Skip to main content

The Orville: New Horizons

The Orville has long been an entertaining science fiction show that got even better with its third (and possibly final) season. With shooting on the third season getting held up by the pandemic, Seth MacFarlane--who created the series, as well as stars as its Captain, Ed Mercer--seemingly took the added time to rework the scripts. And that was a very good thing. When The Orville first debuted, it was seen as a comedy that offered a funny, satirical view of Star Trek, the classic series from which The Orville was inspired by. The humor was very broad and bombastic, sometimes going a little over the top.

But even in the first two seasons, the slapstick humor began to slowly be replaced by earnest storytelling as MacFarlane and his writers fleshed out their characters and the universe they lived in. And by doing this, The Orville only got better. While there’s still humor in the third season, and it’s much welcome (because the humor here is still genuinely funny, emerging from the situations, instead of being forced), this new, dramatic version of The Orville: New Horizons is now a far more confident series that tells its enthralling stories in a stately, detailed-filled manner that’s ultimately very satisfying.

The average run-time of the third season episodes is well over an hour each--with one episode, Midnight Blue, clocking in at just under ninety minutes! That’s an Orville movie, kids! The episodes are self contained, with the main story wrapped up by the end, yet they still all fit together in a mosaic to inform us about the ongoing war between the Planetary Union and the cybernetic Kaylon--which leads up to Domino, an episode with a marvelous ‘eye candy’ space battle showdown that is so sweeping and epic that it easily put the recent bunch of lethargic Star Wars TV series on Disney+ to shame (although I’m still holding out hope that the upcoming Andor might be good).

There are still some cringe moments here, like having a computer simulation of Dolly Parton (played by the real Dolly Parton) talk some sense into an alien aboard the Orville, with Dolly even breaking into a song to prove her point. But, on the whole, the third season of the Orville is extremely well-done, with its stand-alone adventures (such as Gordon getting trapped in the past, or strange, shadowy creatures taking over the ship) being just as gripping as the overall Kaylon war saga. And, the season finale, Future Unknown, wonderfully wraps things up in such a way that it can also serve as a series finale. Even if this is the end, I’m grateful to the cast and crew of The Orville for the fantastic ride. --SF

All three seasons of the Orville can be seen on Disney+. The first two seasons are available on physical media (and hopefully the third season will be on physical media very soon, too).
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Explorer From Another World

It’s Friday night during the summer in Beutter county, an idyllic farming community in Indiana, and the good folks are settling in for what should be another humdinger of an evening. Until their plans are shattered by the arrival of an Explorer From Another World! This turns out to be an alien (Gemma Sterling) who starts savagely killing people from the moment it disembarks from its flying saucer. Local kids Eddie (Colin McCorquodale), Marybeth (Sage Marchand) and Culpepper (Nolan Gay) are planning on seeing a movie, but it looks like they’ll be battling for the very survival of the human race instead! Explorer From Another World is a wonderfully done throwback to the B-movies of the 1950s and 1960s. Ably directed by Woody Edwards (who gives himself a small cameo as Hank in the sheriff’s jail cell), the film is forty five minutes long, but manages to tell its torrid but funny story very effectively in the time allotted. And the short running time tracks when you...
Post a Comment
Read more

Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice -- a review

Despite coming out thirty six years after the first film, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice , once again directed by Tim Burton, wound up being vastly entertaining, adding lots of pleasant surprises, like the use of stop-motion animation. The sequel takes place within the same real-life time frame, with Lydia Deetz, played with wry humor by Winona Ryder, now the host of a ghost hunting show. She’s also the mother of Astrid, a teenager played by Jenna Ortega. They live with Delia Deetz (the always great Catherine O'Hara), Lydia’s step-mother and Astrid’s step-grandmother. After the death of Charles--Delia’s husband and Lydia’s father--during a bird-watching accident involving sharks, the Deetz ladies must go back up to the creepy house in Winter River, Connecticut for his funeral. This is the same place where Lydia first encountered Beetlejuice all those years ago, and she is understandably reluctant to even mention his name, lest she accidentally calls forth Beet...
Post a Comment
Read more

My Top Five of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is returning (finally!) on the 17th of July with an all-new third season. To celebrate the return what has become my favorite of the new Star Trek shows on Paramount+, I decided to create a list of my top five episodes from the first two seasons. Memento Mori After several episodes of hinting at their presence, Memento Mori is the first big confrontation between the Federation and the Gorn. First introduced in the TOS episode Arena , with a memorable fight between Captain Kirk and a slow moving, green-skinned humanoid lizard, the Gorn have popped up in the episode The Time Trap of ST: The Animated Series , and in the In A Mirror, Darkly Part Two episode of ST: Enterprise (using really bad CGI that wasn’t much of an improvement over the Gorn suit used in Arena ). We never actually see the Gorn in Memento Mori , except for their ships, which look like angry claws ripping their way through space. This is a wise move, because not showing the...
Post a Comment
Read more