I watched the pilot episode.
First off, I sure hope that the Fox network executives can keep their fingers off this show and not fuck it up, the way they tend to fuck up any decent science-fiction show.
The world of the Orville is Star Fleet with people who have messy lives, like real people do. The one thing that always bugged me about most of the Star Trek shows was that everybody, unless they were captured by the Borg, was so bloody perfect. Few had messy relationships (Riker notwithstanding), or drank much or were arrogant pricks or anything like that.
Well, that's certainly not the Orville. They come across as people with active senses of irony, humor and they use sarcasm. They seem to be aware that the situations they find themselves in are odd.
So yes, I'm going to keep watching. And hoping that Fox doesn't fuck it up, though I'm not counting on that.
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Wednesday, September 13, 2017
13 comments:
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Have it on the DVR. We'll see.
ReplyDeleteIf it's successful, they probably won't mess w/ it.
J. Michael Straczynski was hilarious in his description of how Crusade got cancelled. It was the spin-off of the successful, concluded Babylon 5 show.
ReplyDeleteI'll see if I can find his description, but it boiled down to a conference table with 20 suits on one side, JMS on the other, and him saying, "No" to 'suggestions' from corporate.
So, I'm saying, yes. A network can fuck up a show that's doing well and making money.
ReplyDeleteStar Trek is very much in the show's DNA, but the first episode is fine. Hopefully it stays on the schedule.
ReplyDeleteThe resolution did make me go "wait, where did the water and sunlight come from?", but I do that a lot..
And gravity. Where did the gravity come from?
ReplyDeleteBe wondering about that for fifty years.
They all seem to have "gravity generators". Except for the Earth-force ships in Babylon V, which used rotating elements, as did the station itself. The gravity generators mean that the ships can do radical maneuvers that defy the laws of physics without smushing their crews against the bulkheads. Even the little pissant shuttles have their own gravity,
ReplyDeleteThe ships all fly like airplanes, not needing to cancel out their directional vectors in order to turn.
At least The Orville doesn't have transporters. So far.
"They all seem to have 'gravity generators'."
ReplyDeleteThe really amazing thing is that while everything else in a ship has failed and is about to explode, the gravity generators NEVER FAIL (except once, in a movie, when they were sabotaged). Clearly that contractor needs to be given a wider range of work...
Onscreen SF will have artificial gravity until shows are filmed in space.
ReplyDeleteNot really a knock, but does anyone else think the corridors and many sets were CGI?
Onscreen SF will have artificial gravity until shows are filmed in space
ReplyDeleteOr on the "Vomit Comet". They did that for Apollo 13.
One of the things I liked about Babylon 5 was the fact that they didn't hand-wave the gravity for the Earth ships or for the station itself.
ReplyDeleteThe reason why the ships have gravity in televised SF is that all the wire-work to simulate zero gravity is a royal PITA (though maybe CGI will make it easier in the future). Same reason why Star Trek had the Transporter Beam. The first scripts were handed in and showed the protagonists getting in and out of shuttles all the time and Gene rolled his eyes and said "can't we just hand-wave some sort of instant teleportation beam so we can make the story move without all this tedious shuttle travel?" So they did. Well, all that floating around similarly doesn't add anything to the story and is expensive to simulate, so they handwave artificial gravity and there ya go.
And the reason why my Hanoverian ships have artificial gravity in the world of "The Thertian Gambit" is that a) the Hanoverians have a prejudice against genetic modifications beyond basic enhancements to the standard human planform, and humans don't work well in zero-g without extensive *major* genetic modifications, and b) it's a logical extension of the Swallow Engine that's used to cut holes through space-time in order to travel effectively faster than life (if you can create artificial black holes, clearly you can create artificial gravity). That said, they're just one of the civilizations in that universe, and some of them (like the Thertians) don't bother with artificial gravity because they're gene-modded to a fare-thee-well and there's no need for it. Others use rotating space stations to simulate gravity. People are weird, in the end.
Hey! Wait a minute Tux, I've read some of that stuff somewhere or t'other. To the library (boxes of books in the barn)!
ReplyDeleteThough Star Trek debuted about the same time I was discovering Asimov, Clarke and Tolkien and my second step-father was an Apollo era NASA engineer who took me out to Edwards and showed me a bunch of stuff I probably shouldn't have seen, Babylon 5 actually had a greater impact on my worldview today. Fake news indeed.
Comrade, I reminded you that Apollo 13 is not Science Fiction.
ReplyDeleteEmbellished and dramatized, yes.
3383,
ReplyDeleteYeah, I know. My point was more to do with the process of filming drama that is set in space. Fiction or not isn't that relevant. Ron Howard wanted the weitless scenes to look good and so they went on the Vomit Comet.
The "seatbelt" scene in the Orville pilot was too much. The gravity generator cancels out stuff, except right then?