TV shows, especially network shows, typically bring out the
big guns in November, February, and May for “sweeps.” That’s when ratings are measured or whatever
to determine whether a show will be picked up or cancelled.
Having missed November, it’s no surprise that Fox’s The
Orville had to pull some literal big guns out in February. The science officer Isaac was a cybernetic
being from a mysterious advanced race known as the Kaylon. He was supposedly on the ship to determine
whether the Kaylons would join the Federation, er, Union.
A couple of the best episodes of the series had the
unemotional “robot” bonding with the doctor and her two young sons. In the first episode the four of them are
stranded on a remote planet and have to work together to survive. In another Isaac and Dr. Finn embark upon a
relationship, which included Isaac taking on a human body in the holodeck thing
so they could have sex.
About two weeks after that episode, Isaac abruptly
deactivates. The crew takes him back to
his homeworld for repairs. While there
they uncover billions of corpses under the planet and learn the dirty secret of
the Kaylon: they overthrew the biological
organisms who constructed them and then slaughtered every living thing on the
planet.
(As an aside, why would the corpses still be there centuries
later? Obviously the Kaylon have the
technology to incinerate the bodies entirely.
You could say that they want to keep them there as a reminder, but
they’re robots, they don’t forget shit!
Every Kaylon has the memory of all that stuff so why would they need
tangible proof? It’s so damned
convenient they left that stuff for the Orville crew to find.)
Isaac’s true mission then was to determine whether the
Kaylon should kill all humans. To which
the answer is yes. So they capture the
crew and commandeer the ship to head to Earth with a dozen huge space gun
things in tow that looked like enlarged versions of the reactor Iron Man used
to power his armor.
This first episode really annoyed me because it undid all
the character building of those other episodes.
None of that meant anything, apparently, because now he’s a bad guy and
it was all an act. And even if it
wasn’t, how do you come back after your people killed like a dozen innocent
crewmembers?
Up to that point I’d watched all the episodes on Hulu but I
decided that next week to watch it live on Fox.
It was...meh. There was a big
space battle that was pretty cool. Other
than that, it wasn’t great. Isaac turns
on his people in the most cliched way possible:
the head bad guy takes Dr. Finn’s youngest son captive and tells Isaac
to kill him. This is so pathetically
cliche that cartoons like Transformers and GI Joe did it back in the 80s. Of course Isaac isn’t going to kill the
kid! Instead he kills all his people on
the ship. As I Tweeted, what’s next,
having a bad guy incriminate himself by talking into a hot mic? I mean while we’re using up age-old cliches.
The battle against the Kaylon is turned when the enemy Krill
show up with a fleet. Which would have
been great if they hadn’t telegraphed that so far in advance. Two officers from the Orville snuck away to
meet with the Krill and were followed by a Kaylon gun thing that attacked the
Krill and thus obviously the Krill were going to help fight the Kaylon
then. Duh. It wasn’t exactly Han Solo coming back to
shoot Darth Vader’s TIE fighter so Luke could blow up the Death Star.
At the end Isaac is abandoned by his people but is given
refuge on the Orville. Which is
something Deep Space Nine did like 20+ years ago. Odo, the shapeshifting head of security,
found out his people had a beef against the “solids” and were going to use
their clone army and fleet to kill and enslave all the solids. At one point when Odo refused to join them he
was banished and made solid for a time.
Which the issue with this show for me is that when it does
character-driven episodes it’s pretty good, but when it tries to do bigger
episodes it winds up regurgitating Star Trek scripts. Not just these episodes but there was one at
the beginning of the year where they make first contact with a planet governed
by astrology and so locks up a couple of the crew because they were born under
a bad sign. (Why lock them up and not
simply banish them? Oh, right, because
that would be a very short episode.) The
first contact gone wrong thing had probably been done 50 times on the various
Trek series over the last 50+ years. At
that point the show feels like a really expensive cosplay, which is annoying.
Anyway, because they needed a big shock story for an
attempted ratings grab they basically fucked up the evolution of Isaac’s
character. But in the end they just fell
back to cliches and warmed-over Star Trek material. If you’re going to ruin one of your better
stories at least do it in the service of a decent story. I’m just saying.
2 comments:
Pretty much every Orville episode is a "spot what they ripped off from Star Trek" game, with the bonus round of picking out the occasional ripped off non-Trek property (such as that episode where they ripped off an entire Black Mirror episode). I really wish Orville would stick to the things that "work" for the series to tell their own stories and rely less on stealing from other properties.
I look forward each week to watching new episodes of Discovery, but Orville is either a "meh, it's on" or "I'll catch it on Hulu later" because there's a huge difference between new Star Trek and warmed up regurgitated leftovers wanna-be Trek mixed with potty humor.
I've only watched it twice, briefly. Just couldn't get interested. It looks fake to me. Like they're on a low budget.
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