The Orville was created on the lie of Star Trek

According to Jonathan Klotz
| Updated 1 hour ago

Seth MacFarlane may still be best known for his animated shows, Family guy and American Dadbut in 2017 he launched his greatest creation, Orvillea science fiction series that begins and was marketed as a parody of Star Trek. Fox’s marketing for the show leaned heavily on the jokes of the first episode, which includes the introduction of Moclans, a species that only urinates once a year, but as longtime viewers of the show already know, what sounds like a joke leads to some fantastic character moments. That’s what makes the series MacFarlane’s greatest trick yet: it’s not a parody; it’s a loving tribute, and as the series goes on, it gets darker, more serious, and may be better than modern Star Trek.

A better version of the worst episodes of TNG

Right in the first scene The Orvilles In the pilot episode, we see MacFarlane as Captain Ed Mercer walking into his house to find his wife in bed with a blue foreign and its blue secretions. Captain James Tiberius Kirk was known for being a womanizer when they were human, Orion, or even a couple in between, so starting with Ed at his lowest, drunk, disorderly, and in danger of losing his job, MacFarlane’s show makes it clear that takes things less seriously than Star Trek sometimes did. The second episode makes this even more clear as it features muscular Moclan Bortus asking who Kermit the Frog is before announcing that he’s incubating an egg, and diminutive security officer Alara saving the day thanks to a reality TV show.

Orville Season 1 contains episodes mocking social media (“majority rule”), one of the worst Star Trek: The Next Generation the episode “The Naked Now” in “Cupid’s Dagger” and the season finale “Mad Idolatry”, a reminder of why Star Trek’s prime directive exists. Star Trek: Into Darkness toyed with the idea of ​​a primitive species seeing the Enterprise take off and starting to worship it, but “Insane Idolatry” went all the way with a planet that gradually enters and exits space, creating a religion based on First Officer Grayson (Adrienne Padalicki, Ed’s ex-wife). It’s both an absurd premise and something that every Trek fan will start thinking about at some point, considering how many alien civilizations Starfleet encounters, so it’s fun to watch it play out, and at this point in the season it’s clear that MacFarlane is a huge Star Trek fan.

Seth MacFarlane in fact, he’s such a big fan of Star Trek that instead of making a comedic version of the classic franchise, he wanted to make another Trek series and use a comedic angle Orville Season 1 as a Trojan horse to get what he really wanted. And it worked. Season 2 ditches the more absurd plots of the first season and replaces them with character-driven drama, including again a top-notch version of the TNG episode with the “Merry Chorus” he makes for the cybernetic Isaac and Dr. Finn what he “In theory” did for Data and Jenne. The difference is that “In Theory” was a one-off, but “A Happy Refrain” not only paid off for a year of character development, but marked a permanent turning point for the characters.

From comedy to emotional punch

On Rotten tomatoesThe Orville Season has a perfect 100% rating among critics, and for good reason, because while it remains entertaining throughout its three seasons, MacFarlane does low-stakes, character-driven episodes better than any writer today. Season 3’s Twice in a Lifetime is considered one of the show’s best episodes, combining time travel with a season 2 callback to create an emotional ending that most science fiction show today can only dream of achieving. If you start watching the series and find it hard to get through the first few episodes, hang in there because if you know where the crew is starting from, it will be all the more satisfying to see where they end up. /

That’s what it ends up doing Orville a work of mad genius that was born out of a love of Star Trek but didn’t conform to the traditions of the franchise. While Star Trek: Discovery was trying to find an audience, Seth MacFarlane was there with his tribute A new generationwhich quietly featured some of the sharpest, most profound, and surprisingly emotional writing of any sci-fi series of the last decade.

Orville currently streaming Disney+ and Hulu.