by JackRiddler » Sat Feb 09, 2019 5:32 am
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Watching both, of course, quasi involuntarily. And here I skipped every single Star Trek since the 1967 series except for the movies and the animated series, having seen only a couple of episodes of Deep Space Nine.
Disco is much more effective emotionally in the second season, having crammed way too much to establish its multiple empires and universes in the first. It's pure space opera with copious soap and either you like it or you don't.
Orville is much more in the original ST mode of one complete parable per episode, and more willing to have single-joke alien species. The porn and gender reassignment episodes were indeed ambitious and surprisingly nuanced. As with all filmed SF, there is way too much threat of total world/universe destruction in almost every episode of both series.
In propaganda terms, both are in the mode of a benevolently militarized super-tech post-money galactic wish-fulfillment American socialism with room for total individual actualization within a corporate team ethic wherein every principal character gets their turn to surprise, shine, and achieve their next experience level while doing exactly whatever has to be done to save the universe/planet/ship with just seconds to spare and too much music, after which the ship-family-team finds they are even closer and warmer to each other than ever, despite their crazy species and character differences.
Orville is explicitly like an HR saga, taking elements of Parks and Recreation and The Office into "space." Every single element of the Trek universe is adopted with different names for Klingons, the Federation, warp, etc., and matter transformers that provide every imaginable consumer object instantaneously, holodecks, no concerns about zero gravity ever or any sudden epidemics that don't have a plot function and can't be cured, unbelievably large and stylish quarters on a goddamn warship, etc., except that in Orville they don't have transporters, which is an excellent choice.
Neither is speculative fiction in the sense that this is about the future, it's all about the present-day globalized United States, kind of like every Trek since 1967.
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Last edited by
JackRiddler on Sat Feb 09, 2019 2:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
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