The Orville - Seth MacFarlane takes on Star Trek

For those of you who watch using OTA antennas like me, which do you watch Live? Brooklyn 99/The Good Place, or The Orville? Last week I watched ST: Discovery at 7:30pm (Central) and then watched both of the other two recorded. 3 simultaneous good shows in the same slot. I would have hated it back in the old days, since I would have been able to use the VCR to record only one.

As a mixed OTA/Streaming viewer… last week we watched the first half of Discovery, then watched Good Place live. Finished Discovery then watch Orville on DVR…

Can’t remember the last time I watched something live. Record, skip commercials during playback, occasionally go to Hulu or similar if the OTA recording had issues. Which are sometimes due to bad weather and the like, but more often because there’s some “weather alert” or stupid news break-in that cut out part of the show.

Yeah, last night I followed dtolman’s lead and watched Discover at 7:30, and then switched to Dead Cells for 10 minutes, then watched Good Place live, except the 10 minutes delay allowed me to skip commercials. And unfortunately both the NBC shows were “squished” so the local channels could show the school closings at the bottom of the screen, so all the actors looked fatter than usual.

I’ll watch The Orville and Brooklyn Nine Nine tonight.

“All the World is Birthday Cake” was pretty good, I thought. I’m a sucker for any of the cultural clash themed stories, even though generally they require serious suspension of disbelief and this one was no exception. But I’m happy that it was actual Star TrekOrville space exploration stuff, not suburbia-on-a-starship. Loved that they used the concept of “is it cool to lie and manipulate someone’s belief system in order to prevent injustice”, just wish they’d spent a bit more time on it than one tiny conversation at the end.

I liked Jessica Szohr though she certainly was opinionated for a security officer when the captain was meeting with the planet leader. Imagine your typical redshirt pulling that shit with JTK in the room.

I do miss Patrick Warburton’s security guy, though, even if he was just comic relief.

I don’t expect a lot of accurate science from a show with quantum drives and gelatinous engineers, but they would have had to put that solar sail a lot higher to fool the planetary residents into thinking it was a star. At the altitude they deployed it, it would only be in the right place in the constellation for a small segment of the population. Plus, they specifically stated that the planet had star-tracking satellites.

I really enjoyed that episode. I have to admit, even though they laid the groundwork with the Doctor, it was still super perplexing to me why the two crewmembers would have been arrested. So when the explanation came, it was a true WTF moment.

Agreed, it was a fun episode. Liked it a lot.

Agreed on the new security officer, she seemed pretty vocal for someone new who should still be in the feeling-things-out phase of her assignment. It seems like she will be more aggressive than Alara, which could be cool, but I already miss Alara’s mix of inexperience, self-doubt and sense of wonder that made the character so appealing.

As for the episode, it was probably the best one of the season thus far, as it really nailed that whole ST:TNG feel that the show seems to strive for. It did seem kind of silly that having the star suddenly reappear would somehow make everything OK again…seems more likely the society would have quickly come to the conclusion that the recent space visitors had something to do with it…either that or they would have been all “Witchcraft! Burn the heretics!”…but it’s cool, they needed a tidy ending so it worked.

I really like this show a lot more than I thought I was going to when it first aired last season. I hope they can keep it up. Even the humor this season seems a little toned down in many of the episodes, and that’s a good thing. I do enjoy the occasional LOL moment that you wouldn’t get from the average ST:TNG episode, but sometimes it goes full MacFarlane…and that’s not a good look.

First contact episode was good. The Admiral looked familiar.

The admiral was Ted Danson. ;)

Not possible, he is on another show! ;)

And that Admiral? Albert Einstein!

I laughed :)

I am enjoying all the cameos on this show.

Very lovely episode tonight. Once again, I thought they got the TNG/humor balance just right.

So that was the real dude under the robot suit or the real dude voicing NotData (or both)? He’s so young (and does an amazing “Brent Spiner as Data” impression)!

Great episode. The end reminded me a bit of the ending of My Fair Lady. He was essentially saying “I’ve grown accustomed to your face.”

Meh, I was largely bored. There were a few funny moments, sure. But I watched STTNG, I’ve already seen the android-approaching-humanity shtick. A fine episode of “This is Us” with an emotionally-incompetent romance, too bad the writers are on the wrong show. At least when STTNG had an android having sex, they used an alien infection in the plot.

And I’m starting to feel sorry for Bortus. Can’t someone else be the butt of the social jokes for a change?

Finally saw last week’s episode. Loved it. Loved that they used the actual actors for the simulated Isaac and Yaphet.

Wow…I was not impressed with the episode at all really. There were a handful of comedic moments that were fun, the best of which was Isaac in tighty whities on the doctor’s couch, but overall it was just boring and lame. Even as a homage to the tried and true “can artificial lifeforms ever really feel anything” Sci-Fi trope it was very superficial and lackluster. And the only side story was Bortus’ mustache? Really?

Hoping this goes back to being a space show about space stuff next episode.