There Is Room for Both 'The Orville' and 'Star Trek: Discovery'

Recently, two similar shows in The Orville and Star Trek: Discovery made their debuts on TV.  The fascinating timing makes perpetual comparisons and a sense of competition inevitable.  It can’t be helped.  It’s simply ingrained in the DNA of geek culture.  Nonetheless, enjoying both is not something impossible.

The Orville is what critics dismissed as the inferior of the two.  However, I will urge anybody who wants to give the show a chance to not believe the negative reviews.  Evaluate it yourselves.  In my opinion, the consensus of critics got it wrong.

When I watched the pilot, I also wasn’t quite sure what to make of it.  I did have the feeling of being underwhelmed and disappointed.  But this was due to finding it entirely different from pre-existing expectations.  During its promotional stage, it was packaged as a Seth MacFarlane-created Star Trek parody, and it led to some assumptions.  First, with MacFarlane involved, I thought it would feature his trademark “no holds barred” humor.  Second, Galaxy Quest comes to mind.

It was pretty PG, and it’s not really a parody.  I thought it would have a relentless barrage of jokes – a sort of sitcom in a Star Trek-esque setting.  I was expecting for comedy to be the centerpiece of the show.  But it turned out being more of a sci-fi drama that happens to have jokes in it.  In other words, it’s closer to a homage to old-school Star Trek than a parody.

Once I got over the surprise of it turning out differently from what I expected, and ceased unfairly assessing it by how it holds up against Galaxy Quest – which is simply smarter and more delightful, for it’s a masterpiece – I found The Orville to be clever and fun in its own right.  And I only grew to like it more and more with each new episode.

In it, Seth MacFarlane plays a rising officer named Ed Mercer who one day catches his wife Kelly (Adrianne Palicki) cheating on him with a blue alien.  Since then, his performance in his duties suffered and his career takes a downward spiral.  However, a year after discovering his wife’s infidelity, he’s given the opportunity to redeem himself when he’s been made captain of the U.S.S. Orville (ECV-197), a mid-level exploratory ship.  Just as Ed has begun to feel good about himself, a bombshell hit: the first officer assigned to the ship is Kelly.  The ex-couple then must learn to put their differences aside and work as a team for the success of the mission.

But more than just dealing with what’s going on between its two central characters, The Orville is first and foremost a transparent attempt to bring back classic Star Trek – particularly the spirit of the original show and The Next Generation – on TV.  And, in my opinion, it mostly succeeds in channeling the essential tropes, optimistic tone, the slight camp, and narrative style of Star Trek.   It’s not as gorgeous looking as Discovery, but its production design, effects, and visuals are decent enough.  In fact, the simpler aesthetics only makes its Star Trek allusions stronger and more endearing.

Meanwhile, though Star Trek: Discovery actually belongs to the franchise and universe of the property that The Orville is referencing, it’s ironically the one that feels “off.”  It’s because its aim is to be an entirely different animal from what Star Trek is known for.

The most noticeable difference from previous Star Trek shows is that the central character is not a starship captain.  Instead, the main perspective of the plot is through a human raised by Sarek (Spock’s father) on the ways of the Vulcan culture named Michael Burhnam (Sonequa Martin-Green), the first officer of USS Shenzhou, whose mutinous actions fail to stop a war between the Federation and the Klingon Empire from erupting.  Six months after being court-martialed, she’s brought into the USS Discovery by its enigmatic captain, Gabriel Lorca (Jason Isaacs), who then asks her assistance in developing technology that could help them win the war.

Unlike The Orville, I didn’t have pre-existing expectations for Star Trek: Discovery that turned out to be false.  It was clear from its promotion that it’s not going to be a Star Trek show in a traditional sense, and that the implicit intention of its vision is to make a mark in the age of revolutionary, complex, epic shows like Game of Thrones.  I immediately liked it.  The only initial issues I had to get over with were pretty minor, like the annoyance of having a female character named “Michael”, which somewhat feels PC/SJW bullcrap; the ugly redesign of the Klingons; and the lack of clarity of where the story falls in the continuity – whether it’s part of the Prime timeline or the Abrams’ Kelvin reboot.

Maybe I’m easily accommodating of Discovery because I’m not really a die-hard Star Trek fan.  I enjoyed the movies, and Deep Space Nine was one of my favorite TV shows back then.  But I was never a fan of the other TV shows, especially the original, as I found it really cheesy.   However, I understand that Star Trek has the most obsessed and nitpicky fandom in the world (these hardcore fans hated the J.J. Abrams’ reboot movies), and I’m sure the paradigm shift is a turn off to them.  There’s a significant preference for a quieter, more philosophical, more conventional Star Trek show, and Discovery’s cinematic style, dark tone, focus on spectacle, and other quintessential variations will certainly trigger many Trekkies.  But, for me, these new characteristics propel Star Trek into a seemingly exciting and fresh direction.

In conclusion, both shows have their own unique merits.  The Orville brings the light-hearted romp; Star Trek: Discover brings the weighty and gritty.  The Orville brings something comfortably familiar; Star Trek: Discover brings something audaciously novel.  The Orville is hopeful; Star Trek: Discovery is cynical.  And they’re sort of complementary in their differences – worth to be watched side by side each week.