Star Trek - Space: The Final Frontier

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I got to S3E8 of The Orville and forgot how retarded it was.

Haveena had one task as part of her official diplomatic agreement with the Moclans: stop smuggling Moclan females off of Moclus. The Union sacrificed a ton of political capital to get this and Haveena's first move as the leader of a precarious colony is... to violate her diplomatic agreement and continue smuggling Moclan females off of Moclus. Then, in service to this blatant breach of a diplomatic agreement preventing her colony's utter destruction, she deliberately enlists the aid of a child because she knows that child has access to better communications technology than she does. Captain Mercer berates Haveena for this, rightly so (which is not explored again in the rest of the episode), but Haveena refuses to testify before the Union Council, thus ensuring a child's death, as well as ensuring her network will be compromised and her colony will be seized in violation of aforementioned diplomatic agreement.

It isn't until a hologram of Dolly Parton convinces her to do the right thing. Even then, she pulls a Curly from Hey Arnold!:


She flat out tells the Union Council she did it, she doesn't care that she did it, she'd do it again, and she didn't care that it endangered the child of a Union officer until the hologram of a long-dead country music star convinced her. Haveena demonstrates to the Union that she:
  • will flagrantly violate diplomatic agreements
  • is openly revolutionary and does not care or understand that you can't do that as part of a larger political alliance
  • will sacrifice children for her revolutionary goals
  • can be convinced to do something based on a hologram
How does the Union respond? They reward Haveena by expelling her enemies from the Union and making her colony a Union protectorate. This is not revisited in the rest of Season 3, which continues its morality play with the Moclans. Granted, the Moclans made the mistake of not informing the Union of their suspicions about Haveena and then torturing a child, but the entire thing is Haveena's fault.

The hardest part for me is the automatic expectation that, in Season 4, Haveena will face no consequences for this. Her planet will be all hunky dory, an all-female utopia, nothing to see here, no insane child-sacrificing revolutionary leader, ain't nobody here but us chickens.

At least they reckoned with Isaac's actions in Season 2 at the beginning of Season 3, so there's a glimmer of hope.
 
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Curzon Dax-sama said:
That comparison is insulting to Tolkien, and you know it. Whedon is objectively a shit writer, simple as.
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I'm not comparing Whedon to Tolkien in quality, I'm saying that for both, condemn the man for what he's guilty of, not what his imitators ripped off. (Now Tolkien just happens to be largely flawless as a writer.)

Dragged Into Sunlight said:
Also, did they ever offer up any sort of explanation for Alexander's advanced aging? Because I dont remember them acknowledging it even once on either of the shows. Picard is such a faggot in the Reunion episode. Duras came onto your ship and murdered a Federation ambassador and you're going to cry because your security officer went down and avenged her within Klingon law? Pathetic.
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Ok so now you have my autism going...

Alexandar showed up in S4 Reunion, after being conceived in the S2 episode "The Emissary." So that would put him at 2 years old. In S6, DS9 had a crossover with TNG with the episode "Birthright." Given that lines up with the DS9 S1 episode "Q-Less" that means Alexander would be 6 now when DS9 begins. His next appearance would be the DS9 S6 episode "Sons and Daughters" which means... he would have been 12 years old.

Which... yeah I could see Klingons employing 12 year olds on their starships. Would explain a lot of things, actually.

Captain Syrup said:
I love how these W&H guys just respawn :story:
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I'm starting to wonder if you actually watch these shows. They state in Angel, multiple times, that the Wolfram and Hart contracts are so binding, you have to keep working even after death. It's literally stated in the scene you posted an image from:

The time he locked the doors on the bloodsuckers (and the vampires) was stone cold.

And this is also what I mean by Whedon does have real writing talent that his imitators don't. The line is a direct quote-back to something the old guy said earlier to Angel in the story, and it's played dead serious here. A quip that isn't played for laughs but for chills. Not for the villains' lives, but for the hero's soul.

Hey Johnny Bravo said:
Haveena had one task as part of her official diplomatic agreement with the Moclans: stop smuggling Moclan females off of Moclus. The Union sacrificed a ton of political capital to get this and Haveena's first move as the leader of a precarious colony is... to violate her diplomatic agreement and continue to smuggle Moclan females off of Moclus. Then, in service to this blatant breach of a diplomatic agreement preventing her colony's utter destruction, she deliberately enlists the aid of a child because she knows that child has access to better communications technology than she does. Captain Mercer berates Haveena for this, rightly so (which is not explored again in the rest of the episode), but Haveena refuses to testify before the Union Council, thus ensuring a child's death, as well as ensuring her network will be compromised and her colony will be seized in violation of aforementioned diplomatic agreement.
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The Moclans is one of my biggest hangups with the Orville. If it's a single-sex race, then they're not "all male." If they're forcibly transitioning females so that they are actually "all male", then how in the world can they possibly reproduce? If they've figured out artificial incubation to produce eggs to continue to make more Moclans, then how in the world have they not figured out yet how to automatically select for only male embryos and not even have to bother with forced transitions???

It's like my issue with Blade Runner 2099 (or whatever the number) - how can you have the technology to implant and view memories, and NOT be able to have breeding replicants? We have breeding now on earth, with our technology, and can't even come close to that level of mind tech. Like it's a bunch of writers who understand tech so little they can't understand that in order to get to one solution you show the subject having, they would HAVE to pass over and solve what you say is a problem.

(and this often bugs me in the reverse when I talk with some people who have the opposite problem and believe if someone has solved one thing, they should have the solutions to others - when fields might be completely unrelated)
 
Flexo said:
It's like my issue with Blade Runner 2099 (or whatever the number) - how can you have the technology to implant and view memories, and NOT be able to have breeding replicants? We have breeding now on earth, with our technology, and can't even come close to that level of mind tech. Like it's a bunch of writers who understand tech so little they can't understand that in order to get to one solution you show the subject having, they would HAVE to pass over and solve what you say is a problem.
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It's what happens when the writers want a particular impression or outcome without stress-testing the common sense of their premise. I think the first episode with Topa's forced transition made the universe more interesting. Season 3 was borderline preachy. At least Captain Mercer chastised Haveena and then screamed at Malloy to shut the fuck up. I guess. I'm hoping Season 4 is less stupid but I'm not going to cry here if it does.
 
Flexo said:
I'm starting to wonder if you actually watch these shows.
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You and half the site.

Hey Johnny Bravo said:
It's what happens when the writers want a particular impression or outcome without stress-testing the common sense of their premise. I think the first episode with Topa's forced transition made the universe more interesting. Season 3 was borderline preachy. At least Captain Mercer chastised Haveena and then screamed at Malloy to shut the fuck up. I guess. I'm hoping Season 4 is less stupid but I'm not going to cry here if it does.
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Season 3 has a lot of issues. The Union fleet suddenly spawning thousands of capital ships out of nowhere was one of the more egregious moments.
 
Hey Johnny Bravo said:
It's what happens when the writers want a particular impression or outcome without stress-testing the common sense of their premise. I think the first episode with Topa's forced transition made the universe more interesting. Season 3 was borderline preachy. At least Captain Mercer chastised Haveena and then screamed at Malloy to shut the fuck up. I guess. I'm hoping Season 4 is less stupid but I'm not going to cry here if it does.
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TBH, the whole Moclan storyline turned me off the show. The species was a literal joke in the initial comedy pilot (hehe, the warrior race are all gays!), and then they tried to shoehorn some contradictory social commentary on gender conformity and feminism into them as the show heel-turned into a more conventional sci-fi drama. It was all dumb, forced, and poorly written.

To be fair through, the kind of non-sensical moral un-reasoning that leads the Union to reward a terrorist's crimes and kick out a key member world (during an existential war with the Kaylon) is exactly the kind of stupidity that Brannon Braga would come up with. So again, Orville is the only real Trek produced since Enterprise.
 
Dragged Into Sunlight said:
On subsequent rewatches of DS9 I really started hating Kira and the Bajorans and more and more understanding the Cardassians and Dukat. Man, the Bajorans sucked.
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Ro > Kira. There, I said LE THING™.

In all seriousness, tho... I would have loved to see Li Nalas going full Caesar or Mussolini during the Circle arc in the sense of "Listen up, faggots. I'm tired of this shit, but my homeland is in the hands of absolute cunts, so excuse me while I do a little military putsch to throw them out" rather than the "I'm just tired, please kill me at the earliest convenience, I'm a character that has zero impact on anything, lol" we got.

None of the Bajoran characters that were hyped up to be good guys had the necessary charisma and aura to pull it off. Kira came across as a feisty space-terrorism commie far too often, which is tiresome after three and a half seasons. Li Nalas was a poor man's version of Yang Wen-Li and lacked the military exploits Yang at least had. Vedek Bareil had the charisma of a door mat. Shakaar was basically Biden on valium. Their bad guys had more interesting things going on.

Winn was a powerhungry Stalinist-type that could have survived the USSR's polit bureau bullshit. Jaro Skeletor had a lot of potential to become a real threat to Starfleet's presence by being a scheming manipulator in his own right. But when the chips fell down, he just... disappeared into the fucking void, never to be seen again.

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But in the end none of them mattered. Dukat could have done nothing and still won because he was much more effective than either and all of them.
 
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