The Orville got MUCH less satirical in season 2 and even more so in season 3. There are still jokes for sure but I would struggle to call any of it mean spirited. There’s even this old home video TOS skit that Seth MacFarlane and his friend’s did in high school. I assume Seth or someone let the writers off their leashes when they didn’t get sued by Paramount in Season 1.

The green hand? That’s the hand of Apollo. The actual Greek god Apollo. TOS got weird lol.

I went in to this show expecting not to like it, that it was just going to make fun of something I loved for mass market appeal. I’ve never been so happy to be so wrong. This whole show is a love letter to Trek. I’m sad that it’s leaving but also really glad that it ended up being worth watching.

I wish I had something more to add to this. I saw this when you posted and thought surely someone more creatively minded than I would chime in. Just want to say thanks for taking the time to write this up, it makes you think about how many other one off deux ex machina type races that Star Trek likes to throw out there. The Organians, Talosians, whatever they decided Trelane is, the Douwd, the list goes on and on. It’s quite fortunate for the rest of civilization that these omniscient beings seem to stick to themselves.

This is almost the exact experience I had playing Elite Dangerous in VR one time. I had my HOTAS mounted to the arms of my office chair so the whole setup could swivel. One day I was sitting in orbit over a planet researching a route or something. Ship sounds going in the headphones, comms coming in every now and then, then out of nowhere for just a brief moment I was in space flying that ship. I wish so badly that I could extend that feeling.

Same. I love any of their “infrastructure” type videos. One of my favorites is when their storage server almost kicked the bucket and they showed the unimaginably stressful recovery process.

All they did was offer an opinion, chill.