Even if I only know him from Red Dwarf (twenty-five flippin' years ago), I still spotted him right off the bat. So I like to think Red Dwarf was the main reason he was cast. A lovely subtle nod to another TV show blending sci-fi and comedy. The iconic one, really, even if not mixing the two defining traits in even vaguely similar measures.
She put a formal reprimand on his file for covering for Kelly's fuckup. Then she told him not to interfere with the planet any more - just observe.
Mercer then proceeded to reveal his entire party to the planet's religious leaders and leave his most technologically advanced crew member behind with the express intent of "course-correcting" the planet's civilization over the course of the next 700 years.
That's... that's much worse than what she initially reprimanded him for.
Isaac staying was a pretty solid idea (even if only for the sheer efficiency of him being able to get 700 years of data in 11 days, which would be awesome for him and his people), but pretty much everything leading to that point was really unnecessarily dumb. They've got sensors that can detect people from space, super-telescopes, and synthesizer technology; there was absolutely zero reason for anybody to just run off after landing instead of waiting twenty minutes to re-equip via another shuttle (or, hell, just stay at the damn shuttle and wait). Instead Kelly runs off and bumps into people in like five minutes (despite looking right at the people-detecting device that would warn her way ahead of time), then really really screws things up by using space magic on a kid who just has a bump on the head (instead of doing the obvious thing, which was making sure the kid was fine and then immediately leaving). Then they double-screw-up things by re-re-visiting the planet at a point in development when the truth wouldn't matter to anybody, couldn't be proved except to one person, and wouldn't be able to spread anyway because nobody would believe it.
Just have the dang shuttle crash-land in a village or something, instead of doing a bad job trying to force some drama with Kelly wanting to fix things and the Union brass saying no. Kelly heals up her crew member, heals up some locals hurt in the crash, and then there is a hell of a lot more reason for her appearance and actions to be an actual spectacle. Union brass gives the okay to visit on the second appearance to determine the extent of the "contamination" (where Kelly finds out she's a deity now), and the third appearance maybe has them trying to fix the problem but with Union backing. And the final appearance goes with a big push by Isaac's government for him to go down, instead of more breaking rules.
Those are all good, sensible ideas, and I fear they run smack up against the goals of comedy, which often require people to act non-sensibly.
(There are uncounted hours of sitcoms that could be eliminated if one or more persons had simply explained things, fully and clearly, at the right moment. This is neither a new or uncommon observation. The genre literally runs on stupidity, misunderstanding, miscommunication, and bad decisions.)
If you don't want to watch people being idiots, failing to communicate or understand each other, and working against their own best interests, don't watch comedy.
(Or politics.)
Those are all good, sensible ideas, and I fear they run smack up against the goals of comedy, which often require people to act non-sensibly.
(There are uncounted hours of sitcoms that could be eliminated if one or more persons had simply explained things, fully and clearly, at the right moment. This is neither a new or uncommon observation. The genre literally runs on stupidity, misunderstanding, miscommunication, and bad decisions.)
If you don't want to watch people being idiots, failing to communicate or understand each other, and working against their own best interests, don't watch comedy.
(Or politics.)
The trouble I had with that episode - and what I think @Ninja Snarl P is talking about - is contrivance. That's distinct from miscommunication and misunderstanding generally.
I don't always care for its brand of comedy, but The Good Place is a current example. Its characters have in-universe reasons for the secrets they do and don't keep. I think Brooklyn Nine-Nine is pretty good too, but I can't recall if they've always been consistent about it.
My least favorite part of this episode was Mercer deciding that it was D'Relio's pheromones that led to Kelly cheating on him, when in previous episodes Kelly had clearly listed the multiple reasons for her cheating. Seemed like a huge cop out when would have genuinely been more interesting for Mercer to get over himself, realize the mistakes he has made in the past, and forgiven Kelly on his own.
My least favorite part of this episode was Mercer deciding that it was D'Relio's pheromones that led to Kelly cheating on him, when in previous episodes Kelly had clearly listed the multiple reasons for her cheating. Seemed like a huge cop out when would have genuinely been more interesting for Mercer to get over himself, realize the mistakes he has made in the past, and forgiven Kelly on his own.
That didn't bother me much at all
I've listened to people give many many totally plausible sounding reasons why they cheated on someone months and even years after the fact when the truth is they just fucked up because of alcohol/high/just happened to be horny enough and holy shit though no you don't understand this person was fucking gorgeous
Guilt is a hell of a thing and the human capacity for justification is as well
Kelly's opinion on it was, "Well, it's... generous of you to think that." She doesn't believe it, but if it'll get Mercer to get over himself it's a starting point at least.
Kelly's opinion on it was, "Well, it's... generous of you to think that." She doesn't believe it, but if it'll get Mercer to get over himself it's a starting point at least.
And the justification didn't matter, in the end.
Even if they reconciled, Ed and Kelly can't be together because that is a huge liability on a military vessel. Maybe if Kelly gets her own ship, or if Ed retires, or something of that nature, but until then, them being together is a violation of protocol... and a really bad idea, for reasons that we saw in this episode.
I wonder if Mercer will be in deep shit next season or if it'll all just get glossed over.
He did still hand them a pristine enemy warship and shuttle, so I suspect he's still on their good side. Besides, they keep showing how laid back people are, hopefully that includes the admiralty.
I wonder if Mercer will be in deep shit next season or if it'll all just get glossed over.
He did still hand them a pristine enemy warship and shuttle, so I suspect he's still on their good side. Besides, they keep showing how laid back people are, hopefully that includes the admiralty.
The Union is business casual enough that Ed can call up the admiral and be all like "WTF BRO? You only hired me because my ex-wife told you to? Fuck that noise!" and not get his ass reamed.
Ah, it stinks, it sucks, it's anthropologically unjust
Yeah, the dressing down Ed got from the admiral came off to me as “dammit now I’ve got to yell at you because this is too big to ignore but we are too short on captains and honestly I’ve got other shit on my plate so just stop screwing up in ways that force me to notice please.”
I thought I'd hate Orville, given the ads. I like Family Guy, but Star Trek + Family Guy sounded like a fucking disaster.
But turns out... This is actually serious science fiction.
In a way, this is almost more authentic than Star Trek. The characters feel real. The humor of the show lets them just be themselves.
The vision of the future feels more reachable in this show than any Star Trek show.
I'm loving it so far. (Just finished ep 4)
It's Star Trek without the bullshit humanity is a utopia now baggage
I dunno if that's baggage? Like, the hopeful optimism of Star Trek is one of the things I love about it.
Also humanity seems fairly utopian in Orville? They don't have money, have matter replication, etc.
I think he means the part where Star Trek humanity seems to have become an almost completely lobotomized squeaky-clean version of itself. A better future means people understanding the shortcomings of themselves and others and working towards being better, not a near-total lack of much of what makes people human.
A huge key difference to me is that the people on the Orville are there to work and like what they do, but they are not their jobs. They aren't obsessing over their work every waking minute and never really go off-duty, whereas Star Trek folks are hardly ever even out of uniform at any time of day.
Everyone in Star Trek is so boooring, it wasn't until DS9 that people looked like they were even doing fun holodeck programs
Exactly. Even then, O'Brien was just about the only "regular" person in the crew, and about the only physical indication of anybody having hobbies outside of work was the Alamo model he and Julian built.
Just because it's a post-consumer society doesn't people wouldn't want things, they'd just want things with some actual personal value to them. Star Trek quarters are more like sterile prison cells than places where people live.
+6
minor incidentexpert in a dying fieldnjRegistered Userregular
Ed's Kermit doll alone shows more personality to his quarters than like 90% of Star Trek characters show.
Ah, it stinks, it sucks, it's anthropologically unjust
Roddenberry had some unrealistic ideas about human conflict. He put humanity on a huge pedestal that in reality is completely unrealistic, even in a future utopia. The Orville just simply cuts out that nonsense, but keeps the post-scarcity, science is valued, utopia.
Everyone in Star Trek is so boooring, it wasn't until DS9 that people looked like they were even doing fun holodeck programs
Exactly. Even then, O'Brien was just about the only "regular" person in the crew, and about the only physical indication of anybody having hobbies outside of work was the Alamo model he and Julian built.
Just because it's a post-consumer society doesn't people wouldn't want things, they'd just want things with some actual personal value to them. Star Trek quarters are more like sterile prison cells than places where people live.
there was a loooooot of off duty stuff and other hobbies in DS9 yo. and I never exactly paid heaps of attention to their quarters but they had some personality in them as well. heck, Sisko had the baseball on his desk and that thing was pretty significant fairly often
but like, I get the notion that humanity was kinda boring and unrealistically calm in TOS and TNG but DS9 breaks that down a whole lot and, I guess with it being my favourite trek series, it makes me think of humanity as being more complex in the star trek setting
Part of it, simply, is that props and wardrobe cost money, and Trek has always been chronically short of that, because they spend it all on the SFX and spectacle for the A-plot.
Everyone in Star Trek is so boooring, it wasn't until DS9 that people looked like they were even doing fun holodeck programs
Exactly. Even then, O'Brien was just about the only "regular" person in the crew, and about the only physical indication of anybody having hobbies outside of work was the Alamo model he and Julian built.
Just because it's a post-consumer society doesn't people wouldn't want things, they'd just want things with some actual personal value to them. Star Trek quarters are more like sterile prison cells than places where people live.
there was a loooooot of off duty stuff and other hobbies in DS9 yo. and I never exactly paid heaps of attention to their quarters but they had some personality in them as well. heck, Sisko had the baseball on his desk and that thing was pretty significant fairly often
but like, I get the notion that humanity was kinda boring and unrealistically calm in TOS and TNG but DS9 breaks that down a whole lot and, I guess with it being my favourite trek series, it makes me think of humanity as being more complex in the star trek setting
Yeah I was speaking more to TNG for sure and don't get me wrong I love me some TNG.
Honestly I never even realized there was a sense of tranquility in Star Trek that rings kinda false me to until watching this show but a few episodes in it kinda dawned on me that hold on wait a minute. I think it's exactly the reason DS9 always felt off to me as Star Trek but in a good way if that makes sense.
One other thought about something I love about the show:
I love that we have a black guy on a Star Trek-like-show who actually acts like a regular ordinary black guy. (I'm finding it hard to find the right words to express what I mean here, speaking as a white person... not saying that, say, Sisko didn't act black, just like.... fuck what do I mean exactly. I mean that the Orville officer whose name I forget feels more like the black dudes I know in real life, and Sisko feels more like Obama. I don't know if that makes sense.)
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
In a round-about way you're saying something I agree with; The Orville is like Star Trek but with normal people. They are not the Übermensch, just above average to average folks doing their job and enjoying their life.
Note though that the Enterprise was pretty much the pride of Starfleet, one of the most powerful vessels in the entirety of the federation and under the command if its most reknowned captain, and the crew reflects that.
Most of them being very career driven.
The Orville on the other hand isn't quite bottom of the barrel, but it's not far above it either. It's a captains first posting (and the posting of a captain who barely even got a ship at all) and the Orvilles crew definitely reflect that.
The crew is pretty much a mix of rookies, oddballs and slackers.
"The western world sips from a poisonous cocktail: Polarisation, populism, protectionism and post-truth"
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
Note though that the Enterprise was pretty much the pride of Starfleet, one of the most powerful vessels in the entirety of the federation and under the command if its most reknowned captain, and the crew reflects that.
Most of them being very career driven.
The Orville on the other hand isn't quite bottom of the barrel, but it's not far above it either. It's a captains first posting (and the posting of a captain who barely even got a ship at all) and the Orvilles crew definitely reflect that.
The crew is pretty much a mix of rookies, oddballs and slackers.
Meanwhile Voyager was on a mission that by design couldn't be fucked up that badly (the only people who were going to get killed unnecessarily had been declared terrorists by all the major powers and literally nobody would have raised a fuss if Janeway ended up killing them all except other people who had been declared terrorists by everyone else), and was still full of the same kind of people. I mean, Harry Kim, the least accomplished major character in any Star Trek series (and I'm including Travis "I've been in space" Mayweather) could still take previously unobserved exotic particle interactions from the speculative level to the military application practical level with less than two minutes of mental calculations, done during a high stress combat situation.
The only member of the Orville cast that's been able to do that is Isaac, and in one of the cases even the most competent members of the crew straight up admitted that only Yaphit could even figure out where to start implementing the idea. In Star Trek Enterprise, the xenolinguistics translator could have done that from the transporter room.
They're clearly all far better educated than any person today, but you rarely see any of them with a workable understanding outside of their own field the way you often do in Star Trek. For example, Voyager encounters an anomaly, the science officer states the proper name for it, and the cook says, "I thought those were only theoretical! The gravimetric distortions would be far more than any starship's engines could handle." Same thing happens on Orville, and everyone who's not a science officer says, "Ok, that's a lot of words, but what is it?"
DS9 is somewhat closer to Orville in this respect, because they usually didn't do the same thing with the non-Starfleet crew, and there were a few special cases in the Starfleet crew, like Dax's past lives and Bashir's augmented brain. So the same thing happens on DS9, Dax and Bashir say, "Yes, I know all about those!" O'Brien says, "Oh! Yes! We saw one of those on the Enterprise. I don't know what happened because I was in the transporter room," and Sisko says, "I don't care what it's called, just tell me where it keeps its balls so I can punch it in them."
Hevach on
+6
minor incidentexpert in a dying fieldnjRegistered Userregular
That's all actually one of the reasons I also like Discovery a lot. They also do a great job of humanizing the cast, as well, but in a very different way than The Orville. Granted, I never really watched DS9, but Orville and Discovery seem to do a better job of portraying their crews as regular humans (just, brilliant scientists with demanding naval specialties, in the case of Disco, versus the rookie slacker oddballs of Orville) who just happen to crew a space ship for 40 to 60 hours a week.
Ah, it stinks, it sucks, it's anthropologically unjust
Note though that the Enterprise was pretty much the pride of Starfleet, one of the most powerful vessels in the entirety of the federation and under the command if its most reknowned captain, and the crew reflects that.
Most of them being very career driven.
The Orville on the other hand isn't quite bottom of the barrel, but it's not far above it either. It's a captains first posting (and the posting of a captain who barely even got a ship at all) and the Orvilles crew definitely reflect that.
The crew is pretty much a mix of rookies, oddballs and slackers.
The thing that perpetually irritates me about Trek is that everybody is seems to have a graduate degree in everything, then knows a ton about their own field on top of that. It's that really awful trope where being intelligent is equated with knowing everything without having to actually study it, and it's everywhere in Trek.
I spent four intensive years of study getting a graduate and undergraduate degree in molecular biology and that shit is hard, especially considering it was actually a five-year program. I loved the material and had days of study that were 14-16 straight hours of constant study and instruction, which was not sustainable day to day even when I liked it. There's seriously only so much time in one person's life and only so much that can be input; everybody having PhD-level knowledge of virtually every major subject by their twenties is just impossible, short of widescale genetic manipulation of humanity. Even an actual genius with an actual photographic memory wouldn't have enough time to learn what everybody in Trek seems to know offhand. Yet you can hand somebody in Trek a tricorder and they can still manage to half-ass a cure for cancer or something like that, even if their day job is computer maintenance.
Something like Orville makes one hell of a lot more sense. They've got a crew with a lot of smart and skilled individuals, but they aren't all-knowing masters of every subject. Humans are still definitely human, it's society that's improved and, as a result, produces better people.
Star Trek humans have to basically all be genetically engineered, it would be the only way you could have so many people that are perfectly okay with living and breathing their jobs and also have the time to learn so much and also have any leisure time for anything.
Ninja Snarl P on
+1
minor incidentexpert in a dying fieldnjRegistered Userregular
edited December 2017
I have to think humans in the 1700s would feel just as perplexed by the concept of modern day mathematics, physics, biology, neurology, etc. But we manage that pretty well nowadays.
I don't think characters on Trek shows being multi-disciplined scientific experts (by our measure) is anything all that bananas.
minor incident on
Ah, it stinks, it sucks, it's anthropologically unjust
Star Trek probably has something like Moore's law but for learning
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
I have to think humans in the 1700s would feel just as perplexed by the concept of modern day mathematics, physics, biology, neurology, etc. But we manage that pretty well nowadays.
I don't think characters on Trek shows being multi-disciplined scientific experts (by our measure) is anything all that bananas.
Yeah, maybe our education system has also managed to evolve along with everything else. Not having to worry about things like bills also frees up a lot of time for education.
The "trope where being intelligent is equated with knowing everything" makes vastly more sense in a Trek-like universe than everywhere else on TV. It's usually a very stupid trope though.
I do like on DS9 where they occasionally actually show that a character being brilliant at one thing doesn't mean they're brilliant at everything. Like, we see that Kira is super tough and brilliant at strategy, but she's not necessarily going to understand everything about warp theory. Or O'Brien may be an incredible engineer, but he doesn't know all that much about medical science. Etc.
I also really like that The Orville seems to be on this side of things, where being great in one area doesn't mean you're great in another.
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Even if I only know him from Red Dwarf (twenty-five flippin' years ago), I still spotted him right off the bat. So I like to think Red Dwarf was the main reason he was cast. A lovely subtle nod to another TV show blending sci-fi and comedy. The iconic one, really, even if not mixing the two defining traits in even vaguely similar measures.
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Isaac staying was a pretty solid idea (even if only for the sheer efficiency of him being able to get 700 years of data in 11 days, which would be awesome for him and his people), but pretty much everything leading to that point was really unnecessarily dumb. They've got sensors that can detect people from space, super-telescopes, and synthesizer technology; there was absolutely zero reason for anybody to just run off after landing instead of waiting twenty minutes to re-equip via another shuttle (or, hell, just stay at the damn shuttle and wait). Instead Kelly runs off and bumps into people in like five minutes (despite looking right at the people-detecting device that would warn her way ahead of time), then really really screws things up by using space magic on a kid who just has a bump on the head (instead of doing the obvious thing, which was making sure the kid was fine and then immediately leaving). Then they double-screw-up things by re-re-visiting the planet at a point in development when the truth wouldn't matter to anybody, couldn't be proved except to one person, and wouldn't be able to spread anyway because nobody would believe it.
Just have the dang shuttle crash-land in a village or something, instead of doing a bad job trying to force some drama with Kelly wanting to fix things and the Union brass saying no. Kelly heals up her crew member, heals up some locals hurt in the crash, and then there is a hell of a lot more reason for her appearance and actions to be an actual spectacle. Union brass gives the okay to visit on the second appearance to determine the extent of the "contamination" (where Kelly finds out she's a deity now), and the third appearance maybe has them trying to fix the problem but with Union backing. And the final appearance goes with a big push by Isaac's government for him to go down, instead of more breaking rules.
(There are uncounted hours of sitcoms that could be eliminated if one or more persons had simply explained things, fully and clearly, at the right moment. This is neither a new or uncommon observation. The genre literally runs on stupidity, misunderstanding, miscommunication, and bad decisions.)
If you don't want to watch people being idiots, failing to communicate or understand each other, and working against their own best interests, don't watch comedy.
(Or politics.)
The trouble I had with that episode - and what I think @Ninja Snarl P is talking about - is contrivance. That's distinct from miscommunication and misunderstanding generally.
I don't always care for its brand of comedy, but The Good Place is a current example. Its characters have in-universe reasons for the secrets they do and don't keep. I think Brooklyn Nine-Nine is pretty good too, but I can't recall if they've always been consistent about it.
That didn't bother me much at all
I've listened to people give many many totally plausible sounding reasons why they cheated on someone months and even years after the fact when the truth is they just fucked up because of alcohol/high/just happened to be horny enough and holy shit though no you don't understand this person was fucking gorgeous
Guilt is a hell of a thing and the human capacity for justification is as well
And the justification didn't matter, in the end.
Even if they reconciled, Ed and Kelly can't be together because that is a huge liability on a military vessel. Maybe if Kelly gets her own ship, or if Ed retires, or something of that nature, but until then, them being together is a violation of protocol... and a really bad idea, for reasons that we saw in this episode.
He did still hand them a pristine enemy warship and shuttle, so I suspect he's still on their good side. Besides, they keep showing how laid back people are, hopefully that includes the admiralty.
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The Union is business casual enough that Ed can call up the admiral and be all like "WTF BRO? You only hired me because my ex-wife told you to? Fuck that noise!" and not get his ass reamed.
Super cool, laid back brain bugs. But brain bugs none the less.
That bug episode was the grossest one of Next Gen.
I'm a huge, huge Star Trek fan.
I thought I'd hate Orville, given the ads. I like Family Guy, but Star Trek + Family Guy sounded like a fucking disaster.
But turns out... This is actually serious science fiction.
In a way, this is almost more authentic than Star Trek. The characters feel real. The humor of the show lets them just be themselves.
The vision of the future feels more reachable in this show than any Star Trek show.
I'm loving it so far. (Just finished ep 4)
It's Star Trek without the bullshit humanity is a utopia now baggage
I dunno if that's baggage? Like, the hopeful optimism of Star Trek is one of the things I love about it.
Also humanity seems fairly utopian in Orville? They don't have money, have matter replication, etc.
It's utopian, sure, but people are still going to have problems and The Orville is perhaps more open and honest about that than Trek was.
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I think he means the part where Star Trek humanity seems to have become an almost completely lobotomized squeaky-clean version of itself. A better future means people understanding the shortcomings of themselves and others and working towards being better, not a near-total lack of much of what makes people human.
A huge key difference to me is that the people on the Orville are there to work and like what they do, but they are not their jobs. They aren't obsessing over their work every waking minute and never really go off-duty, whereas Star Trek folks are hardly ever even out of uniform at any time of day.
Exactly. Even then, O'Brien was just about the only "regular" person in the crew, and about the only physical indication of anybody having hobbies outside of work was the Alamo model he and Julian built.
Just because it's a post-consumer society doesn't people wouldn't want things, they'd just want things with some actual personal value to them. Star Trek quarters are more like sterile prison cells than places where people live.
Enlist in Star Citizen! Citizenship must be earned!
there was a loooooot of off duty stuff and other hobbies in DS9 yo. and I never exactly paid heaps of attention to their quarters but they had some personality in them as well. heck, Sisko had the baseball on his desk and that thing was pretty significant fairly often
but like, I get the notion that humanity was kinda boring and unrealistically calm in TOS and TNG but DS9 breaks that down a whole lot and, I guess with it being my favourite trek series, it makes me think of humanity as being more complex in the star trek setting
Yeah I was speaking more to TNG for sure and don't get me wrong I love me some TNG.
Honestly I never even realized there was a sense of tranquility in Star Trek that rings kinda false me to until watching this show but a few episodes in it kinda dawned on me that hold on wait a minute. I think it's exactly the reason DS9 always felt off to me as Star Trek but in a good way if that makes sense.
I love that we have a black guy on a Star Trek-like-show who actually acts like a regular ordinary black guy. (I'm finding it hard to find the right words to express what I mean here, speaking as a white person... not saying that, say, Sisko didn't act black, just like.... fuck what do I mean exactly. I mean that the Orville officer whose name I forget feels more like the black dudes I know in real life, and Sisko feels more like Obama. I don't know if that makes sense.)
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
I never finish anyth
Most of them being very career driven.
The Orville on the other hand isn't quite bottom of the barrel, but it's not far above it either. It's a captains first posting (and the posting of a captain who barely even got a ship at all) and the Orvilles crew definitely reflect that.
The crew is pretty much a mix of rookies, oddballs and slackers.
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
My wife calls it "that star trek show".
Meanwhile Voyager was on a mission that by design couldn't be fucked up that badly (the only people who were going to get killed unnecessarily had been declared terrorists by all the major powers and literally nobody would have raised a fuss if Janeway ended up killing them all except other people who had been declared terrorists by everyone else), and was still full of the same kind of people. I mean, Harry Kim, the least accomplished major character in any Star Trek series (and I'm including Travis "I've been in space" Mayweather) could still take previously unobserved exotic particle interactions from the speculative level to the military application practical level with less than two minutes of mental calculations, done during a high stress combat situation.
The only member of the Orville cast that's been able to do that is Isaac, and in one of the cases even the most competent members of the crew straight up admitted that only Yaphit could even figure out where to start implementing the idea. In Star Trek Enterprise, the xenolinguistics translator could have done that from the transporter room.
They're clearly all far better educated than any person today, but you rarely see any of them with a workable understanding outside of their own field the way you often do in Star Trek. For example, Voyager encounters an anomaly, the science officer states the proper name for it, and the cook says, "I thought those were only theoretical! The gravimetric distortions would be far more than any starship's engines could handle." Same thing happens on Orville, and everyone who's not a science officer says, "Ok, that's a lot of words, but what is it?"
DS9 is somewhat closer to Orville in this respect, because they usually didn't do the same thing with the non-Starfleet crew, and there were a few special cases in the Starfleet crew, like Dax's past lives and Bashir's augmented brain. So the same thing happens on DS9, Dax and Bashir say, "Yes, I know all about those!" O'Brien says, "Oh! Yes! We saw one of those on the Enterprise. I don't know what happened because I was in the transporter room," and Sisko says, "I don't care what it's called, just tell me where it keeps its balls so I can punch it in them."
Geordie is a sociopathic monster, it removes him from the discussion.
The thing that perpetually irritates me about Trek is that everybody is seems to have a graduate degree in everything, then knows a ton about their own field on top of that. It's that really awful trope where being intelligent is equated with knowing everything without having to actually study it, and it's everywhere in Trek.
I spent four intensive years of study getting a graduate and undergraduate degree in molecular biology and that shit is hard, especially considering it was actually a five-year program. I loved the material and had days of study that were 14-16 straight hours of constant study and instruction, which was not sustainable day to day even when I liked it. There's seriously only so much time in one person's life and only so much that can be input; everybody having PhD-level knowledge of virtually every major subject by their twenties is just impossible, short of widescale genetic manipulation of humanity. Even an actual genius with an actual photographic memory wouldn't have enough time to learn what everybody in Trek seems to know offhand. Yet you can hand somebody in Trek a tricorder and they can still manage to half-ass a cure for cancer or something like that, even if their day job is computer maintenance.
Something like Orville makes one hell of a lot more sense. They've got a crew with a lot of smart and skilled individuals, but they aren't all-knowing masters of every subject. Humans are still definitely human, it's society that's improved and, as a result, produces better people.
Star Trek humans have to basically all be genetically engineered, it would be the only way you could have so many people that are perfectly okay with living and breathing their jobs and also have the time to learn so much and also have any leisure time for anything.
I don't think characters on Trek shows being multi-disciplined scientific experts (by our measure) is anything all that bananas.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Yeah, maybe our education system has also managed to evolve along with everything else. Not having to worry about things like bills also frees up a lot of time for education.
The "trope where being intelligent is equated with knowing everything" makes vastly more sense in a Trek-like universe than everywhere else on TV. It's usually a very stupid trope though.
I also really like that The Orville seems to be on this side of things, where being great in one area doesn't mean you're great in another.