The Orville: New Horizons, Created by Seth McFarlane

Starring Seth McFarlane, Adrianne Palicki, Penny Johnson Jerald, and Scott Grimes
Distributed by Disney Media Distribution
Rated TV-14

For many decades, science-fiction books, films, and television shows have imagined a better future, where technology has radically enhanced human life, and humans have colonized space. That positive vision of the future has inspired innovators and entrepreneurs to do real world-changing work, such as inventing the cellphone and 3-D printing.¹

Recently, however, sci-fi has turned away from optimism. On TV, the cancellation of Star Trek: Enterprise and Stargate Atlantis in the late 2000s left a dearth of optimistic science fiction, with new sci-fi offerings being darker and more pessimistic. When the traditionally upbeat Star Trek returned to TV with Star Trek: Discovery in 2017, even that had a downbeat, pessimistic tone. But, in the same year, a new show appeared that offered a return to optimistic futurism. The only problem was that the new show’s marketing presented it not as a serious work of sci-fi, but as a spoof of the genre.

The Orville, brainchild of Family Guy creator Seth McFarlane, was sold as a Galaxy Quest-style parody-homage to Star Trek. What aired, however, was a richer and more serious show, tackling important moral and social topics such as war, justice, leadership, the problems of democracy, and racism, while delivering compelling stories with strong, well-developed characters.² In the early episodes, the comedy was awkwardly shoehorned in, and the jokes, although often funny, detracted from the serious storylines.³ Aside from the humor, the show had all the essential characteristics of the earlier Star Trek series. It took place on board a starship, part of the exploratory fleet of a peaceful interplanetary alliance, the Planetary Union. The crew was an ensemble of humans and aliens from various Union worlds, and even the bright, colorful uniforms with rank insignia and color-coded divisions between command, operations, and medical mirrored those on Star Trek.

After the first few episodes, the writers started to cut back on the humor and introduce more serious storylines. By the second season, a show that had been sold as a comedy parodying Star Trek had grown into a serious sci-fi drama that could almost be part of that franchise.⁴ Indeed, many Trek fans, dismayed by the pessimistic tone of new shows such as Discovery and Star Trek: Picard, pointed to The Orville as an exemplar of what Star Trek should be.⁵ But it still sat in the shadow of its inspiration; serious though it had become, it was still an homage.

The third season, released in 2022, changed that completely. Titled The Orville: New Horizons to reflect the show’s evolution, the new season swapped the traditional forty-five-minute episode format for a variable-length one with much longer run times. This gave the writers the flexibility to deal with complex philosophic themes in far greater depth, as well as allowing for a slower pace and long poignant scenes.

The first episode, “Electric Sheep” (a reference to Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the inspiration for Blade Runner), focuses on the crew’s sentient robot, Isaac (Mark Jackson). He deals with hatred and resentment from his crewmates over the actions of his kind, the robotic Kaylon, during a recent war between them and the Union. Eventually, convinced that he no longer has a purpose on the ship, Isaac attempts suicide. This prompts a debate among the crew over his right to take his own life, the injustice of blaming him for the other Kaylons’ actions, and to what extent he possesses emotions. Any viewer under the apprehension that The Orville is primarily a comedy could not remain so after this episode.

Another prime example of the season’s depth is the episode “A Tale of Two Topas.” It continues a first-season story dealing with the character Bortus (Peter Macon), who comes from an all-male race called the Moclans. In the earlier story, when Bortus and his husband Klyden’s child Topa was born female, Klyden insisted on following Moclan tradition and having the infant undergo an operation to become male. The couple disagreed, and Klyden took the issue to a Moclan court, which forced them to put the baby through the conversion. In “A Tale of Two Topas,” Topa (now her species’ equivalent of around ten years old) discovers what was done to her and demands that it be reversed, triggering the debate once again. The situation is complicated further when the Union moves to block Topa’s surgery on the grounds that it will drive the Moclans, a key ally against the Kaylon, to leave the Union. The episode becomes a debate between the crew defending an individual’s freedom of choice in how she lives her life and two governments intent on denying her that choice. The Orville crew resolutely defend her freedom, arguing that opposing Moclan injustices against women outweighs the strategic value of the alliance.

The episode’s handling of gender identity contrasts starkly with that of Star Trek: Discovery. There, a female character announces, “I’ve never felt like a ‘she’ or a ‘her,’ so . . . I would prefer ‘they’ or ‘them.’” After this, the dialogue emphasizes other characters using the new pronouns, taking the writers’ views on gender as a given without further exploration. The Orville, by contrast, deals with serious moral and philosophical issues: highlighting the immorality of forcing a child to go through an unnecessary life-changing operation, exploring the question of individual freedom versus government coercion, and debating whether it’s right to respect another culture’s ideas when those ideas mean treating individuals unethically. Whereas Discovery hits the audience over the head with the writers’ relativist views on gender, The Orville presents a story in which characters probe and discuss these difficult questions and leaves viewers to think over the implications for themselves.

Many of the other episodes deal with theoretical or scientific questions. “Mortality Paradox” poses the question of whether immortality would deprive life of meaning, and “Twice in a Lifetime” delivers an interesting time-travel story in which a character chooses to live in the past, regardless of the consequences his actions will have for people in his own time. Another episode that deals with present-day issues is “Gently Falling Rain.” It gives us an in-depth look at the society of one of the show’s main villains, the Krill. They are a race of religious zealots who invade other planets, following a belief system that commands them to take up arms in a “divine fight” against their “soulless” alien neighbors.⁶ Previous Krill stories mostly took aim at their xenophobic, dogmatic nature (the show’s cinematographer Martin Rush likened them to ISIS), spotlighting the barbarism such irrationality leads to and contrasting it with how the Orville crew uses reason to learn about the universe and solve problems. This episode continues that contrast, but also uses the Krill as an allegory for nationalism and religious conservatism in modern-day America.

Although admirable, this creates a few problems. The episode centers on an election on Krill in which the nationalist xenophobe Talaya is running on a platform of returning the Krill to the grandeur and dominance of their past. Her campaign is clearly inspired by Donald Trump’s, and she breaks into computer systems to alter the election outcome in what might be a reference to Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election result. That McFarlane would take aim at Trump and his supporters is not surprising given his lifelong support for the Democratic Party (and there’s plenty to legitimately criticize about Trump and his campaigns). But the metaphor is so blatant that instead of leaving viewers to ponder a moral dilemma, as the other episodes do, this story comes off more like political propaganda.

The episode also gives us a look into the backbone of Krill society, called the “merchant class,” who reside in “the Grand Marketplace.” They suffer in poverty and homelessness as they struggle to sell their wares. This presents a kind of Marx-style class struggle between the merchant and ruling classes, which could be either a backhanded criticism of markets or a consequence of the dictatorial Krill regime. The former fits with the fact that The Orville follows Star Trek in advocating the unfounded idea that it is desirable for the society of the future to be moneyless, regardless of the fact that that would deprive people of a means of trading freely with each other.

One thing that makes The Orville distinct from, and arguably superior to, Star Trek is that it is free from Trek creator Gene Roddenberry’s ideas about how people will behave in the future. Roddenberry prohibited main characters from having interpersonal conflicts and exhibiting modern-day normal behavior such as cursing, drinking alcohol, and watching TV, sometimes resulting in unrealistic, wooden characters and limiting the drama. The Orville includes these elements. In McFarlane’s words,

the difference [between The Orville and Star Trek] is that our characters are flawed, real people. We want our shows to come out of the funny, awkward, serious interactions of characters that feel like they could exist in our world—it’s just that they’re walking on the bridge of a spaceship.⁷

The characters argue vehemently when they have disagreements and react believably to the situations they encounter, resulting in much more dramatic story lines. Captain Mercer (McFarlane) frequently responds to shocking moments with an exclamation of “Jesus Christ!” The characters on The Orville even casually take recreational drugs, which is shown to be legal and free of stigma.

The Orville: New Horizons explores complex issues in a balanced manner and presents a positive but believable vision of the future, resulting in one of the best science-fiction shows in recent decades. It is inspiring to see a modern TV show that explores deep, fundamental ideas and presents an optimistic view of the future, with efficacious characters who overcome challenges through reason and hard work. The Orville is a delightful development in an age of pessimistic media and antiheroic stories.

About Thomas Walker-Werth

Thomas Walker-Werth is associate editor at The Objective Standard and a fellow at both Objective Standard Institute and Foundation for Economic Education. He is currently writing his first full-length book, Reason for Living: A Rational, Fact-Based Approach to Living Your Best Life. See more of his work at walker-werth.com.

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