S03.E06: Twice In A Lifetime

[DoctorAtomic]

The space station debris was from somewhere else. They all went to check it out and were housed by the Kaylon. It seemed to be a ruse by them to lure out the Union to get the time travel device. 

[ketose]

6 hours ago, iMonrey said:

I admit it was fun seeing the actor who plays Isaac. Posts upthread indicate we've seen him before? I don't remember when. My question is, is it Mark Jackson inside the Isaac robot suit every week and his voice? Or just one or the other? Typically, the guy in the robot suit is not the same person doing the voice. Those are generally two different talents.

I'm confused though. At the beginning of this episode, the Kaylons have destroyed a space station orbiting earth. At the end of the episode when they jump back to the future, the space station is just fine. Did they change something to prevent the destruction of the space station? Or was that another space station? What did I miss here? I kind of figured they jumped back to a point in time before the station was destroyed and would warn everyone about the impending attack but nothing came of it.

I agree it was unnecessarily cruel to tell Gordon and his wife, right in front of their young son no less, that they were going to jump back 10 years and prevent this from ever happening. They could have just walked away and let them think they were leaving things as is. It just made them look like assholes.

I'm also surprised they didn't notice Gordon's wedding ring on the drive back to his house - I did. But maybe that's not a thing in the 25th century. 

The destroyed space station was orbiting a different planet. Earth was a space dock they went to get repairs after the time travel damage.

[redpencil]

7 hours ago, iMonrey said:

I admit it was fun seeing the actor who plays Isaac. Posts upthread indicate we've seen him before? I don't remember when. My question is, is it Mark Jackson inside the Isaac robot suit every week and his voice? Or just one or the other? Typically, the guy in the robot suit is not the same person doing the voice. Those are generally two different talents.

We saw him when Claire was dating him in the simulator (or whatever it's called in Orville universe). It's definitely his voice the rest of the time, not sure about the suit, but I would assume it's him.

[The Kings Foot]

On 7/9/2022 at 9:14 AM, ketose said:

The Orville retrieved Gordon one month after he got there. How was he able to send the message 5 months later?

I think was deliberately done to imply that 2025 Gordon still exists

On 7/9/2022 at 3:35 PM, chaifan said:

Thoughts on Gordon using his previous knowledge of Laura (through the cell phone left in the time capsule in Season 2)...

I honestly don't find it as creepy as everyone else.  I see it about the same as looking up someone's open Facebook page or Twitter feed, which is practically the norm at this point.  All Gordon had was the cell phone with pictures, videos and text messages.  He programed the simulator to create a program based on that information, but that's really not that much different than just using your own imagination to imagine how potential conversations might go based on what you've seen on someone's Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.   There is some deception there, as he would have known more about Laura than she could have ever expected when they first met, but again, everyone on first dates acts as if they don't know the person across from them has already looked them up on Facebook or whatever, so it's still in the same ballpark to me. 

Yeah. They even went through the trouble of showing Gordon singing in the beginning to show that he wasn't just faking interest in her music because she was pretty.

Those comments also seem to be a bit naive to me. Anyone interested in you is going to check social media , talk to any common friends you have and try to tailor themselves for that first meeting.

[DoctorAtomic]

11 hours ago, redpencil said:

We saw him when Claire was dating him in the simulator (or whatever it's called in Orville universe). It's definitely his voice the rest of the time, not sure about the suit, but I would assume it's him.

'Human Isaac' sure had the same stiffness in his walk and positioning with the arms, so I would think they're the same. 

[Chicago Redshirt]

7 hours ago, The Kings Foot said:

Those comments also seem to be a bit naive to me. Anyone interested in you is going to check social media , talk to any common friends you have and try to tailor themselves for that first meeting.

I think there's a difference between looking at someone's social media for a few minutes or hours and interacting over the course of days/weeks with a simulated version of someone that has extrapolated from not just social media as well as non-public sources like texts, e-mails and so forth (as Gordon did). 

1. There's an expectation in 2022 that people will do background checks using public information. Fair enough. No one expects people to incorporate what they say in potentially years of private e-mails and texts in that sort of background check. Using that private info is unfair, and I would think that it would be a dealbreaker for many if they were told, "Before I started dating you, I happened upon all these texts and photos you sent your family and friends and read them all."

2. Being able to act and react based on simulated interactions, test-driving things again without the other person's knowledge, is unfair. Simulators don't exist, but if they did, I think it would be a dealbreaker for many to say, "I built a simulated version of you based on all this information, found out what you liked and didn't like through trial and error. Also, I spent a lot of time fucking it."

3. Even if it were confined to publicly available information and to just reading up on her, the length of time Gordon spent on this would be a dealbreaker for many (I expect) if it were known.

Or maybe I'm projecting but if someone I was dating told me "I spent literally weeks reading all the information about you I could find publicly on the Internet," I'd probably call it quits right there. I would feel like my privacy and personhood were violated.

[DoctorAtomic]

52 minutes ago, Chicago Redshirt said:

I think there's a difference between looking at someone's social media for a few minutes or hours and interacting over the course of days/weeks with a simulated version of someone that has extrapolated from not just social media as well as non-public sources like texts, e-mails and so forth (as Gordon did). 

Like people now wouldn't do that if there was the technology. 

[Guest]

1 hour ago, DoctorAtomic said:

Like people now wouldn't do that if there was the technology. 

I certainly hope there are a lot of people who wouldn’t. Even if that is true it doesn’t make it any less creepy. 

2 hours ago, Chicago Redshirt said:

Or maybe I'm projecting but if someone I was dating told me "I spent literally weeks reading all the information about you I could find publicly on the Internet," I'd probably call it quits right there. I would feel like my privacy and personhood were violated.

I’d feel the same way. In real life obsession isn’t sexy. It was creepy when it was LaForge falling for someone on the holodeck and it’s even more so now. 

[Chicago Redshirt]

13 hours ago, DoctorAtomic said:

Like people now wouldn't do that if there was the technology. 

Of course there are people who would do that. And many, if not most of them, would be creeps for doing so. I'll give some the benefit of the doubt that they wouldn't think through the ethical ramifications of using people's private information without their knowledge and consent to put themselves in a better dating position that would likely turn into a worse dating position if the object of their desire knew what they had done.

And of course, people's mileage will vary on the ethical and etiquette aspects of dating. People might think that fucking a simulated version of someone is  always wrong. Some might think it is not meaningfully different from fantasizing about them in any old-school way. Or they might think that the line should get drawn when it's a version that incorporates real-world data of the person. Or when it incorporates private data. 

[madfortv]

To answer a question from other posters, there was an article about Mark Jackson a couple weeks ago that seemed to be legitimate.  It was stated he is actually in the suit. 

There is so much disinformation, I try to be  careful about what I read. However, since it has been a couple weeks, I don't have the reference and can only tell you what I remember reading. 

[UnknownK]

21 hours ago, Dani said:

I certainly hope there are a lot of people who wouldn’t. Even if that is true it doesn’t make it any less creepy. 

I’d feel the same way. In real life obsession isn’t sexy. It was creepy when it was LaForge falling for someone on the holodeck and it’s even more so now. 

I think somebody from your time period obsessing over you is creepy but somebody from the far future that only has data about you doing it is different. I mean if Facebook was still around you could look up billions of people and chose who to try dating if you happened to go back in time (which is what people do now anyway with apps).

[Guest]

2 hours ago, UnknownK said:

I think somebody from your time period obsessing over you is creepy but somebody from the far future that only has data about you doing it is different.

I don’t disagree but he than used that knowledge to date her in her time period making it very creepy. 

What bothers me about this type of plot is that the women is never a fully developed character in their own right. She exists exclusively to be a fantasy for the man to fall in love with. TNG did a better job than most by having that women show up and be completely different and be pissed over what happened. The Orville never made the women into her own character (as evidenced by the fact I can’t even remember her name). It would have been better if they had split the story and spent time with Gordon in the past. Or if Ed and Kelly showed up and Gordon was married to someone else. 

2 hours ago, UnknownK said:

I mean if Facebook was still around you could look up billions of people and chose who to try dating if you happened to go back in time (which is what people do now anyway with apps).

Yeah that’s not the same thing. Facebook and dating apps are for public consumption. It was what we choose to put out there into the world. People in the future would find out next to nothing about me from the sources. Having someone’s cell phone is closer to having their diary. 

[MSterling]

On 7/13/2022 at 2:05 PM, madfortv said:

It was stated he is actually in the suit.

He is in the suit and does the voice. If you watch the season 2 gag reel, you see him in the suit without the helmet (from a distance) and Grimes says something about it. I've listened to interviews with Jackson on the Planetary Union Network podcast and he talks about the suit and his performance. I don't remember where I heard or read it, but someone mentioned how the other Kaylon actors had to mimic Jackson's movements during Identity Parts I & II.

[Yeah No]

On 7/7/2022 at 11:17 PM, chaifan said:

While the concept of hiding out in isolation is fine in theory, it would be extremely hard to do in real life.  Unless they expect the time-displaced crew member to live in a cave in true caveman style, living anywhere is going to require money, resources, and inevitably interacting with other people.  Where was Gordon living for 3 years?  Did he find an abandoned cabin in the woods?  He looked in pretty good shape, clean and well groomed, after living alone for a month when they got him in 2015. 

After spending a few days driving through my home state of Connecticut I found myself wondering about all of this.  I hope that the timeline where Gordon stays on earth after 2015 still exists somehow.  I would watch the hell out of anything that showed us how he survived until he finally left the forest and joined civilization.  Seth McFarlane is originally from Kent, CT, a small town I got lost in once before GPS devices.  It is heavily forested (most of CT is) and what I would call "where God lost his shoes".  So I picture that as the kind of place Seth would have imagined Gordon to have hidden out.  Although like you I figure it would have been unfeasible for him to live for very long without either interaction with other people or perhaps resorting to pilfering food and other items from farms or farm stands.  Didn't he still have a phaser?  He could have used that I to hunt and make a fire I suppose.  I have an entire scenario in my head for all of this.  The stuff of fan fiction, perhaps, although I've never really been into that.

[hoosiermommy]

So, last episode, Charlie was an amateur archeologist who knew about a long-extinct race, enough so that she would help with an archeological mission, and yet this week, not only could she. It identify what had been a ubiquitous object in her own species’ history, but she’d never even heard of it? “What is this cellular telephone you speak of?”

The writing for her does her no favors.

1 minute ago, hoosiermommy said:

So, last episode, Charlie was an amateur archeologist who knew about a long-extinct race, enough so that she would help with an archeological mission, and yet this week, not only could she not identify what had been a ubiquitous object in her own species’ history, but she’d never even heard of it? “What is this cellular telephone you speak of?”

The writing for her does her no favors.

[GreyBunny]

On 7/13/2022 at 6:08 PM, Dani said:

What bothers me about this type of plot is that the women is never a fully developed character in their own right. She exists exclusively to be a fantasy for the man to fall in love with. TNG did a better job than most by having that women show up and be completely different and be pissed over what happened. The Orville never made the women into her own character (as evidenced by the fact I can’t even remember her name). It would have been better if they had split the story and spent time with Gordon in the past. Or if Ed and Kelly showed up and Gordon was married to someone else. 

Agree, but even so, TNG fell far short too. Geordie did his creepy and disgusting, “I was just trying to make a connection” speech that he yelled in her face when she rightfully told him she felt violated, and at the end she told him she was married, as if “no” couldn’t be a good enough answer for her to turn him down. I hate that episode, it grosses me out. 

[DoctorAtomic]

11 hours ago, Yeah No said:

Didn't he still have a phaser?  He could have used that I to hunt and make a fire I suppose. 

I think he did allude to that. Gordon said he had to 'eat meat' in a very horrifying way that I found really interesting. 

[RedHawk]

8 hours ago, DoctorAtomic said:

I think he did allude to that. Gordon said he had to 'eat meat' in a very horrifying way that I found really interesting. 

I recall that he said he had to "eat animals" or "small animals" as if he were revolted, horrified, and maybe even embarrassed. So I assume that by the time of The Orville, the killing and eating of animal flesh has long been considered a disgusting action of the ancestors although some may feel it was understandable prior to the 20th century.

Edited July 18, 2022 by RedHawk
Spelling

[DoctorAtomic]

It was a good bit of world building that wasn't an information dump. 

[Chicago Redshirt]

18 hours ago, hoosiermommy said:

So, last episode, Charlie was an amateur archeologist who knew about a long-extinct race, enough so that she would help with an archeological mission, and yet this week, not only could she. It identify what had been a ubiquitous object in her own species’ history, but she’d never even heard of it? “What is this cellular telephone you speak of?”

The writing for her does her no favors.

In fairness to Charly, she very well could have understood the concept of a cell phone but not connected the one Gordon had with the abstract idea of one, especially if it was face-down and/or powered off when she first saw it. 

If you showed someone from the 1980s a modern cell phone, they would not recognize what it is at a glance.

I don't think she was puzzled when Gordon began to explain.

21 minutes ago, RedHawk said:

I recall that he said he had to "eat animals" or "small animals" as if he were revolted, horrified, and maybe even embarrassed. So I assume that by the time of The Orville, the killing and eating of animal flesh has long long been considered a disgusting action of the ancestors although some may feel it was understandable prior to the 20th century.

The Planetary Union has the equivalent of replicators, and so like the Federation, they seemingly have progressed to the point where they "no longer enslave animals for food," as Riker put it in one episode.

I don't have a specific example, but I'm pretty sure that there were examples of the characters eating meat-based dishes, unless we are to assume that it's all the futuristic equivalent of tofu and impossible burgers.

[shapeshifter]

19 hours ago, Yeah No said:

Didn't he still have a phaser?  He could have used that I to hunt and make a fire I suppose. 

7 hours ago, DoctorAtomic said:

Gordon said he had to 'eat meat' in a very horrifying way that I found really interesting. 

21 minutes ago, Chicago Redshirt said:

The Planetary Union has the equivalent of replicators, and so like the Federation, they seemingly have progressed to the point where they "no longer enslave animals for food," as Riker put it in one episode.

We already have lab-grown meat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultured_meat

And the relevant dialog: 

• [ED] Gordon. You're guilty of about 50 counts of temporal contamination. You broke the law, and god knows what the consequences...

• [GORDON] Screw the law! I spent three years obeying the law. I hid in an abandoned cabin in the woods of Connecticut, and I did my goddamn duty. I stayed invisible. I didn't see anyone, I didn't go anywhere. You know what I ate? Animals. Yeah. I was holding my weapon when I got sent back, and I used it to kill animals. You wanna talk about breaking the law? Here it's no big deal, but in our time? I'm a serial murderer, folks. You know what that does to your head? So after three years, I said the hell with it. Temporal law can blow me.

[Yeah No]

25 minutes ago, shapeshifter said:

• [GORDON] Screw the law! I spent three years obeying the law. I hid in an abandoned cabin in the woods of Connecticut, and I did my goddamn duty. I stayed invisible. I didn't see anyone, I didn't go anywhere. You know what I ate? Animals. Yeah. I was holding my weapon when I got sent back, and I used it to kill animals. You wanna talk about breaking the law? Here it's no big deal, but in our time? I'm a serial murderer, folks. You know what that does to your head? So after three years, I said the hell with it. Temporal law can blow me.

Thank you for reprinting this, I thought I remembered Gordon saying all of this.  I actually did see a couple of abandoned cabins on my drive and pictured Gordon living in them.  It would have been a very rough life, especially for someone not used to living anywhere near so rough a life.  It's not even as much of a stretch for us as it would be for someone that never ate real meat much less had to kill and cook it.

[SmithW6079]

I love time travel stories. I love how they mind-fuck me. I love paradoxes like the Orville got a message from Gordon five months after he was sent back, but then rescued him one month after he was sent back, so how could he have sent the message in the first place? They make my head hurt but in a good way.

I'm a believer in parallel universes, where every decision we make branches off into a separate universe. (One of the few Worf-centric episodes I liked from TNG is "Parallels," in which Worf keeps universe hopping.) The future that 5-month Gordon sent the message to no longer exists once 1-month Gordon was rescued, and the timeline has diverged slightly. Does the 10-year future where Gordon married and had children still exist? Somewhere, it does.

While I appreciate that this episode gave Scott Grimes a chance to shine, it once again involved crew acting stupid. Gordon has to run all the way from the bridge to wherever the time machine is to shut it down and barely makes it in time. I wonder if instead there might have been something Ed could have used, oh, I don't know, something like an intraship communications device where he could have just ordered someone nearer to the equipment to get in there and shut it down.

I know a lot of people found Ed and Kelly to be heartless bastards with Gordon, but personally, I loved how hard-ass they were. After their unprofessional behavior and conduct unbecoming officers in previous episodes, they finally showed their professionalism and dedication to whatever oaths they had to swear when they joined the Union's equivalent of Starfleet and became officers on a Union ship.

[DoctorAtomic]

I think they had a handwave as to why Gordon volunteered to go down and destroy the time machine. 

[RedHawk]

2 hours ago, Chicago Redshirt said:

The Planetary Union has the equivalent of replicators, and so like the Federation, they seemingly have progressed to the point where they "no longer enslave animals for food," as Riker put it in one episode.

I don't have a specific example, but I'm pretty sure that there were examples of the characters eating meat-based dishes, unless we are to assume that it's all the futuristic equivalent of tofu and impossible burgers.

Yes, I was also imagining that once replicators became common it would have made eating animal flesh repugnant to most humans, and over time to all. As the quotes above showed, the practice eventually was outlawed. Gordon feels anger and shame at needing to eat animal flesh to survive.

I do recall an episode of TNG where Riker has acquired a few eggs on a space station and cooks them (scrambled I think) for Troi, Worf, and Geordi. IIRC for some reason only Worf enjoyed the dish.

[Yeah No]

1 hour ago, RedHawk said:

I do recall an episode of TNG where Riker has acquired a few eggs on a space station and cooks them (scrambled I think) for Troi, Worf, and Geordi. IIRC for some reason only Worf enjoyed the dish.

Klingons tend to prefer real meat so maybe real eggs wouldn't disturb them?

[sharkerbaby]

On 7/17/2022 at 7:14 PM, RedHawk said:

I recall that he said he had to "eat animals" or "small animals" as if he were revolted, horrified, and maybe even embarrassed. So I assume that by the time of The Orville, the killing and eating of animal flesh has long been considered a disgusting action of the ancestors although some may feel it was understandable prior to the 20th century.

Prior to 1900?  So for the last 122 years what we have been doing is not understandable?  

[Ottis]

That episode… was actually good. Until the end. They mined TNG territory when Picard lived a lifetime on a planet, but offered Gordon a choice (ultimately not really, but in terms of the plot). I wish they would have stayed with that at the end instead of the time travel back. Because that was way more interesting.

Still, a good effort. Some silliness with the egg salad sandwich that probably deserved more focus.

[RevBrett]

I propose a new position on the command chart: A Common Sense Officer. This is how such a position could function:

Ed: OK, while you guys scoop up the fuel we need for our time travel doodad, we'll go get Gordon. Hope he's not too weird after living for 10 years in the past.
Common Sense Officer: I think we should wait to see if we can get the fuel and repair the doodad. That way we could go back the extra 10 years and get him before he's either had the chance to mess with the timeline, or spent 10 years in hermit misery...or worse!

Ed: Well, I ignored the Common Sense Officer, so now we have Gordon making a life for himself in the past with a family and everything and he won't leave them. We'll take Talla for one last chance to bully him into coming, even though three people physically dragging a man down the street would probably be noticed by a lot of people who would call the authorities, and if he won't come then we'll unnecessarily tell him we're going to go back when he first arrived and take him then so we'll wipe out his family and he can know it's his fault.
Common Sense Officer: How the hell did you get this job?

Of course, they could have written the episode to give reasonable explanations for every step they actually took, but that would have taken work and they might have had to cut the scene where they make Anne Winters say, "I lose, you choose" all dirrrty and everything.

Edited August 1, 2022 by RevBrett

[Lugal]

23 minutes ago, RevBrett said:

I propose a new position on the command chart: A Common Sense Officer.

See the Evil Overlord List, #12: One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation.

[Dobian]

On 7/7/2022 at 1:30 PM, Chaos Theory said:

Temporal Law sucks.

It sure does.  The whole idea that humans can regulate time travel is completely delusional.  Trying to regulate time travel is as ridiculous as trying to regulate gravity.  If you believe in a single universe, then the future impacts of Gordon's trip to the past are already known, so bringing him back before he did anything could potentially change the future that they have experienced.  If you're talking about a multiverse, which is the how the show sees it, then who cares?  You create another universe while the original universe is still intact (eliminates the paradoxes too).  Gordon's trip through time would have immediately created a new universe, simply by virtue of the fact that he now exists in a time he never existed in.  His life with his family still exists in that other universe.

If one time machine exists, you know there are or will be others.  The technology will spread, most planetary governments will have them, corporations will have them, black markets will have them.  I guess it hasn't occurred to the people writing the Temporal Law that not only are there people not under their control who might go back to the past, but people far into the future would be doing it, and the people in the present are already living with the result.

Ed and Kelly were complete dicks in this episode.  Send anyone back in time for a decade and expect them to live like a hermit for fear that they "might" disrupt future events?  It's preposterous, and 21st century Gordon nailed it to them.  It's sad to see Ed and Kelly devolve from the free spirits they used to be to a couple of petty little bureaucrats enforcing laws they don't even understand.  Their tone with Gordon was totally arrogant and devoid of basic empathy.  Time to get them Civil Service jobs.

Ed put his entire crew and the timeline at risk (at least according to him) going back another ten years with that contraption burning out.  If Lamar hadn't come up with the idea to return them to the future, there would have been hundreds of future people wandering around Earth and changing the timeline, not one.

Gordon's reaction, "Was I that selfish?," completely rang false for me.  Selfish for living a life when you were stranded in the past?  Give me a break!  He would have felt some level of resentment, knowing that he had actually created a life with the mystery woman from the cellphone.

Edited August 5, 2022 by Dobian

[Dobian]

On 7/17/2022 at 5:14 PM, RedHawk said:

I recall that he said he had to "eat animals" or "small animals" as if he were revolted, horrified, and maybe even embarrassed. So I assume that by the time of The Orville, the killing and eating of animal flesh has long been considered a disgusting action of the ancestors although some may feel it was understandable prior to the 20th century.

Well it's been understandable throughout the entire fossil record of one billion years.  There is nothing disgusting whatsoever about eating animals, it's a critical part of an ecosystem.  This show, similar to Star Trek, gets confused on its own morality.  In this case it's hunting for food vs raising livestock for slaughter.  I can see a society deciding that breeding animals to eat is repugnant, and many today of course believe this.  But hunting for survival?  Imagine a lion being revolted or embarrassed because it brought down a gazelle so it could eat.  Gordon can hunt or he can starve to death.  He can feel sorry for the animals he killed, but he has nothing to feel ashamed about. 

[Chicago Redshirt]

1 hour ago, Dobian said:

Well it's been understandable throughout the entire fossil record of one billion years.  There is nothing disgusting whatsoever about eating animals, it's a critical part of an ecosystem.  This show, similar to Star Trek, gets confused on its own morality.  In this case it's hunting for food vs raising livestock for slaughter.  I can see a society deciding that breeding animals to eat is repugnant, and many today of course believe this.  But hunting for survival?  Imagine a lion being revolted or embarrassed because it brought down a gazelle so it could eat.  Gordon can hunt or he can starve to death.  He can feel sorry for the animals he killed, but he has nothing to feel ashamed about. 

Even as a near-hermit, he could have gone vegetarian.

Morality/cultural taboos are funny things.

[Lugal]

3 hours ago, Dobian said:

Imagine a lion being revolted or embarrassed because it brought down a gazelle so it could eat.  Gordon can hunt or he can starve to death.  He can feel sorry for the animals he killed, but he has nothing to feel ashamed about.

Lions are obligate carnivores, humans are not.

[Dobian]

58 minutes ago, Lugal said:

Lions are obligate carnivores, humans are not.

How does that factor into the morality of hunting?  We're omnivores.  there is nothing immoral about hunting for food.  You eat what the land provides.  Gordon wasn't in a position to start his own vegetable farm, he was homeless and with no money.  He didn't have the option of going into the city to a homeless shelter since he was still following the temporal law.  If he wanted to survive he had to hunt.  He was in the same position as a lion.

[Lugal]

1 hour ago, Dobian said:

How does that factor into the morality of hunting?  We're omnivores.  there is nothing immoral about hunting for food.  You eat what the land provides.  Gordon wasn't in a position to start his own vegetable farm, he was homeless and with no money.  He didn't have the option of going into the city to a homeless shelter since he was still following the temporal law.  If he wanted to survive he had to hunt.  He was in the same position as a lion.

Humans do not require meat as an essential part of our diet, but as omnivores we can digest meat or plants.  Certain proteins we need are obtained most easily from meat, but can be obtained in other ways.  Felids however, being obligate carnivores, require certain nutrients that can only be found in meat, so Gordon was not in the same position as a lion, in that he must eat meat to live.

He was in the wilds of Connecticut, which is largely oak-hickory forest.  Both acorns and hickory nuts are edible, and can be gathered in greater quantities with far less caloric output than hunting would require (and they can be stored).  There would have been times when he did to hunt, but it was not his only, or I would bet, even his major source of food.

[Chicago Redshirt]

1 hour ago, Dobian said:

How does that factor into the morality of hunting?  We're omnivores.  there is nothing immoral about hunting for food.  You eat what the land provides.  Gordon wasn't in a position to start his own vegetable farm, he was homeless and with no money.  He didn't have the option of going into the city to a homeless shelter since he was still following the temporal law.  If he wanted to survive he had to hunt.  He was in the same position as a lion.

To some extent, morality is subjective. Some people consider eating any animals immoral, period. Some people consider eating certain animals like cats and dogs immoral.

Gordon was likely in a position to eat only vegetables if he wanted, because he could have eaten the food that the animals he hunted ate. It would be hard to gather enough vegetables, nuts and berries to be satisfying, but he could have done it. He also could have broken the temporal law as little as possible to obtain seeds and such to start a garden.

[tv-talk]

6 hours ago, Dobian said:

There is nothing disgusting whatsoever about eating animals,

if you grew up eating solely food created by a synthesizer you might view hunting animals as a pathological sickness, pretty much killing for your own personal pleasure. So while I am sure Gordon understood he had to do what he had to do, and both Kelly and Ed understood it, it could still seem revolting to them. Akin to having to be cannibalistic to survive a plane crash.

Edited August 5, 2022 by tv-talk

[Dobian]

1 hour ago, Lugal said:

Humans do not require meat as an essential part of our diet, but as omnivores we can digest meat or plants.  Certain proteins we need are obtained most easily from meat, but can be obtained in other ways.  Felids however, being obligate carnivores, require certain nutrients that can only be found in meat, so Gordon was not in the same position as a lion, in that he must eat meat to live.

He was in the wilds of Connecticut, which is largely oak-hickory forest.  Both acorns and hickory nuts are edible, and can be gathered in greater quantities with far less caloric output than hunting would require (and they can be stored).  There would have been times when he did to hunt, but it was not his only, or I would bet, even his major source of food.

He stated in the dialogue that he hunted out of absolute necessity, not because he wanted to.  So you can argue that it was the fault of the writers for not realizing that he could survive like a chipmunk - although even a diehard vegan would probably be sick of that diet after a while - but in the show's story as written, Gordon had to hunt to in order to live.  You have to go by what the show's story is presenting.  But you still miss the main point of what I said.  Even if Gordon did have other options and knew about them, and even if he wasn't anti-animal protein and hunted anyway, there is nothing immoral about killing to eat.  It is a natural thing and part of animal ecosystems.

[Lugal]

16 hours ago, Dobian said:

He stated in the dialogue that he hunted out of absolute necessity, not because he wanted to.  So you can argue that it was the fault of the writers for not realizing that he could survive like a chipmunk - although even a diehard vegan would probably be sick of that diet after a while - but in the show's story as written, Gordon had to hunt to in order to live.  You have to go by what the show's story is presenting.

Yeah, you're right, they acknowledged that Gordon killed to eat out of necessity.  And while the show didn't make it explicit, I'm sure he supplemented his diet in other ways (because anyone in a survival situation like his would).  I was pointing out ways he could have done so.  He brought up the hunting because that was what he had the biggest problem with.

16 hours ago, Dobian said:

But you still miss the main point of what I said.  Even if Gordon did have other options and knew about them, and even if he wasn't anti-animal protein and hunted anyway, there is nothing immoral about killing to eat.  It is a natural thing and part of animal ecosystems.

Like Chicago Redshirt said, to some extent morality is subjective, influenced by personal and cultural factors.  Gordon chose to set aside his morality for his own survival as was his prerogative.  And to get back to my original point, to compare his situation to a lion is invalid because lions must eat meat to survive whereas humans don't because we aren't obligate carnivores.

[Dobian]

10 hours ago, Lugal said:

Like Chicago Redshirt said, to some extent morality is subjective, influenced by personal and cultural factors.  Gordon chose to set aside his morality for his own survival as was his prerogative.  And to get back to my original point, to compare his situation to a lion is invalid because lions must eat meat to survive whereas humans don't because we aren't obligate carnivores.

The fact that lions have to eat meat is irrelevant.  Raccoons and foxes are omnivores.  They technically don't have to eat meat.  Is a raccoon immoral if it kills and eats a rabbit?  You're still bringing morality into this. Raising livestock to slaughter is a human activity and subject to moral question.  Hunting to eat is a part of our nature and is not.  We're omnivores, so it is in our nature to eat meat, and we have to go against our animal nature to not eat meat.  There are even theories that the reason the human brain evolved like it did was because of the introduction of cooked meat into our diet and the nutrients our ancestors got from that.  But whether or not that's true, it's still in our nature to eat meat, so not a moral issue as far as I'm concerned.  Nature created predator and prey for a reason.  Gordon may have believed in his own mind that he was having to set aside his morality to  survive, but I would say that it's a silly idea to question your own morality when are are simply doing what nature intended.

[Yeah No]

On 8/5/2022 at 5:41 PM, Lugal said:

Humans do not require meat as an essential part of our diet, but as omnivores we can digest meat or plants.  Certain proteins we need are obtained most easily from meat, but can be obtained in other ways.  Felids however, being obligate carnivores, require certain nutrients that can only be found in meat, so Gordon was not in the same position as a lion, in that he must eat meat to live.

He was in the wilds of Connecticut, which is largely oak-hickory forest.  Both acorns and hickory nuts are edible, and can be gathered in greater quantities with far less caloric output than hunting would require (and they can be stored).  There would have been times when he did to hunt, but it was not his only, or I would bet, even his major source of food.

On 8/5/2022 at 5:53 PM, Chicago Redshirt said:

Gordon was likely in a position to eat only vegetables if he wanted, because he could have eaten the food that the animals he hunted ate. It would be hard to gather enough vegetables, nuts and berries to be satisfying, but he could have done it. He also could have broken the temporal law as little as possible to obtain seeds and such to start a garden.

For one thing, Gordon was living in the wild.  It isn't like a supermarket where you have access to a variety of fruits and vegetables that could sustain you for an indefinite period if you choose not to eat meat.  The only reason vegans and vegetarians survive without meat is because as humans living in a highly organized society they have access to a broad variety of non-meat foods.  The forests of CT do not have enough vegetation or the kind of vegetation to sustain someone for an indefinite period if that's all they eat.  There is not enough edible vegetation with enough plant protein or fat.

One thing I've learned from watching the TV series "Alone" on the History Channel is that fat is incredibly important to human survival and if you don't have access to enough of it out in the wild you are going to lose too much weight too fast and not receive enough nutrition to survive very long.  Contestants tend to lose about a pound a day out in the forest because of that no matter how much vegetation or even lean meat they eat.  The only really good source of fat in that situation is either from fatty fish or animal fat.  Vegans and vegetarians living in organized society also have access to plentiful sources of non-meat protein that isn't available in the forest in quantities that would sustain humans for the long haul.  It would be very hard for any human to survive for very long in the forest without eating meat for the fat and protein, especially here in my home state of CT.  

So based on all of that I am in the camp of feeling that if Gordon were going to adhere to his ethics about not interacting with the human population/altering the timeline, he would ultimately end up having to hunt or trap and eat meat to survive.  Acorns wouldn't be a bad source of nutrition, but he would need a whole LOT of them on a daily basis not to waste away.  The average man needs in excess of 2,000 calories a day to survive and more if he's very active.  That's a lot more than it sounds when you're dependent only on the wild for your sustenance and in my opinion not realistic to achieve under the circumstances if meat isn't on the menu. It would take a pound of acorns a day to equal 2,000 calories.  That's a LOT of acorns on a daily basis, probably more than one person could find and process every day and not easily found at certain times of the year (which is why the squirrels go crazy in the Fall burying them for the Winter).  So unless he were to sneak into a supermarket and steal some nuts, seeds, plant protein or oil, he would end up having to eat fish or meat.  Most of the time people living in the wild don't have the luxury of not eating meat unless they are OK with wasting away to nothing.  Gordon also didn't have access to the resources necessary to start a garden of any kind unless he engaged in some sort of pilfering or theft.  And even then it wouldn't be that easy. 

Edited August 7, 2022 by Yeah No

[Lugal]

14 hours ago, Dobian said:

The fact that lions have to eat meat is irrelevant.  Raccoons and foxes are omnivores.  They technically don't have to eat meat.  Is a raccoon immoral if it kills and eats a rabbit?  You're still bringing morality into this.

You brought morality into this when you said:

On 8/5/2022 at 8:40 AM, Dobian said:

Imagine a lion being revolted or embarrassed because it brought down a gazelle so it could eat.

I pointed out that the situation is not applicable because lions are required to eat meat to survive while humans are not.  Everything else has been an interesting digression about human diet and the mechanics of hunting.

14 hours ago, Dobian said:

We're omnivores, so it is in our nature to eat meat, and we have to go against our animal nature to not eat meat.

As to whether it's "our nature" to eat meat, I have no idea, that's a philosophical discussion.  What it really comes down to is: we can.

13 hours ago, Yeah No said:

One thing I've learned from watching the TV series "Alone" on the History Channel is that fat is incredibly important to human survival and if you don't have access to enough of it out in the wild you are going to lose too much weight too fast and not receive enough nutrition to survive very long.

The thing is most wild meat is pretty lean.  Acorns are a good source of fat as are hickory nuts, and acorns were a dietary staple for many cultures before grains.  But one of the best sources of fat is bone marrow, which can be found through scavenging (which was likely how humans evolved meat eating in the first place).

All food gathering comes down to energy efficiency:  How much energy do you have to expend for what you get?  Gathering is more efficient than hunting.

To bring it back to the show, the fact that Gordon did hunt was was out of desperation and the fact that he had a weapon that greatly increased his chances of success. Least energy expended for greatest reward.  If he didn't have the raygun, hunting would have been much more difficult for him.  So to get hypothetical: could Gordon have survived without killing animals?  If we consider game animals and fish, it would have been very difficult.  If we include just game animals, and Gordon was OK with eating fish, then he probably could have.  Fishing, foraging and occasionally scavenging, he could have survived.  But to just survive like that for the sake of not interrupting the timeline, I can understand why he said screw this and went into town.

[shapeshifter]

2 hours ago, Lugal said:

To bring it back to the show, the fact that Gordon did hunt was was out of desperation and the fact that he had a weapon that greatly increased his chances of success. Least energy expended for greatest reward.  If he didn't have the raygun, hunting would have been much more difficult for him.  So to get hypothetical: could Gordon have survived without killing animals? 

Clearly Gordon hated having to kill and eat animals, so I don't think he would have done so unless it seemed like the only way to survive. 
In my mind, not all of the human people from the Orville would have been so repulsed. I can imagine John and Charly almost getting into the skill of it. 
Maybe Kelly too. 
Claire might have been matter-of-fact about it. Or she might have been upset at taking a life.
Ed seems like he'd be as squeamish as Gordon.
Regardless, the writers decided having to kill animals for food was going to freak out Gordon. 

I wonder if he had landed on an island in the Pacific Northwest where he could pick up oysters when the tide was out (something I did in my pseudo-vegetarian hippie days without running water or electricity) if he would have been okay with that, and even enjoyed it? Maybe had a little collection of tiny pearls and brought them back to the future with him--

Edited August 7, 2022 by shapeshifter

[Yeah No]

On 8/7/2022 at 1:38 PM, Lugal said:

The thing is most wild meat is pretty lean.  Acorns are a good source of fat as are hickory nuts, and acorns were a dietary staple for many cultures before grains. 

Yesterday I picked up a few acorns from my yard.  They are much lighter than they look!  It would take a LOT of acorns to sustain the average man every day.  I didn't think of the option to only eat already dead animals, but that can be a problem too because you don't know how fresh they are or why they died.  And if he thought fishing was OK, most fish around here aren't the fatty kind, so that's a bummer.  But yeah, I'm with you that I get why at some point he would have to hunt and kill animals to survive and eventually join human society.  Living like that is much harder than it looks.  This episode focused on the ethical issues behind what he did but I think he should have pointed out to them how difficult it was for him to live that way successfully.  Kelly and Ed didn't care, though.  They thought he should have sacrificed himself.  What if he got hurt?  Should he let himself suffer and die rather than go to a hospital?  He should have made those points to them even if they were unsympathetic.

[shapeshifter]

10 minutes ago, Yeah No said:

This episode focused on the ethical issues behind what he did but I think he should have pointed out to them how difficult it was for him to live that way successfully.  Kelly and Ed didn't care, though.  They thought he should have sacrificed himself.  What if he got hurt?  Should he let himself suffer and die rather than go to a hospital?  He should have made those points to them even if they were unsympathetic.

I/we are probably thinking a lot more about this than the writers——or maybe not? The writers maybe have had lively debates about ethics, given the episode we saw.
Anyway: 
I am now imagining that all union explorers go through extensive training and testing about not rewriting history should they find themselves in the past, and that includes some sort of suicide plan in some circumstances. 
I'm not saying they absolutely had such training. Just that they might have. It would explain Ed and Kelly's somewhat uncharacteristic ruthless attitudes.

Edited August 9, 2022 by shapeshifter

[Lugal]

2 hours ago, Yeah No said:

Yesterday I picked up a few acorns from my yard.  They are much lighter than they look!  It would take a LOT of acorns to sustain the average man every day.  I didn't think of the option to only eat already dead animals, but that can be a problem too because you don't know how fresh they are or why they died.

I remember I read about a study where 9 women gathered around 3 kg of acorns in an hour.  As for eating dead animals, the findings seem to be that early humans would avoid any meat left on the bones because it spoils quickly, but the marrow will last long enough that humans would gather and break open the bones after the predators had finished with the carcass.  And sometimes they worked in groups, they would steal kills from other predators.

2 hours ago, Yeah No said:

What if he got hurt?  Should he let himself suffer and die rather than go to a hospital?  He should have made those points to them even if they were unsympathetic.

Injuries in the wild can be deadly, and it may not be a quick death.  He should have made those points.  And hunting does carry a greater risk of injury than gathering.

[Emma9]

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: 

On 7/9/2022 at 2:57 PM, madfortv said:

Charly and Isaac took two cycles and rode them to another location.  What is the possible impact on the future of the former owners?  Were the cycles dumped or returned? They mined dysonium. Even if they had removed Gordon from that timeline, what are the repercussions on the new timeline because of their actions?  Was there an impact in the future because some dysonium was no longer available? If there was an attempt to hide the shuttle, I missed it.  At the start they were attempting to retrieve Gordon from 10 years in the future yet there was little care to hide their actions, which left many plot holes.

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.

~

On 8/5/2022 at 3:52 PM, Dobian said:

If he wanted to survive he had to hunt.  He was in the same position as a lion.

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.

Edited August 11, 2022 by Emma9

[aemom]

On 7/7/2022 at 8:46 AM, shapeshifter said:

But I do like the way it was written so the characters have to live with their sense of loss of what could have been, which was mirrored with Charly's "conversation" with Isaac, and perhaps Grimes and Palicki's divorce at the time. 

Scott Grimes did Emmy-worthy work; maybe there's some Scifi awards he'll at least get, or, maybe even better, he'll get cast in some other roles which he would not have otherwise, and which he will totally own.

Didn't someone post in another thread that this was the first episode that would have been filmed after Palicki and Grimes divorce? If so, kudos for working the emotions into the plot in a respectful way.
But, Adrianne? After hearing Scott play guitar and sing in the opening scene? Speaking from my own distant future: I still wonder if I should've stayed on the island with that violinist at least another day 45 years ago to see if there was some spark.

The Sci-Fi awards would be the Saturn Awards.

Interesting thing about singing: I am a singer-songwriter and while I get positive feedback about my work, my husband does not listen to my music. He says that it's too weird to listen to me sing. So while some people would love to have their partner serenade them, others want no part of that.

On 7/10/2022 at 10:41 PM, ketose said:

I mentioned one of my favorite time travel movies being Paycheck is kind of a cheat because a person doesn't physically travel in time. The time part is the ability to see the future, which is more likely than actually popping into the future. In that case, the "future" could be changed.

Have you read the short story by Philip K. Dick that the movie was based on? Excellent, as are many of his stories.

[ketose]

On 10/15/2022 at 12:12 AM, aemom said:

Have you read the short story by Philip K. Dick that the movie was based on? Excellent, as are many of his stories.

No. I haven't even read "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" when I borrowed it in college (I gave it back).