I asked this question sometime ago on The Orville's subreddit, and surprisingly got mixed responses. I assume most here however, are going to prefer Star Trek, specifically TNG that its aping from. For the record I do prefer TNG as well, but rewatching The Orville, after you get past its kinda sucky first season, I really enjoyed the show and feel it's a very good successor to TNG just with added humor and levity which I think is a good thing. And there are elements I find better in The Orville. And now that Lower Decks is back (a show I'm now a fan of after dismissing it for so long), I felt the need to return to The Orville and see if I still liked it. I'm really hoping it at least gets a fourth season. Anyway, what do you guys think?
I was really disappointed with the most recent series of Orville. I feel they moved from social commentary to being preachy and smug.
The biggest example of this is the time travel episode in season 3. You have someone who has established a life and has kids and real character growth, who wants to be able to live the life they established after being abandoned for 20 years. On the other hand you have Seth McFarland saying that it's bad. There isn't any real discussion of what right is, it's just McFarland saying that he's right and then circumventing any resistance. It ends with McFarland being smug he did the right thing and having no self reflection on the damage he did.
To be clear, I'm all about social commentary in my sci-fi but I feel like anything interesting is diluted to make it a closer parallel to earth. The Moclans went from a unique all male species, to having a rare minority that allowed for discussion of trans rights, to in season 3 being 50-50 split and a tired gender war trope.
I think the Orville has gotten lazy and moved further and further away from having interesting plots to talk about big ideas and moved more towards character driven drama and lazy hamfisted commentary.
I liked that time travel episode and its moral dilemma, even if basically aborting the children seems morally dubious. Why didn't they offer to just take his family with him into the future? Other than that, I felt it was brilliant. Also I like "preachyness" if what's being preached is the right message, and they mostly preached the right message IMO in The Orville.
I agree with their politics, I just feel that plot took a hit to allow them to soapbox more. Aliens lost what made them alien and became humans with make up.
My issue isn't the message, to me it felt like the lecturing of DISCO with fart jokes.
Malloy is a stalker and a rapist in that timeline, it's good that Mercer went back and prevented it.