I was screaming every minute for everyone to stop being such shitlib robo racists and it never stopped and they never even got a real reprimand for their utterly abhorrent behavior (which fully vindicated the Kaylons' views of biological life btw, like, they literally cannot separate isaac from the rest of his species and wish they could hate him to death, real classy). I kept wanting at least SOMEBODY to get sent to the brig or something, but woops, they didn't even get some b.s. sensitivity training or other slap on the wrist.

The captain even goes like "yeah I agree with you i'm a little robo racist" like what the fuck seth MacFarlane, people told me this season would be better and this is like 20 steps backwards. How hard is it to double down when Ensign Scratched-Liberal tells you Isaac's heroic betrayal of his own people, at great cost to himself, was "too little too late" because people died? Guess what ensign, if it weren't for him everyone would be fucking dead, you included!

Isaac is literally only guilty of being a spy and they just let this bullshit about him being responsible for these deaths fly without real argument. Isaac only directly killed other Kaylons, you're welcome dipshits! Yeah he was a spy but if it weren't him, it would have been another unit, and they should fucking pray it would make the same decisions Isaac did, because if not, good bye. Extinction. They act like Isaac told them to declare exterminatus when they make it obvious the Kaylons were gearing up for that anyway. Every single person on that ship indirectly or directly owes Isaac their life and that should be drilled into their heads in fucking reeducation camps if necessary.

And then they hinge his recovery on Ensign Racist Cracker, and her magic fucking brain, deciding to save him. I wish so badly the episode had ended with her asking to go back to her post only for her to be told she's still fired for refusing a direct order. At least SOME kind of reprimand for her gross attitude, especially when she leaves with another snide fucking comment after her magic brain helps fix him. But nope, she Did the Thing so her almost letting him die a permanent death because she's a fucking bigot is forgiven.

I'm really hoping they just wanted to get this tension about him being a Kaylon out of the way in one episode because if the rest of this season has people being petty dicks to Isaac because they're bigots incapable of handling their own trauma i'm gonna lose it

    • Dingdangdog [he/him,comrade/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I do not recall Cochrane wanting sex slaves? Or even being libertarian in any sense except for living in a collapsed state

            • Dingdangdog [he/him,comrade/them]
              ·
              2 years ago

              This is a solid take, and thanks for the effort dissecting it. I'll say I'm not much of a ST movie guy so I haven't had the time to really go through it. I just watch ds9 over and over again until I get bored then tng for a season then back on the ds9 train to check in and make sure worf and O'Brien are doing alright

              But, from what I've seen of it. You seem to be definitely doing a good job critiquing what's going on there and it's helpful for my Trekkie ass perspective.

            • invalidusernamelol [he/him]
              ·
              2 years ago

              Why can't more stuff be like the Foundation series (at least the first 3 books). The whole plot of that series is the unstoppable force of societal and collective power. The conditions of the empire lead to its own demise, it's predicted (not brought about!) by Hari Seldon. The whole concept of psychohistory is basically a sci-fi version of dialectical materialism. The great men in the series aren't great men so much as they're the ones who happen to be in the right place at the right time as the inevitable social crises of the developing Foundation society come to fruition. Something that a lot of them end up realizing later.

              I do think that eventually it's revealed that in the background there were thousands and thousands of psycho-historians planning out the history of the Foundation, but even then it's a much more compelling way to approach the history of an entire planet/galaxy than just saying "ah yes, then one individual came along and singlehandedly changed the course of Galactic history"

        • UlyssesT
          ·
          2 months ago

          deleted by creator

          • D61 [any]
            ·
            2 years ago

            Cochrane :snipes-hesitation:

            • UlyssesT
              ·
              2 months ago

              deleted by creator

              • D61 [any]
                ·
                2 years ago

                I wonder how many actors read for a part and realize that not only are they reading a villian role but that the role was created to shit on a real person who could use to be knocked down a few pegs and just bring their own silverware when they start eating the scenery?

                • UlyssesT
                  ·
                  2 months ago

                  deleted by creator

    • D61 [any]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I love Star Trek and the Orville, but their politics are often pretty perverse, even though their values are generally okay and sometimes they have excellent surface-level critiques of capitalism. I hate the historical background for the setting especially; In a later episode of the third season, Kelly says that humanity only overcame capitalism when the invention of industrial replicators made scarcity a thing of the past, making competition irrelevant, and then less than a couple minutes later she says with a straight face that humans overcame capitalism just by “becoming better people.” That same episode in the Orville pretty explicitly condemns any attempt to work towards socialism or communism before the availability of post-scarcity tech, which is weird, because their justification for the prime directive is that too many alien civilizations in the past went boom because Union explorers gave them technology they weren’t ready for.

      huh... I may have to rewatch that episode.

      spoiler

      My takeaway from Kelly's story was that before Earth people figured out (or were given) replicators the people were already kinda on their way towards a more global solidarity with each other. So when the tech came about, instead of hording it, it was shared with everybody for everybody's benefit. Then the Union explorer fleets go out and stumble across a civilization at a point mirroring Earth's recent past. Thinking "Hey, we've been there and it sucked, how about we give them a magic box that makes anything you want" and hoping it would be used for things like clean water, food, medicine to be shared by the people of that alien world. Unfortunately the gift of the tech didn't keep them from wiping themselves out. Now, the Union can't know for sure that the addition of the tech caused them to whip themselves out but also cannot rule out that their interference had no effect. So the default position winds up being, "Stay the fuck out of the affairs of pre space flight species" because the first time we tried they went extinct a few years later.

        • D61 [any]
          ·
          2 years ago

          Yeah, the eternal conflict. Do you play god and accept the consequences or do you stay in the background and let whatever happens over there just happen?