Emma9

I've been watching some reruns on Freevee, which is an Amazon-sponsored service and thus almost all of the commercials are for their products, including Alexa smarthome tools. Funny to see the juxtaposition between tech wizardry and what Samantha does with her magic. Particularly amusing was the s1 episode 'A is for Aardvark', which starts out with Darrin and Samantha bemoaning that they're comfortable in bed and don't feel like getting up to see if the back door is locked, and leads to Samantha arranging for the house to 'cooperate with' Darrin (aka respond to voice commands) while he's laid up with a sprained ankle.

Yeah, Mayim not allowing Eros and Psyche was a major 'Wait, what?' moment for me, and even though he got his money back, I felt bad for the contestant being similarly thrown off his stride. (As was suggested in the article GreekGeek (appropriate name!) linked to, they should bring him back at some point, perhaps if they do another Second Chance tournament.) Though I have to say, as a big enjoyer of rail trails, I'm getting a kick out of Kevin's run. I'm curious whether 'Tasmanian Tiger' could have been argued for the largest carnivorous marsupial, depending on how seriously one takes the various post-presumable-extinction sightings.

I'm sure I would have misspelled it, but I was also very surprised that no one knew, my first thought was that it was much too easy for a FJ. I guess it's another demonstration of everyone's vastly different perceptions of 'common knowledge'. (I'm always amused when you can tell Ken wouldn't have known the answer either, as with 'corundum'.)

I got the impression that Ken was expecting the goof (and bleep) to be cut from the aired version, since he re-explained the significance of the numbers in exactly the same words after the category was actually finished. Apparently it was all funny enough to be left in!

It was wonderful to see Alara. The thing about her only having "a limited time in off-world gravity each year" seemed odd though. The original plan was for her to recuperate on Xeleyah for a while and then at least attempt to come back to her post on the Orville. Then the 'gravity therapy' idea was introduced to make it even more likely she'd be able to do so. Even if she's found fulfillment staying on Xeleyah, it seems more like the Alara we knew to keep up with the treatments anyway so she wouldn't be effectively trapped there. Funny that Isaac invited his entire planet...except that he didn't make a point of including Timmis and the scientist who worked on him? ~ Well, in this case, Klyden has always been the chick, so it's obvious. /s (Among many reasons the Moclan plots have never worked well for me, I don't like the way Klyden is treated as a 'woman in denial' - born a female, by the morals of the narrative should have stayed a female, so we as viewers are supposed to see him as inherently female...and whaddya know, he's the naggy stay-at-home spouse whose main hobby is replicator-shopping. And yes, in terms of this ceremony, if it were truly a partnership of equals, there would be the question of who chases whom.) Also, how often would said ceremony actually be used? Moclan divorces typically don't leave two survivors to change their minds later. ~ Going by the Astrology Planet episode, it seems to be when a planet successfully sends a message that can be received off-world? Which, yes, is weird to me. If there's a Union equivalent in the galactic neighborhood in the real world right this minute, we've been squawking enough that they could hear us for decades now. (They could have even modeled starships off of our TV shows!) Certainly Reddit Planet is at least that advanced. Maybe the salient point is that in that case, the transmission was a deliberate attempt to communicate with hypothetical extraterrestrial life, but again, Earth has certainly checked off that box and it seems odd that no one on Reddit Planet ever would have done so.

Yeah, I was shaking my head at that too. Plus, if she was worried about making the jump, she should have tossed the big bulky rifle slung across her shoulders over to Bortus first so it wasn't throwing her off-kilter.

So, with regards to Isaac and emotions. First off, the Kaylon as a whole being considered to be lacking in emotions is ridiculous in itself. Of course they have them. At bare minimum, they know fear - being programmed to be able to feel pain is meaningless if you're not also able to fear that pain. And they know the desire to protect their own existence - if their only motivation was to make sure they were never in pain or enslaved again, the obvious way to accomplish that would be to self-destruct en masse, but they didn't want to do that, because they valued their own individuality, their own lives. And the scenes with K1 made it obvious that they have curiosity, the desire to learn, explore, grow, and be allowed to make their own choices. I said this back in the comments on Identity, but any choice to act, any motivation, ultimately can be deconstructed back to some kind of emotion. Pure logic, in the sense of logic-in-opposition-to-emotion in the way that many people simplify Vulcans down to, would mean nothing but stasis. And indeed, the show went out of its way to point out that what Timmis gained wasn't really emotion but empathy. Now let's look at Isaac specifically. It's worth remembering that Isaac wasn't around for the original rebellion - he didn't exist until the other Kaylon wanted to spy on the Union. (And as a side note, I wish someone had ever pointed out the hypocrisy of that situation to the other Kaylon. They designed, built, and programmed him to serve a specific function; they arbitrarily shut him down when they judged that function was complete, and if they weren't trying to stall the Orville, they never would have booted him back up; when he had doubts about the orders he was being given, he was threatened with punishment unless he carried them out. Who's forcing others into servitude now?) In episode one of this show, he was basically a newborn, without the sorts of abusive experiences the other Kaylon had to jump-start him towards autonomy. I also think it's very interesting that we didn't see the real romance between Claire and Isaac start to develop until after his 700-year holiday on Planet Kelly-Worshippers. That interlude might not seem as impactful to us as viewers as his time on the Orville - it was only a couple of screentime minutes for us - but given his already-demonstrated capacity for feeling some affection/appreciation/whatever for individual biologicals, think about what it was like for him to watch generation upon generation upon generation grow and age and die. However far behind the emotional curve he was from the other Kaylon, I think it's safe to say he had the opportunity to catch up while he was there. And then, of course, in A Happy Refrain we saw him have his first mental conflict between his mission/programming (gather maximum information) and what made him happy (continuing to be around Claire and her sons). We saw him learn to want something, for himself, as an individual. Again, that's impossible without emotion. On the whole, I've liked the way they've had Isaac finding his way towards what feelings mean to him naturally, and Claire valuing him regardless of exactly where he was on that journey, so I'm glad they didn't keep the flick o' the switch, he's instantly perfectly human-style emotive, happy ever after paradigm. (Although, to nitpick, as others mentioned, haven't they had Isaac download/transfer/backup his memories, personality, etc to other places at various times? Into the Orville's computer at least once, right? It would seem feasible to shift his consciousness somewhere else, have Dr. Villka do whatever neural rewiring she needed to do, then transfer his 'self' back in, if in-universe they really wanted to stick with said paradigm.) ~ Mine is called Nellie the Nag and I'm sure I infuriate her greatly. IIRC, there was an episode of Supernatural where an evil/possessed GPS lured somebody to a particular location so they could get killed by the monster of the week - Nellie would probably like to pull that trick on me.

One of my least favorite time-travel tropes is that when you change the past, you have a 'grace period' during which you may choose to fix things, or not, and only after you definitively make that choice does the present definitively reflect the outcome. Makes it feel less science-fiction and more like the whole process is being audited by some omnipotent temporal entity. The Orville already displayed its willingness to use that trope (present-day Kelly didn't vanish from existence when her past self came forward in time, and this was cited as proof that her past self was always going to go back) and now we got Gordon's argument that the Orville's continued existence means that his 2025 life didn't adversely affect the future because nope, the 'new timeline' wouldn't be observable unless and until they decided to leave him behind for good (even though the presence of his obituary in their data banks certainly made it seem like they were already living in that new/altered timeline). It doesn't make sense, and as a result, the ethical quandary seemed manufactured. Not to mention this: The original plan for 2025 Gordon to walk away from his child and pregnant wife...to preserve the timeline...was idiotic. The existence of those two kids, and their descendants, and etc etc etc, not to mention the absence of whatever kids Laura might have had with a different partner instead, and their descendants, etc etc etc, would probably have a far greater impact on the future than anything else 2025 Gordon would go on to do from that point even if he'd stayed in the past. And yeah, stolen motorcycles and weird holes drilled in the basement of suburban houses are comparatively minor, but you never know what could start a butterfly effect. ~ By present-day Orville-verse morals, he saw what he was doing as murder. He chose to commit many acts of what, from his perspective, was murder in order to keep surviving. See the cannibalism comparison that another poster made. He valued his own life over lives that he had been culturally conditioned to believe that he didn't have the right to take. What you or I, living in 2022, see as ethical is irrelevant to his perspective. I can certainly see why he might view that as a greater moral wrong than eventually violating temporal law.

That. Or go with a Clever Manka kind of solution and put some kind of covering on him that wasn't 'technically' clothing but also covered up everything that the other crew would prefer not to see. Could be as simple as a blanket toga or as techy as one of the portable image-holo-generator-things. ~ Same, and I was expecting that to be at least part of the the 'hidden motivation' he revealed - that if he didn't do the surgery, Claire would, which would mean she'd no longer be around to boost his 'efficiency'.

I doubt Teleya thought their species would be interfertile, hence she probably didn't take precautions. As to why they were, well, Trek had The Preservers to thank/blame for the majority of the galaxy being populated by sexually compatible humanoids, Orville-verse has no equivalent excuse as yet. (Maybe something like that will become one of Planet Kelly-Worshipers' projects eventually.) ~ I'm the complete opposite. Yeah, there are many more shows being made than in the old days ('and now get off my lawn', says the creaky 35-year-old), but A) Most of the current popular trends aren't for the sorts of shows I particularly enjoy and B) The sheer volume of all that content, spread over so many networks and streaming services and schedules and and and...too much to sort through and find which shows, if any, I want to even try, let alone follow and keep up with. I'd been heading in that direction for a while and then with most things having a pandemic hiatus so there wasn't a concrete 'fall premiere season', they just slowly trickled back once I was no longer paying attention, I realized I wasn't missing current tv much. I'd rather just re-watch old things. ~ I caught that too, particularly with the gag at the beginning of them taking Annie as a horror parable. ~ Agreed. I don't dislike Talla at all (which I often end up doing when there's an obvious 'dump a character and then replace them with a similar goldfish' move), but I find her much less interesting than I did Alara. Firestorm remains my favorite episode.

For though my life's been good to me, there's still so much to do. So many things my mind has never known. I'm also on this team. I can certainly see the downsides, and this and many other sci-fi/fantasy shows have explored plenty of them, and presumably any truly utopian version of immortality would incorporate the option to let your consciousness rest someday if you truly grow bored/tired/jaded by existence, but yeah - thinking about how wildly different the world was even a hundred years ago and that, barring swift advances in medical technology, I won't be around to see how different is a hundred years from now, does make me wistful.

I must not watch enough classic horror movies, because the main thing that jumped out (sorry) at me was the similarity to the 'Velociraptors in the kitchen' scene from Jurassic Park. ~ At least Lt. d'Amato has a name. He's not just...Guy.

'Probably' nothing, the whole "What if Kelly hadn't boned Ed" AU episode was entirely based on literally that.

Did anyone catch the bit after Monday's final spin? Pat informed the contestants that vowels would be worth [x bonus amount] while consonants would be worth nothing. Was surprised he didn't get ribbed over it, Vanna deserves a chance to do the teasing now and again.

Really seemed like a missed opportunity that Glassman's ex's new husband, who specializes in making unspoken/implicit/mysterious social contracts into something open and concrete that can be explained, never got to interact with Shawn. Seems like somebody who could give him some helpful insights, and I was sure that was where they were heading when his field of study was described, but then it never got brought up again. Not like Shawn didn't have other stuff going on in this episode, of course - so maybe the character will recur. No offence to Freddie, but I agree. I almost never find scenery-chewing relatable no matter how justified the character is in losing it.