An interesting, deliberately thought provoking 🤔 question for a lazy long weekend Sunday morning…
Setting aside whether specific fans like specific ‘gimmicks’ (crossovers, musicals, bringing back Kirk or Khan) or tropes (transporter malfunctions), Space.com is posing the hypothesis that the proportion was too high in Strange New Worlds second season.
There’s no arguing that the season was successful in drawing in large audiences week after week. Taking a look back though, was there too much trippy-Trek™ dessert and not enough of a meaty main course? YMMV surely.
For my part, I can both agree that trippy Trek is something I’ve been wanting more of, and that I would have welcomed 2 or 3 more episodes were more grounded or gave the opportunity to see more of Una as a leader and dug into Ortegas backstory.
The 90s shows seemed to be bit embarrassed by trippyness, although Voyager found its pretext allowed even stern Janeway to pronounce ‘Weird is our business.’ One can argue that the high proportion in SNW is a feature, not a bug.
I’d still prefer a 12-15 episode season though.
@HWK_290
Be careful about praising The Orville the way you are to people who remember TNG very fondly. It apes TNG very closely but also has more than its fair share of Mcfarlane’s Family Guy humor which isn’t for everyone and definitely doesn’t jibe with Trek.
The episode where we first meet the Krill has Lt. Malloy laughing maniacally and constantly at the fact that the Krill’s god is named Avis. This just isn’t that funny and breaks immersion.
McFarlane himself admits this episode was very juvenile and the show gets quite a bit better once he decides to stop going after Family Guy style jokes. Many people won’t watch enough episodes to see the show is worth a chance.