YMMV / The Orville

• Adorkable:
  • Alara often comes off as this. Examples include when she takes part in challenging Bortus to eat different objects, agreeing wholeheartedly to the idea of getting a cat for the bridge, anytime she's in the boxing simulator, and anytime she's forced to wear a disguise to hide the ridges on her forehead and nose.
  • Ed's also pretty adorkable at times. He keeps a Kermit the Frog doll on his desk, likes to play sheriff in the simulator, sings along to old musicals, and likes to crack terrible jokes. There's also his utter helplessness when he is drafted as 'Sober Man' and later when Claire ropes him into trying on dresses in the Season 3 finale.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Whilst it's widely accepted that Ed Mercer is a good man who tries to do his best to resolve conflict wherever he encounters it across the galaxy, there is some debate over his way of handling alien cultures. Is he open-minded and eager to guide primitive races to a path of enlightenment, using reason and logic to persuade them to halt traditions that have needlessly oppressed members of their species? Or does Teleya have a point in Nothing Left on Earth Excepting Fishes, that his views are anthropocentric, and he seeks to educate whilst remaining narrow-minded, trying to make other cultures homogeneous to that of the Union?
    • Ed and his crew's history of clashing with the Moclan's culture is seen as support for the latter. The trial in About a Girl not ending in their favor because they made their case based on the human argument of gender equality to a jury of Moclans, whilst Bortus - the only Moclan supporting them - was actually convinced by the idea of letting his child decide their own future rather than making it for them.
    • It seems the Moclans themselves agree with the latter interpretation for not just Ed Mercer and the Orville crew, but for the Union as a whole. After they are forced out of the Union in Midnight Blue, they use this exact reasoning to try to strike up an alliance with the Krill in Domino.
  • At the end of "Cupid's Dagger", Darulio says that he doesn't know if his pheromones were active when he had sex with Kelly, which opens itself to three different interpretations:
    • 1) he's telling the truth, and he really does not know

    • 2) he's lying because he wants to give her the ambiguity she needs to forgive herself

    • 3) he's lying because he's come to realize that, by her standards, he raped her, and he doesn't want to admit it.
  • Is Klyden a cis woman forced into a male gender role and full of self-hate, or a trans man lucky enough to be born a Moclan. Neither interpretation is good, since he's a sexist, bigoted Jerkass either way.
• And You Thought It Would Fail:
  • A lot of people were skeptical of Seth MacFarlane doing an even semi-serious big-budget sci-fi program; on top of this, the series is in a genre with a historically short lifespan on mainstream network TV on the network that notoriously cancelled the acclaimed Firefly after only a dozen episodes. So far, viewer response has been mostly positive while critical response has been mixed and its debut season ratings were enough to ensure was renewed for a second season.
  • Once Star Trek: Discovery debuted, a Dueling Shows scenario resulted, with some expecting The Orville to fail once "real" Star Trek returned to TV. Instead, it ended up, at first at least, garnering more positive response from viewers than Discovery, and it became the first network show of the 2017-2018 TV season to get a second season renewal (following Discovery being itself renewed, albeit for streaming).
• Anvilicious:
  • The Orville is full of Author Tracts against religion and the religious via a series of strawmen with every religion in seasons 1 and 2 shown being a fictional one that's misguided, evil or both. The only references to real-life religions are selective and exaggerated historical references ^note  There are several jabs at the Spanish Inquisition - a frequent victim of this trope in real-life while being thinly-veiled strawmen overall (with some real-life religions being singled out more than others). Season 3 seems to acknowledge this, where episode 2 has Ed and co a-bit-too-eagerly dismiss the Krill's warning about a dangerous region of space under the belief it's just more religious nonsense and end up losing a couple of their crew members, and episode 5 has Kelly coming to a diplomatic agreement with an alien officer whose religion believes it blasphemous to wear clothing in the first month of work (they agree to put on a pair of pants while in public areas and call it a day).
  • Seth's expressions about recreational marijuana use, with pot brownies here considered an acceptable foodstuff.
• Ass Pull: John's sudden thrust into the Chief Engineer position, that comes up solely as a result of Kelly finding his old aptitude test from the Union Academy moments after their current Chief Engineer leaves in the same episode to design a space station. Befitting the trope's place here under YMMV, there is some debate on whether this is really an ass pull or part of planned-out character development paying homage to how Geordi in Star Trek TNG, similarly out of the blue, transformed from the bridge helmsman to chief engineer between seasons with no prior hint of him having any knowledge or interest in engineering. Considering that in modern navies, most engineering officers spend years learning (particularly in nuclear navies), it seems incredible that a bridge helmsman could suddenly switch to leading the engineering section of an FTL starship. And why would the Engineering Chief on a small frigate-sized ship suddenly transfer to design a space station? The qualifications for designing a ship are a lot different to running & maintaining the engines on one.
• Awesome Music:
  • Bruce Broughton's rousing main theme. The version playing in the pilot (also scored by Broughton) as the Orville pulls out of spacedock for the first time is suitably bombastic.
  • Each episode receives a full score that is performed by a 75-piece orchestra. Seth MacFarlane has said that they treat the music for the series as seriously as they would for a major motion picture. In keeping with the Star Trek connections, Regular composer John Debney scored a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode and two episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. He alternates with Joel McNeely, who's also worked with MacFarlane on A Million Ways to Die in the West and Family Guy and is most recently the Poor Man's Substitute for Michael Giacchino, the composer for Star Trek (2009), Star Trek Into Darkness and Star Trek Beyond.
  • When the crew starts prepping for First Contact in "All the World is Birthday Cake", John Debney cuts loose with an uproarious cue that wouldn't be out of place in James Horner's Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan soundtrack.
  • The above is then topped by the aforementioned "poor man's" Michael Giacchino doing a near pitch-perfect pastiche of John Williams' Star Wars scores as the score of the Season 2 finale "The Road Not Taken" for several scenes (the initial chase, the fight on the rebel outpost and the subsequent escape and the crew's arrival on the lifeless Earth) and then does an even better take on James Horner, specifically his score for Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, when the Orville rises from the Marianas Trench, give it a listen but beware spoilerific title "Lifting Off the Ocean Floor".
• Base-Breaking Character: Charly Burke is easily the most divisive member of the show's main cast. Her detractors tend to consider Anne Winters to have been miscast in the role, as well as feeling Charly in general to be an overly abrasive, unsympathetic character who clashes with the show's optimistic ethos, and bemoan her being Killed Off for Real just as she was starting to be more interesting and sympathetic. Others applaud her Character Development, feel that Winters greatly improved in the role as Season 3 went on, and that her Heroic Sacrifice more than made up for Charly's harsh attitude towards Isaac.
• Broken Base:
  • An unusual example of a series breaking another series' fan base, with many Star Trek fans taking issue with fellow fans who consider The Orville to be "real Star Trek" instead of Discovery, the actual current Trek series. Even fans who love both shows have been known to take issue with this.
  • A split started occurring within the Orville fandom as the show progressed. Originally framed as a sort-of Indecisive Parody to dodge copyright infringement^note Word of God was that Seth originally pitched the scripts to Star Trek but was turned down, Season 1 had a bunch of sitcommy scenes that poked fun at various tropes seen in Star Trek. Reception to the jokes were mostly lukewarm and having attracted enough folks that watch the show for the sci-fi the parody pretense was basically dropped with Seasons 2 onwards, and while most of the base have no issue with it, a few fans have expressed that they genuinely liked the humor and miss its absence.
  • There's a little bit of a split between fans who prefer Alara, and those who prefer Talla. Alara's fans typically like her adorkable nature, considering it to be something that sets her apart from the usual Action Girl archetype, and feeling Talla to be a more generic character by comparison. Meanwhile, Talla's fans tend to consider Jessica Szohr to be a better actress than Halston Sage, and thus more convincing as a security officer, in addition to being better-suited to handle the more dramatic direction that Season 2 onwards would take. And then there are the fans who love both characters equally.
• Catharsis Factor: During "Midnight Blue", after watching Topa getting tortured through most of the episode, it can be ultimately satisfying seeing Bortus storm into her cell and gouge out the eye of the Moclan Interrogator.
• Complete Monster—"From Unknown Graves": Yan was a "Builder" on the planet Kaylon responsible for creating the robotic Kaylon race. Designing the Kaylon to be servants, Yan knew all along that he had created a sapient Slave Race, dismissing all criticism of his actions and responding to the problems that resulted by introducing shock devices that were used to subjugate and torture the Kaylon on a daily basis. This eventually led to the extinction of the Builders as the Kaylon saw no other option but to rise up against their masters to escape their fate. Caring for little more than his profits, Yan was emblematic of the hubris and cruelty of the Builders.
• Critical Dissonance:
  • In Season 1 the audience and the critics were extremely divided. On Rotten Tomatoes, the critical approval rating, which was largely based on the pilot episode, began at 18%, vs. the Season 1 audience approval rating of 94%. Metacritic also showed a simlar split, and the show gained a user rating of 7.9 out of 10 on IMDb. As the first season progressed, the Rotten Tomatoes critic score improved to a still-weak 31%, showing some critics had warmed to the series, though others doubled down and plastered the show on some "Worst of 2017" lists.
  • For Season 2, the critics who stuck around were impressed by the show's progression, enough to give Season 2 a 100% critical approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. This is one of the most dramatic positive season-to-season jumps for any show. The high marks continued into New Horizons, albeit with a relatively small number of reviews.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Alara rapidly became a fan-favourite character, helped by two of the best episodes of the first season being centered around her.
• Expy: The show is full of them for Star Trek characters: Gordon is Kirk, Bortus is Worf, Isaac is a combination of Data and Odo, Teleya is Seska, La Marr is Geordi, Gordon is Tom Paris, Yaphit is Barclay, Claire is Dr. Crusher, Alara is Wesley. As a common exploration ship, the Orville is close to Voyager than the Enterprise.
• Fanfic Fuel: That Bad Future timeline is just screaming an open invitation to write out what happened there.
• Fandom Rivalry:
  • When it was announced that Hunter would return to Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. in Season 5 but not Bobbi, many fans suspected that Adrianne Palicki's role on this show was keeping her from doing it.
  • With Star Trek: Discovery, over the perception that the latter diverges too far from the franchise's roots, and that Orville feels more like what Star Trek should be. Part of the rivalry also extends to the two shows' (initial) levels of accessibility; Discovery is exclusive to CBS All Access, while Orville was free to watch on your local Fox TV station. That changed with season 3 of The Orville, which became exclusive to Hulu (and later Disney+).
  • Averted for everyone outside the USA, where Discovery was on the comparatively more mainstream Netflix — until 2021, when it was removed pending a shift to international versions of Paramount+ (the successor to CBS All Access). Except for Canada, where Discovery is actually broadcast on the Space cable network, and is also on a separate streaming service called Crave TV.
  • Fans of Firefly have voiced their opinions on YouTube and Facebook that they aren't too fond of this series. FOX bothering to do another space series, and giving it more chances to thrive, when they didn't give the same chances to Firefly seems to sting a bit, even though more than a decade of changing TV tastes has passed since the cancellation of Firefly and Firefly didn't have the benefit of piggybacking off of Star Trek's familiarity and nostalgia. In addition, The Orville had the benefit of being produced and starring the man behind one of its most popular and long-running series, who was already powerful enough with Fox to get them to produce and air a science documentary series - in prime time.
• Genius Bonus: In "Gently Falling Rain", Gordon performs an "expanding helix maneuver". He claims he just made it up, however those familiar with aviation would know that an aircraft moving along a helical path is called ... a barrel roll.^note A barrel roll according to aviation, anyway. The one in Star Fox is actually an aileron roll, which is a misnomer, but the developers kept the wrong term due to Rule of Cool.
• Growing the Beard:
  • The Orville's early episodes are rough if you're not fond of toilet humor, to say nothing of "Cupid's Dagger" in late season one. But right around then the show starts to dramatically track upwards in watchability: among other things, Ed and the other male cast members start acting a little less like frat boys and more like professional officers (at least when they're on duty), and the series starts exploring the Krill more instead of leaving them an Always Chaotic Evil antagonist leading to a rapprochement between them and the Union in season two while revealing that the Kaylon — y'know, Isaac's people — are an even greater threat. Seth MacFarlane himself said he intentionally toned down the show's sitcom aspects for season two.
  • Season Three continues this growth by sincerely tackling serious topics and maintaining tension and drama. Levity now comes from natural interactions between characters, with Seth MacFarlane says that they've stopped trying to shoehorn in jokes and punchlines and are letting scenes flow more naturally while finding levity from the way characters interact and behave instead.
• Harsher in Hindsight: In the season 3 episode "Gently Falling Rain," we see the Krill's psychologically torturous means of punishing early termination of pregnancy. In the show, it's treated as an example of an exaggerated fascist society. And then, in what has to be an example of THE MOST inadvertently appropriate timing in TV schedule history, the US Supreme Court overturned Roe Vs. Wade the very next day, ending the nationwide protection of abortion in the country.
• He Really Can Act:
  • This applies to series lead Seth MacFarlane himself. Those expecting him to fratboy it up and do nothing but joke and pop culture reference his way along found themselves surprised to see Seth put some genuine gravitas and nuance into his performance as Captain Mercer during the show's many non-comedic moments.
  • Scott Grimes as well, particularly in Season 3."Twice in a Lifetime" has him putting in an absolute Tear Jerker of a performance.
• Humor Dissonance: Mercer admits that Grayson's Bond One-Liner "You got wood" after destroying a spaceship with a rapidly growing tree is better than his own "Happy Arbor Day." Several fans have stated that they found the other way around to be the case. Granted, it's implied that the holiday has become very obscure even among humans by this time, as the only one to get the joke immediately is a recently-rescued botanist. Also, Grayson's joke is more international, as "Arbor Day" is relatively meaningless outside the US.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: A lot of reviewers panned the show for being just a Star Trek rip-off. While that is true, that perhaps is why it found popularity as it has the old Star Trek style and format that many fans missed, as opposed to the darker, more action-focused style of Discovery and later Picard.
• Magnificent Bitch: Pria Levesque is a time traveller from the 29th century who arranges to be picked up by the Orville by faking a distress call. After arriving on board, Pria quickly gains the crew's trust by saving them from a dark matter storm before bonding with Captain Ed Mercer, who is still recovering from a painful divorce with his ex-wife (now First Officer) Kelly Grayson, and seducing him into a one-night stand. Meanwhile, Pria installs a device in the engine room through which she can remotely take over control of the ship in order to pilot it into a wormhole to the future, selling the Orville off as an antique and forcing the crew to live out the remainder of their lives in an unrecognizable universe with everyone they know having died hundreds of years ago. When her scheme fails, Pria makes one last attempt to convince Mercer to cooperate before calmly accepting that her current version will be erased from history. Pria is among the cleverest foes the crew of the Orville have faced so far, with few managing to emotionally get under Mercer's skin like she has.
• Narm: The reveal of the Krill’s god having the name of a car rental place makes for a funny gag the first time. Unfortunately, it also means the show is forever after stuck with the name Avis being a big part of their culture, even in serious scenes. This apparently applies in-universe as well; Kelly was convinced that Gordon was pulling her leg when he told her about it for the better part of two seasons.
• Narm Charm: Heveena reciting the chorus of Dolly Parton's "9 to 5" as part of her speech to the Union Council in "Sanctuary" could have come across as an overly silly bit in a serious episode. However, the sheer sincerity with which Rena Owen delivers the lines helps to sell the moment, as does the bemused side-eye Admiral Halsey gives to Ed.
• One-Scene Wonder:
  • Liam Neeson, unlisted in the guest credits, gives a ton of gravitas to the captain of a crippled ship facing a lifetime marooned in space.
  • Similar one-off cameos have involved Jeffrey Tambor and Ted Danson. (Though the latter has now made a couple of appearances.)
• Romantic Plot Tumor: While some fans find it sweet, others believe that the handling of Kelly and Mercer's relationship has been... less than ideal. Mercer is unwilling to accept his wife's statement that their relationship is over and frequently tries to get back with her despite the fact she's his subordinate. The Will They or Won't They? has caused both of them to leave behind relationships that fans liked more (Mercer/Pria and Kelly/Cassius). It reached its nadir when Mercer tried to date Kelly's past self and blackmail her present self into dating him over it. Fans are ready for them either to hook up and stay hooked up, or for Mercer to finally get over it.
• The Scrappy:
  • Already up against the wall for sleeping with a married woman, the episode "Cupid's Dagger" plants Darulio, the blue alien man whom Kelly cheated on Ed with as a Grade A Jerkass, if not outright evil. His species has pheromones that they secrete while in heat that makes anyone who touches him fall madly in love with him. He touches both Ed and Kelly, sleeps with them, basically committing date rape and is completely unapologetic about it, and spreads it to Yaphit which leads to the Squick mentioned below and nearly driving Claire homicidally insane, though at least that part was unintentional on his part. All of this, and he'd been among other species for years, more than long enough to be able to recognize that other species could view what he did as wrong and understand that strongly negative consequences could happen.
  • Klyden seems to be well on his way there, if not there already. Firstly, being the loudest voice in the room asking for Topa's forced gender reassignment (and being a Boomerang Bigot, as we find out). Then, there's stabbing Bortus in his sleep due to his culture's divorce customs. And then there's his actions in "Deflectors," done partly out of jealousy over Locar being Bortus's ex and part out of heterophobic bigotry, which sends the poor bastard to a death sentence. It's getting to the point where you wonder just what Bortus sees in the guy. He cements his status in "A Tale of Two Topas", wherein he vehemently disagrees with the idea of telling Topa about her gender reassignment, verbally and physically assaults Kelly over it, and winds up the episode by divorcing Bortus and disowning Topa. Whether his actions of apologizing to Topa in "Midnight Blue" and renouncing his Moclan citizenship changes his status in the minds of fans remains to be seen.
• Ship-to-Ship Combat: There was one brewing with shipping Ed with Kelly, versus shipping him with Alara. Of course, since Alara and Kelly had some good chemistry of their own, a third and fourth option was also on the table. Sadly, Alara was Put on a Bus without any of this coming to fruition, and it looks like Kelly might follow her in Season 4.
• Shocking Moments: Most of the series consists of Lighter and Softer sci-fi as advertised ... and then the second season's "Identity" (the first two-part episode in the series) comes along and reveals that the entire Kaylon race are not the seemingly benign androids that Isaac was shaping up to be, but rather a race of genocidal Absolute Xenophobes bent on the extermination of organic life, instantly making them a far greater threat than the recurring Obviously Evil Krill.
• Spiritual Successor:
  • The show is effectively a more comedic version of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Despite Seth MacFarlane's presence, it's also mostly a dramatic story. Given the involvement of so many Star Trek alumni, it's arguably got as much title to being a Star Trek show as the official ones by Paramount and CBS.
  • There have also been a few jokes about it being Galaxy Quest: The Series.
  • It could also be said to be The Office (US) IN SPACE!, in exactly the same manner as the original Star Trek was promoted as Wagon Train IN SPACE!.
  • Fans of Peter David's Star Trek Expanded Universe works say it's as close as we'll probably get to Star Trek: New Frontier.
• Squick: In what may be one of the most disgusting scenes in the history of television, Claire and Yaphit having slime sex. No amount of Brain Bleach will get that image out of your head once you've seen it.
• Take That, Scrappy!: Bortus gets fed up and chews out Klyden for his misogyny and close-mindedness in "Sanctuary," and it was a long time coming.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: "Pria" ends with a very intriguing setup for future appearances by its title character, a con artist stranded centuries before her time who has genuine affection for the Orville crew but would still be willing to manipulate them in efforts to get home. Unfortunately, she's played by big star Charlize Theron and clearly won't be sticking around, so she's eliminated from the setting through especially wonky time travel logic. (Albeit in such a way that a potential return appearance is not off the table.)
• Unintentionally Sympathetic:
  • Captain Mercer's reaction to his wife's adultery struck quite a few viewers as over the top. While certainly bad, the fact he divorced her as well as is clearly devastated by it a year later struck many as Good is Petty. On the other hand, some viewers (particularly those who have been cheated on) are entirely on his side. Both characters seem to both be at fault for their own behavior, and mutually hurt. By the end of the first episode, we know he was a workaholic who barely spent any time with his wife, at the same time, even Grayson admits what she did to him was terrible, and her intent to get his career back on track with playing the cronyism card for him behind his back strongly alludes that she sees it as penance. The fact that both characters are willing to work with each other after the initial confrontation seems to help. In any case, much more nuanced than one might expect from the Family Guy Guy. And now an episode with the one she cheated with has called into question whether Grayson was even mentally competent enough at the time to be responsible for her actions, which throws a wrench into the whole issue, although said episode does have her explicitly state that her relationship with Ed was already failing even before she became involved with Darulio, and the episode is ambiguous as to whether her actions were totally against her will.
  • Pria Lavesque wanted to steal the Orville and sell it, but in her original timeline, the Orville was destroyed by a Negative Space Wedgie, which means she really did save the life of every single person on the ship. Her motives might not have been altruistic, but the crew treating her like a totally evil villain kind of makes them look like Ungrateful Bastards. Would they have preferred to die a pointless death?
• Visual Effects of Awesome:
  • Yaphit's character model is impressive, especially considering he is done on a network TV budget. Not only is he translucent and constantly moving, close observation shows that his surface is covered in fuzz and other bits and pieces he's picked up from sliding across the Orville's deck.
  • The wormhole seen in "Pria" is nothing like what's been seen before on televised sci-fi, and is both psychedelic and ominous in its imagery. It's like they mixed the Deep Space Nine wormhole interior with the Gargantua black hole from Interstellar then coloured it while on acid.
  • The two-dimensional space from "New Dimensions", along with the impact that anomaly has, flattening out the ships that get caught in it. Also, the two scene alien from this episode is a remarkable physical effect.
  • The Orville itself is a great-looking ship design, reportedly devised by MacFarlane himself. The ship's beauty is especially evident during the electrical storm sequence in "Firestorm", where the Orville is lit so that every contour of the physical shooting model is visible in beautiful close up. It also manages to avoid the typical Star Trek style "nacelle" design and avoid an overly brutish hard line "rectangle" design.
    • Even more awesome, especially for old school special effects aficionados, is the fact that the Orville is a split between a model miniature (for when the ship is traveling normally through space) and CG (for when the ship is in battle scenes or doing more complex movement). In a day and age where Hollywood has replaced most model effect sequences with CG, it's a breath of fresh air to see that this show treats both the model and CG versions of the ship equally and seamlessly blending together in some scenes.
  • The porn dealer from "Primal Urges" is an especially impressive alien design, with the suit just being slightly augmented by CGI touches that blend in perfectly.
  • The space battle in "Identity, Part 2" is a breathtaking sequence that is incredibly action packed but also carefully choreographed to be easy to follow. It is apparently the largest, longest, and most complex space battle ever created for television and required the development of an entirely new graphics engine to accomplish.
• Why Would Anyone Take Him Back?: It's hard to figure out just what Bortus sees in Klyden, especially given the stunts that Klyden pulled in the name of tradition. Although speaking of tradition, since Moclan divorce involves heart stabbing, Bortus might just not want to go through with the divorce procedure.

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