The Orville was a dumb Star Trek: The Next Generation rip-off that felt like self-insert fanfic. I mean, they didn’t even do a good job filing off the serial numbers. They shamelessly refer to nothing but twentieth-century Earth pop culture like nothing in the past four hundred years made a difference. None of the characters act like they come from a military or a utopia. They’re more obsessed with petty gossip, bar tricks, and sex than exploring the galaxy. One of the episode’s inciting incidents comes from a character dry-humping a statue during a first-contact visit. This guy’s a senior officer.
Seth MacFarlane is a blunt hammer of a writer. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes blunt hammers are good. Especially when it comes to comedy, which MacFarlane is a master at. But when it comes to subtle social commentary like inspirational science fiction is supposed to be, The Orville ain’t it. It’s full of cliches done better by better writers. The questions it does propose are answered unintelligently. It’s like asking “what are your responsibilities to lesser-developed cultures” and you get back a picture from a five-year-old in crayon.
But… for all its faults the show did bring up an interesting issue in the character of Bortus. That question never gets answered in any meaningful way except to force our 20th Century ‘Murican values on a totally different culture. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Bortus is a stand-in for the Klingons. He’s big and tough and stoic, acting as the straight-man for comic relief most of the time. Divorce is done by murder. Break-ups involve yanking out the tooth of your ex and giving it to your next fling. They urinate once a year and make a ritual out of it so all his friends can watch. His planet Moclus is a harsh lifeless environment (to the point where Moclans can eat anything, including rocks). As a result, only the strongest have survived, making their culture all males (they lay eggs and that’s as far as the process of reproduction is discussed)…
…except that some babies are born female. To fix this “birth defect”, the babies have to undergo gender reconstructive surgery to “make them right”. This happens to Bortus with his and his mate’s egg. The Orville crew, with their big-ass hammer of bullheaded self-admiration, do everything in their power to prevent this from happening. But the Moclans’ heads fail to turn around, even when they bring in a female who’s been living as an outcast but wrote the Moclans’ greatest piece of literature, proving “girls can do anything boys can.”
This issue of the Moclans’ parochial views around gender and sexuality comes up a few times in the series. In another episode, Bortus’s partner, who is more congenial than Bortus but has insular conservative views, is framed for murder of a Moclan who likes females. In another, Bortus’s holodeck “simulator” porn addiction leads to a shipwide computer virus. The key piece that they gloss over is that Bortus’s impulses are the result of his resentment over his son’s/daughter’s surgery.
It’s clear that the Moclans as a race are bigoted and prejudicial. They’re very good at “conviction by public opinion”. So the big question The Orville proposes is this–what do you do when you have friends that are part of a culture with values that directly counter your own. What if you have a friend who’s a complete racist, but you need his truck to get to work? Are you compromising your values if you use him? Borrowing his truck isn’t going to make him less racist. But where do you draw the line? It’s an interesting ethical question, one that gets bigger when you’re talking about planets and space and larger scales of humanity. Although The Orville does this with all the subtlety of a boot to the head.
What I think is (based on my constant yelling at the screen) that the Orville’s crew is constantly imposing their views–humanity’s views–on other cultures. And that’s wrong. Talking to your friend is different than trying to get an entire planet, an entire race that’s evolved and developed from a totally different situation than you, to follow your “right” ways. With your racist friend, you’re just trying to impart values everyone should share, those of human decency and rights.
“I don’t know how to explain to you why you should care about other people.”
Lauren Morrill
But Moclus isn’t across the street from you. They had to evolve so hard that they used to be a two-gender species and then phased that out. They spent hundreds of thousands of years developing their culture and it’s worked for them. It’s at least got them to a comparable civilization/technological level to humans. Forcing them to “stop it” is equivalent to telling your Muslim employee he can’t fast during Ramadan because it might affect his work performance.
In America, we consider certain things as “birth defects” another culture might treasure. Or another culture might be disgusted by. No one knows how an alien species would react to a cleft palate or an unformed limb. They might see it as an honor because in their bible, people with missing limbs are holy. They have different views when it comes to what’s “wrong” and what’s “evil”. The scariest things in our culture (spiders, snakes, rats, deformity, the dark, blood, disease, heights) might not be so in another culture. Spiders certainly aren’t evil–they’re actually helpful by getting rid of pests. If they developed good sanitation, rats might not have become a disease vector for them. The Krill (another enemy race) certainly don’t have a fear of the dark (they evolved on a sunless planet, so bright light kills them). We have no right to condemn another species for what they believe is good and what’s evil.
There’s no Prime Directive in this universe so the crew freely interferes with all kinds of planets and keeps fucking them up. They accidentally install their first officer as a Jesus figure on one planet, corrupting their culture for thousands of years. They get their engineer arrested on another because he acts like a dumbass. Yes, Star Trek does this all the time, but at least it’s inadvertant. At least they have a rule in place that says “do not do this, there are ramifications for it”.
Of course, The Orville answers this dumbly. What’s our solution? Force our values onto a planet that we clearly knew had this problem going in. You’d think after X number of years of alliance their hang-ups about strict sexual preferences would come up. You’d think they wouldn’t be a mystery to Captain Mercer who has one on his crew. If he wasn’t a childish idiot, he would have done research on all the alien species serving in his crew to make sure everything’s culturally kosher? I mean, think of the sensitivity training corporations have to do today. Now multiply that by all the races in Star Wars.
Here’s a bigger question. How did a planet with such radically different ways gain an affiliation with the Planetary Union? Is everyone on the USS Orville just an idiot (legitimate question) and the legislators know what’s up? (i.e. they make the hard decisions so the peons don’t have to.)
