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