kuvma's insistence in the show that the Federation lies when they say they come in peace.  Scope out the intro here if you haven't seen it yet:

But that's not really where the first episode starts.  The first episode starts with a cold open of a Klingon talking in Klingon with subtitles.  I hope you're tuned in and paying attention because if you're not you're about to miss some very important plot points.  Fortunately Klingon is a strange enough language to make you turn your head.  The Klingon design is, in and of itself, kind of cool.  But I do have some problems with it.

Scream at the Honorable Dead!  May they find triumph in Sto-Vo-Kor!

The skin tones are no longer consistent with anything we've seen from any Klingons ever.  This wasn't like a super big deal to me at first, since they also have cranial ridges and since they established pretty clearly that this takes place a scant 8 years before TOS, that these might be a fringe sect of Klingons whose biology is just a little different from the rest of the species.  Nope!  The whole lot of them have these skin tones (albino is apparently the new outcast color in Klingon society) that cover up completely any ethnicity that might belong to the actors beneath.  These are now wholly aliens, and totally outside the scope of where the species is supposed to be in the Prime timeline where Alex Kurtzman, Gretchen J. Berg, and Aaron Harberts insist the show takes place.

Chris Obi is black, but not that black.  Let us see this actor's beautiful skin!

We first see that this look is sported by more than just these evidently fringe fundamentalist followers of Kahless when they are successful in summoning the 24 houses of the Klingon Empire for this big ol' battle with the Federation that they want to start.  Because they're Klingons.  Well, okay, that checks out.  But we're losing important connections to the DS9 episode when Worf hastily informs his colleagues that Klingons do not talk about this time period because of the disgrace of not having cranial ridges, and the small arc in Enterprise where Phlox was kidnapped and forced to create an antidote for abused gene-enhancing that caused them to lose their cranial ridges in the first place.  Not to mention every appearance of Kor and Koloth in TOS (including the iconic original Trouble with Tribbles).

It's a good thing the computer tells us because that looks like some H.R. Giger shit.

I expected all of the tech to be updated to 2017 standards.  I'm fine with it.  It looks cool!  It's pretty and engaging and exactly what I want to see in Star Trek!  This doesn't bother me too much because they don't spend a whole lot of time in any of the other series focusing on why things were designed in the particular way that they were.  Although I was disappointed that absolutely zero of the Klingon ships resembled anything we'd seen from Klingon ships before - save, perhaps, for T'Kuvma's battleship which looked kind of like a big Gothic-style K'T'inga battle cruiser.

Neat!

After the cold open with the Klingons, we return to the now-familiar scene from Star Trek Into Darkness where Kirk and Bones are trying to save the natives from their planet by covertly violating the prime directive.  Wait... no, wait that's not Kirk and Bones.  That's Captain Georgiou and Commander Burnham.  And, yeah.  They're still doing the covert subversion of nature's course to save a species because sometimes complex ethical quandaries are for chumps.  Of course, they fail to be covert at the end and violate the prime directive.  Go figure.

Oh, wow!  Someone opened the well spring for my people!  Who do I thank?  Wait, what's that?

I hope nobody notices this giant spaceship in the sky above this wide open desert!

The entire scene is filled with clunky exposition dialogue that is important to set up the emotional impact of Captain Georgiou eventually kicking the bucket at the hands of T'Kuvma and in front of her friend of seven long years, Commander Burnham.  And Burnham makes it so painstakingly obvious that she's worried the Captain will die, there's pretty much no chance that she'll survive the encounter with T'Kuvma at all.

We KNOW!

Then there's this cool space walk, and Burnham fights a Klingon and we get to see the tall alien guy be a total wimp.  After fighting the Klingon, we are exposed to perhaps the most interesting tie to Star Trek lore yet: Michael Burnham is Spock's step sister.

And they really nailed that Vulcan hairstyle on young Michael Burnham!

I really like this addition to the Star Trek canon.  I don't really see it as interfering with anything because Sarek and Spock are both logical enough for the added complexity of having another person in their household to be essentially irrelevant to anything else that happened in Spock's or Sarek's life.  Even if that person is a human.  And the method by which Burnham became Sarek's ward is reminiscent of Worf's past, with his family being destroyed by a Romulan attack and being forced to be raised by humans.  But where Worf went on a journey to reclaim his Klingon heritage, Burnham is on a journey to reclaim her humanity.  It makes for a great combination of the logical Spock and the lovable Worf.  Good move.  We'll come back to where her arc looks like it's going to go a little later.

Aww, man, oh jeeze!  Look at all those... are those Klingon ships?

Ultimately they set up a very dramatic mutiny scene where Captain Georgiou becomes the first person to recover from a Vulcan nerve pinch in seconds in order to foil her first officer's plot of trying to preemptively strike the Klingons as a show of force.  The discussion of whether or not it was right to take that course of action is very short, and our heroine, Commander Burnham, is thrown in the brig.  Then the Klingons decide it's time to tear the Federation a new one.

It's a good thing we've got... shields?

Pretty sure that used to be the science station....

Oh man you've never seen this much space from inside a Federation starship!

The Klingons make a very dramatic move by booping the Admiral's ship after duping him into believing that the Klingons and Federation would have a cease fire.  Which is like... MONDO dishonorable.  Can't really see how you'd justify that.  So... is today a good day to die?  Because not one Klingon said it.  They sure did make sure to let us know they believed in racial superiority.  The Klingons then pulled out of the battle instead of finishing because... um... because I guess they felt like they won?  It did look a lot like Wolf 359 after they were done with the Federation.

Explosions!

Overall this was a really dramatic two episodes of Star Trek.  It lacks the episodic nature of all the previous series - which isn't in and of itself a bad thing.  But what we don't get in these episodes in any meaningful way is an exploration of social issues or philosophy.  The closest we get is some teased racial tension between the Klingons and their distaste for their one albino Klingon.  At the end of the second episode, Burnham is on court martial for mutinying against her captain.  This part I really didn't care for in its presentation.  Just not an artistic style I felt was appropriate to the organization.

Burnham is lit so we can see her face and expression, but the tribunal that is judging her is in complete darkness.  Since when has the Federation ever run this way?  Now the Federation has turned into a large, shadowy faceless government.  I don't like that.  It's not the Federation we've seen before and I think it was a poor choice made solely for the purpose of theatrics.  I think it's important to maintain a certain level of fidelity to the franchise, especially when your season trailer teases that you're going to give us an idea of how the Federation might have a seedy underbelly.

All in all I am not put off by Discovery.  But I am wary of it.  It hasn't grown its beard, and it's making it difficult for itself to do so by removing the episodic nature of its episodes.  I'm not thrilled about the life sentence Burnham received at the end of the second episode, and how it basically turns her into the next Tom Paris on board the Discovery later in the series.  But Sonequa Martin-Green is captivating and I want to see more of her.  I'll be coming back for more of this show.

Live long and prosper.