The Orville Season Two - Thoughts?
Ryujin
Legend
Unfortunately that now seems to be the North American broadcast TV cycle.
I can never work out when US shows are on. We get criticised for short series, but we show them from start to finish. With US shows it seems to be two weeks on, three weeks off, one week on, a week off, two more weeks off, two weeks on... sometimes I’ve actually forgotten shows exist and suddenly rediscover them a year later!
Aeson
I learned nerd for this.
They're so ratings critical. If something they know will draw big numbers, a show takes the night off. Holidays often means no one is watching TV, so they take night off. I think it's an effort to stretch the season. With 52 weeks in a year but on average 22 episodes, a show would be on for less than 6 months. More than 6 months for viewers to forget. There was a time in the past there were ratings weeks. A week in November, a week in February, and a week in May. The best of the season would be shown in those weeks. The very special episodes. Big name guest stars. So they had to be able to cover time from August to May. Now you have a show covering 8 months time instead of say 5. Now it's expected to be every week I think.
Orius
Legend
Don't worry, neither can we.
Of course, this is FOX so that makes it even worse. They're really good at the squirrely schedules.
Still, even with the Super Bowl, I have no idea why the skipped a week. Especially during February, which is a sweeps month.
Well, yes. All those reasons are true elsewhere, too. We have big events and special guest stars and holidays too. They aren’t unique American traits. But the result is different. You might as well have said “It’s because the actors breathe oxygen”. The question is about what’s different, and therefore creates that unique scheduling frustration, not listing the things common to everyone.
Orius
Legend
Remember what I said about the last episode?
That was apparently a practice run for tonight, where we get The Orville spiking the ball in the face of one of TNG's most infamously bad episodes:
[sblock]
Of course, I'm talking about "The Outcast" here, which tried to do an early LBGT tolerance episode and fell flat on its face doing so. It was done so badly, that I recognized just how much of a fail it was when I was only 15. This was done better, though TBH, that's not hard to do.
I think it was a good touch that he wasn't simply portrayed as a victim either. He was perfectly willing to frame Klyden for murder, and he got called out on it. Okay, so Klyden was being pretty bigoted here, but there's two things to point out. First, he is an established character who probably has some fans, and there's some audience sympathy for him about how being framed will hurt both him and his family. Second, keep in mind he was born female, and then had a female child with Bortas, so that may affect how he feels on top of the cultural norms.
Between last season's episode about Bortas and and Klyden's kid and this one, I suspect Seth is going to come back to these issues unlike Trek would do. While some aspects of Moclan society are clearly played for laughs, they seem to be seriously messed up under the surface. Further, these problems aren't just shallow bigotry either, since it seems there was some necessity for it in the past, but is probably not now and only keeps going because of the social pressures of tradition. They're not an all-male species, they deliberately suppress both females and heterosexual males, and since we have two Moclans as regular characters who've been personally involved in these matters, I doubt it's going to be swept away.
On other matters, the whole murder mystery aspect was handed in an interesting way. Once some doubts about Klyden emerged, I figured it was a suicide, until they revealed that was just as shaming as coming out. I also liked how they immediately assumed scanners would be useless against a very skilled engineer, and didn't bother wasting time with them. I figured out he was probably using something like a personal cloaking device or something too, since it would help with evading any searches. Trek doesn't often think things out this well.
[/sblock]
The flower guy was the latest interesting alien design, and the cookie bouquet was silly and funny.
That was apparently a practice run for tonight, where we get The Orville spiking the ball in the face of one of TNG's most infamously bad episodes:
[sblock]
Of course, I'm talking about "The Outcast" here, which tried to do an early LBGT tolerance episode and fell flat on its face doing so. It was done so badly, that I recognized just how much of a fail it was when I was only 15. This was done better, though TBH, that's not hard to do.
I think it was a good touch that he wasn't simply portrayed as a victim either. He was perfectly willing to frame Klyden for murder, and he got called out on it. Okay, so Klyden was being pretty bigoted here, but there's two things to point out. First, he is an established character who probably has some fans, and there's some audience sympathy for him about how being framed will hurt both him and his family. Second, keep in mind he was born female, and then had a female child with Bortas, so that may affect how he feels on top of the cultural norms.
Between last season's episode about Bortas and and Klyden's kid and this one, I suspect Seth is going to come back to these issues unlike Trek would do. While some aspects of Moclan society are clearly played for laughs, they seem to be seriously messed up under the surface. Further, these problems aren't just shallow bigotry either, since it seems there was some necessity for it in the past, but is probably not now and only keeps going because of the social pressures of tradition. They're not an all-male species, they deliberately suppress both females and heterosexual males, and since we have two Moclans as regular characters who've been personally involved in these matters, I doubt it's going to be swept away.
On other matters, the whole murder mystery aspect was handed in an interesting way. Once some doubts about Klyden emerged, I figured it was a suicide, until they revealed that was just as shaming as coming out. I also liked how they immediately assumed scanners would be useless against a very skilled engineer, and didn't bother wasting time with them. I figured out he was probably using something like a personal cloaking device or something too, since it would help with evading any searches. Trek doesn't often think things out this well.
[/sblock]
The flower guy was the latest interesting alien design, and the cookie bouquet was silly and funny.
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