Review of Star Trek: The Orville

It's usually not worth writing reviews of works with a lot of existing reviews. Either you agree with the consensus, and so provide very little information beyond what's already there, or you disagree, and the review probably says more about your taste than about the subject.

Lack of consensus

Not this time. There's no consensus at all. Critics absolutely hate The Orville:

• Rotten Tomatoes critics score - 19%
• Metacritic critics score - 36/100

While the audience loves it:

• Rotten Tomatoes audience score - 93%
• Metacritic audience score - 8.2/10
• IMDb audience score - 7.9/10

This is extremely unusual. Audiences and critics usually agree very closely.

Meanwhile, Star Trek: Discovery has far higher critics score:

• Rotten Tomatoes critics score - 82%
• Metacritic critics score - 72/100

and very mediocre audience score:

• Rotten Tomatoes audience score - 56%
• Metacritic audience score - 4.7/10
• IMDb audience score - 7.4/10

So what's the deal here?

It's simple, the critics are total idiots, and the audience is completely right. Star Trek: The Orville is awesome.

The review

The Orville is 90% classic Star Trek and 10% Family Guy. This combination is just too sophisticated for the stupid critics, but it works really well.

Star Trek was always a very optimistic and lighthearted world. Even its "dark" parts like DS9 would look like a comedy by standard of today's grimdark TV. Dark moments like In the Pale Moonlight were only so effective because they were used to sparingly against the backdrop of endless Ferengi get rich schemes, Odo and Quark's cat and mouse games, shenanigans by the station's kids, Kai Winn's pettiness, and so many other ways which made the future look so much brighter than world of today.

And it couldn't have worked any other way. Star Trek has to be bright for moral dilemmas to be engaging. If the whole world is a grimdark shithole, moral issues become irrelevant, and only survival matters.

The Orville continues doing what Star Trek was great at. Its universe, while technically not in Star Trek canon, is just like it - full of imperfect people still trying to be their best. They explore the universe, run into interesting aliens of the week, and seriously deal with new moral dilemmas just like in previous Star Trek series. It feels like it's actually doing a better job, with choices characters make having far more serious consequences, instead of being promptly forgotten by the next episode.

Sure, previous Star Trek series didn't employ Family Guy style humor, but 80s'/90s' sensibilities wouldn't work on today's TV, and this change is far less drastic than turning Star Trek into another grimdark series like everything else.

It's a must-watch for every Star Trek lover. It's still trying to perfect its formula, but it might very well end up as the best Star Trek series ever.

The bonus review of Star Trek: Discovery

To be fair, I only watched the first episode, but that should be quite telling as I watched every other Star Trek series and movies, many multiple times.

Discovery is simply not Star Trek. Maybe I'd have liked it if it didn't pretend to be one, but it's too late now.

It's just ridiculously grimdark. The characters, the antagonists, the plot, everything on the screen is just ridiculously dark. It hurts to even look at the screen. There's not one scene in the whole episode where the lights are properly on - it's all dark greys and blacks everywhere.

It's so ridiculously Not Star Trek that there's a damn mutiny in the first episode, by the first officer who wants to start a war with the "Klingons"!

As if that's not enough, for some reason it ditches Star Trek races - Discovery "Klingons" look and act nothing like Star Trek Klingons, there's a few Vulcans in the background, but they decided to ignore whole Star Trek Vulcan canon anyway, and there's some humans and some weird new types nobody cares for.

As far as I can tell - and maybe that changes later - it's doesn't even follow the crew ensemble formula, instead focusing hard on single character, who's a woman most annoyingly named Michael.

So why does it even call itself Star Trek? That sets up expectations it's completely unwilling to meet. Perhaps it could be a decent space show in its unique universe, instead it decided to steal the name and then do something completely unrelated with it.

There was nothing redeeming about the whole episode, and I doubt very much it gets any better later.

Just don't bother watching it.