Subspace Review: The Orville Episode 1 - "Old Wounds"

The Orville is going into it's furth week on air and I finally have a chance to sit down and consider just what we are getting.

Also of note, this week continues the shows move from Sunday to Thursdays. And I can't hate the change as that last week my DVRing of the show left we with only the first 10 minutes of the show. (Luckily it is available via streaming with some cable services and it is on Hulu and iTunes. So check it out if you haven't yet.

This opening episode, as with all pilots, is given the duty to establish the premise of the series, introduce the characters, and then start events moving. It is a simple story, but there's a reason since The Next Generation all Trek pilots are 2 hours longs. This first episode chose to work with just one hour. So it gets us into space, meeting an alien threat, and using some tech tech and quick thinking to save the day. It's a quick run jaunt. I'm sorry so people felt jilted by the episode, apparently.

It's the age we live in. We all eagerly await the Chance. We all eagerly await to chance to be hyped and find that next Binge Series or Put Bacon In It Trend. The chance to be affronted, to be offended, to be insulted that it's remake or re-imagining or another of a genre or dares have a given style. We wait for enough Internet Avatars to get weirdly pissed about a show or movie.

Trek was lucky up to Enterprise in how nascent social media was. Even for that show it was limited, mostly BBS threads. But, going back to TNG, I can only imagine the experience online is Twitter had been around when that show started. It would have been savage, brutal, and cruel. Suffice to say, I'm just tired of riding these damn hate trains.

So let's get to know the show!


The premise.

The Orville is a series that borrows heavily from Star Trek, which isn't a bad idea seeing as that's a 50 years old ongoing interest. The show takes place 400 years in the future in an utopian period of a flourishing Earth that is part of a grand galactic union of worlds and peoples.

At the same time, with it's humor, crass moments, human foibles, and New York setting in the first episode, I also flash to Futurama. It's weird to me how I've seen so few reference the similarity. If you hear about a scifi series with a comedic bent, you should have Futurama come to mind, especially with how heavily it borrowed from Star Trek itself.