I'm only just recently watching season 3 with my girlfriend.
The Orville has actually gotten better every season. Season 1 was kindof dumb and didn't know where it was going, but by season 3 Seth Macfarlane clearly told the writers "just make TNG episodes" and it works pretty well.
One thing I realized with the show is that it isn't Star Trek, it's a Star Trek LARP by Seth Macfarlane and his friends. The weakest part of the show is that some of the actors suck because they're literally just his friends. The worst offender is the black engineer guy. He can barely say his lines and has 0 acting skill, so it is really awkward. Also almost all the characters act like Current Day people, and even use slang and sayings that only make sense for present day people. Hence the whole show feels like a LARP and not the real thing.
Seth Macfarlane is obviously woke, but strangely he has gone out of his way to make the messages of his show nuanced. Here are 2 examples:
- So one of the aliens and best actors on the show is a dude named Bortus who is basically their Worf. He is a Moclan, a race of beefy dudes who are 100% male and despise females to the point where anyone born female is forcibly transed to male as a newborn. He has a daughter. In a prior season, there is a whole blowup over whether to trans her, but the Moclan government and Bortus' trad husband win and she gets turned male. Well, Season 3 she's older and suddenly she starts getting weird and possibly suicidal, so the Karen 1st officer sticks her nose in and gives her hints that she was born female, without fully telling her. She finds out the truth, freaks out, then there is a whole blowup where the trad dad refuses to let her de transition while Bortus allows it. Trad dad is cast as the villain and humiliated, basically.
What makes this nuanced is that a woke person could see this as supporting their trans shit, but if you look at it: the whole message is AGAINST transing the kids! It's basically saying that parents should not impose their will on their kids, which is exactly the whole mindfuck social contagion happening now in libtard cities where libtard white women are manipulating and pressuring their kids to be trans. Again, you can interpret it both ways. It's not explicitly preaching a libtard message. That's legitimately impressive storytelling similar to the legacy of TNG.
- There is an episode trying to get an alliance with a matriarchal race where the women dominate the men and the men are basically slaves with no rights. The ship plans to pretend to be the same way to win the feminist aliens to their side. So the Karen 1st officer pretends to be Captain while Seth is her lackey. It's played for laughs at first, but the Captain & other men on the ship legitimately get treated like dirt to the point where you feel bad for them, and then it gets pushed too far where the alien chicks start trying to treat them as sex slaves. The alien feminists are not portrayed as sympathetic or "good", they're cold hard bitches. Again, there isn't really any preaching, and a feminist could watch the episode and be like "hell yeah!" while Imp could watch it and be like "I'd like to order an exterminatus".
I'm not saying the show is a classic like TNG or anything, but I think Seth is trying hard to follow the spirit of TNG without copying it, and making his own thing. He's been learning and improving each season, and I think it's been getting better.
No it had promise but its standard gay commie crap.
The lesson of the s3 tranny ep is tradition is bad, white women are always right and should interfere with families, and kids should threaten suicide if parents exert authority.
That was when I noped out.
Gender-bending 1st season: No thanks!
Somehow, the entirety of human history and decades of recent comedy post-film managed to not have this, but coincidentally it's gotta be in the first few episodes of this exciting new show?
Yeah no. Deviltry. Pass.
Immediately saw it for what it was as well.
The character 'Kitan' was a dead give-away. A super-strong twenty-something female security officer. Even with the in-story explanation, it still came across as the same fem-fu schlock as seen in pretty much every other action-themed show.
Eye-rollingly bad. How many more Buffys do we need to endure before they finally put a stop to this cringe avalanche?
I watched a couple of seasons and thought it was the usual leftist fare: tons of gay sex, trannies, poor oppressed women, religion bad, stronk smart women, stupid men, jabs at anti-vaxxers, etc. Your second example is basically just "that's how bad it is for women in real life".
Any show that talks about trans as a fact of 'life' is too hokey.
Same for the patriarchee/matriarchee nonsense.
Honestly if entertainment is an entire 3 seasons of watching bad actors play out Seth's fevered dreams, while showcasing 'is this the real life or is this just fantasy', then I wish them a
poxbooster.That's so kind of you.
I sometimes LARP goodness.
Another way it's a LARP is that the ship can get across the entire galaxy in no time because the universe has no rules to it.
They haven't tried to make a consistent world every episode they're just winging it.
I hated Season 3.
Hated it. Stopped watching.
Each to their own.
S2 was actually pretty good, in parts.
The abortion episode where they bring the would be parents in and make them talk to a hologram of their aborted kid, and acting like it was this horrible punishment.... I looked at my wife and said I thought they would execute them, this seems like a slap on the wrist!
I hated season 3 compared to the first two, but I was often left unsure if the show was mocking the situation or not. Is the joke that their terrible punishment just that they need to spend a few moments recognizing the significance of their decision? Or, did the show writers legit think that was some horrible form of torture?
Pretty sure pro-abortionists have made a big deal out of how horrible and traumatic it is to try and talk the woman out of it, show ultrasounds of the baby etc. The writers definitely had an agenda to push with that one.
Just looked up the actress they got to play female Topa. She’s actually quite attractive (in real life), which is… Odd.
But yeah, I guess that story worked out for the best. From a human/“universal morality” perspective anyway…
But fuck I hated that season, more broadly. Like holy fuck.
Different people like different things, though, clearly.
I’m not a fan of “Meth” Macfarlane. But I’ll give Season 2, and parts of Season 1, at least, a high pass.
By the end of S3, Grayson has become so much of a Mary Sue that it rendered her unlikable. They tried to veil it in one episode with one scene where she twisted her ankle or whatever but 3 minutes later she was mowing Moklin warriors down like Rambo and kicking male ass hand to hand. Mercer had been increasingly pushed into the background by then and by the final episode of the season I had already checked out. The agenda killed this show.
Yeah, I call her Karen because she's so annoying. That scene where she beats up the Moclan trad dad who is easily like 2-3x her size was cringe. Shit like that is so retarded. Thankfully (I've only seen the 1st 7 episodes so far) that was the only time I saw something like that.
This is why most modern scifi shows disgust me. I watched a few clips of TNG a few days ago and was baffled at the dialogue. Just about every line was either character building or plot-driven. Everyone had a purpose, a use, and contributed to SOMETHING when they spoke. Nowadays, you'll have a bunch of "quirky" humor, cussing, modern-day political soapboxing, and smart-ass comments from ugly women every other line that can be easily edited out with zero impact to character-dev or plot.
That's in alignment with trannies. These people deliberately hide their grooming shit from parents all the time. If trannies were actually mad at this show, it's only because it depicts detransitioning at all.
Season three is where it became completely unbearable and even my nostalgia glasses couldn't hide the subversion anymore.
Sorry man, I don't think it is. Sounds like they're just taking a detour to the same destination. 'See how bad it feels to have the wrong gender assigned to you at birth? That's totally what happens with trans people and this is how they feel every day! We should support them when they want to affirm their true gender!' Their whole delusion is based on AFAB/AMAB (Assigned Male/Female At Birth) and this is a thinly veiled attempt to legitimize that.
I'll admit I haven't seen it. Maybe there's more nuance than I think. If they're doing a TNG LARP they're probably copying the 'raise questions but don't dictate answers' thing but that doesn't mean the writers aren't looking for opportunities to preach in a more underhanded way.
no you are totally right, anyone reading it otherwise is coping to justify their consooming
Hollywood can't make science fiction anymore. Too many Buffys and current thing 'black female roles'.
If it has a Buffy, the show is going to bomb.