Baron Of Hell

In that episode Wesley jumped into a flowerbed which was marked do not step in by a white fence. All crime on the planet held a death sentence. The only similarity would be that you could die for minor reasons. The episode was called Justice.

I'm currently rewatching TNG.

General Zod

And it got all our hopes up..

JTH182

Apparently you're not familiar with the multiverse hypothesis.

Red Dog

Eric F

I loved them trashing American Idol now that it's being revived on a different network.

Bill Needle

This sucked. Mostly because it was such a blatant and lazy rip-off of Black Mirror, and also because it wasn't done remotely as well.

Also, curious to know how the Orville ended up staffed by so many judgmental douchebags. It seems to be a major theme of the show...shitting on every culture they encounter based on 10 minutes of interaction.

Tom Banjo

I love a good alternate reality/multiverse story, actually. I don’t see what has to do with the parallel civilization development going on here, though.

Eric F

The TOS episode Bread and Circuses had a similar premise.

Draven

I liked it. I thought it was interesting to NOT start the episode on the Orville. I'm sure there are examples in the Trek universe of that but it sort of made it feel like a different show (in a good way).

hdnmickey

She was super hot. That opening scene in bed! And we got a return of the Agent T-Shirt version of Padalecki.

The Crusher episode was the first thing I thought of. I remember thinking, "Let him die!".

But just like the last one, I felt all their joke making on the mission really destroys any chance of the plot being taken seriously. They need to find a good mix of realistically fitting on the mission in while making jokes to each other.

movieguru

The whole point system in this episode as well as Black Mirror has some flaws in the "point system". In the Orville system, they only seemed to care about the down votes and not the upvotes. Also the guy was still only 4 points away from hitting the 10 million. Couldn't he easily have recieved four more within hours and be right back where he was? He yelled at and insulted the security in the room right after he was freed. He could have gotten two right there.

The other thing with both the shows. Famous people would not last long. Rush Limbaugh would quickly get 10 million down votes by non Republicans. Same with people on "reality" tv shows, etc.

milo bloom

This definitely feels like TOS. The way the system was portrayed might not stand up to a lot of scrutiny but it’s still a great story that needed to be told.

I might have made John’s crime a little less conspicuous, something a little less flamboyant might have helped sell it a little better.

But still it really felt like a TOS episode done with TNG production. Last week’s episode of Discovery was the first episode that truly felt like Trek but Orville continues to hit it every time.

Guess i should look up this Black Mirror stuff...

JTH182

They literally said in the episode that because of how vast the universe is, that some civilizations mirrored each other (paraphrased). The definition of an infinite universe.

Tom Banjo

Dude it’s still all within one universe. This has jack shit to do with multiverse theory.

windom

How can someone on the crew not be familiar with the concept of money even if their society doesn't use it?

PhantomStranger

As someone that hasn't seen Black Mirror, the episode was interesting. I bet the actress that had the featured guest role will be a lead on some CW show sooner or later.

Jay G.

The TNG episode "First Contact" starts with a hospital scene on an alien world. It also shares some other similarities, such as the Enterprise needing to rescue a crew member that had been monitoring the alien world without revealing themselves to the world, and deciding to take one member of the alien world back to the ship to get their help.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_...xt_Generation)


Black Mirror at least focused on the aggregate score, which can change. Focusing only on the downvotes made it a sort of permanent record that appears would make you a social pariah, even if you don't get conditioned. As it is, though, while John could still get more than 10 million down votes, it's outside the time frame of the "trial," so he wouldn't get in trouble for it, which makes me wonder if he's just permanently untouchable now, of if he has to get another million downvotes (total 11 million) before he gets into trouble again (and then has to stay under 20 million).

Maybe if John had been in the negative in aggregate points, then we would've seen the score slow down, stop, and reverse.

It was also unclear how many times a single person could downvote you, it seemed like only once per person. Could you later change your vote? For Black Mirror, the points seemed to be awarded per interaction.

The guest actor, Giorgia Whigham, already landed a role on the rebooted third season of Scream: The TV Series on MTV:
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm7939956/

dhmac

I just watched the Black Mirror episode "Nosedive" to compare and, although the basic concepts depicted are similar, I think the perspectives are very different.

The Orville episode is focused on the "Tyranny of the Masses" aspect of social media ("Majority Rule" is such a perfect title for the episode) and the "lynch mob"-ish way something going viral can ruining a person's life literally overnight. But the Black Mirror episode was focused more on the "class structure" such a society would create and just how shallow and superficial it would be.

Both episodes are good with thoughtful social commentary. My only nitpicks for each show...

movieguru

They did this in Star Trek as well. In Star Trek IV the crew seemed unfamiliar with 'money", yet in Star Trek VI, Scotty said "Suits me fine. I just bought a bought". Even if they are not familiar with physical money (as our own society won't in another decade or two at best), they would need to have some system to aquire goods and services. Even in Star Trek there were some mebers of Earth better off than others so it wasn't like everyone was supplied the same amount of resources and assets regardless of what job they had.

GuessWho

We still need to get to planet where Alara can go undercover like

JTH182

Even if it's just one universe, it's infinite, which means there are infinite worlds. The theory is that eventually there will be worlds that resemble each other. I don't see what the issue is here.

mphtrilogy

Any show that makes you think these days, and has a laugh along the way, is a good thing imho.

This was def a black mirror ep rip off, bit I didn't care, it was still a good ep.

bunkaroo

I had never given Black Mirror a look but was aware of the show. All the talk in here has me ready to check it out so maybe it's a good thing McFarlane ripped it off?

chowderhead

General Zod

This is basically my take on it. I mean the BM episode was awesome because I think we can all imagine something like that actually happening (or already happening.. please don't downvote me!). This episode of Orville took it to the next level but obviously built on the same premise.

Overall I did enjoy the episode. Although having LaMarr acting like 2nd grader instead of a union officer was unfunny crappy writing - even for this show. There was plenty of other things he could have done more innocently that was unknowingly against the law/taboo in that culture.