vaguerant

Sorry to go all Godwin's law, but astrology can and has been used as a tool of oppression. Nazi Germany had a state-sponsored astrologer, Karl Ernst Krafft, appointed by Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess and Chief Propagandist Joseph Goebbels. Krafft was employed to write astrological propaganda that justified anti-semitism on the basis of celestial events. He was also tasked with using astrological observations to predict threats to the Führer Adolf Hitler and offer military advice.

Ultimately, it's not the stars and Moon that do the oppression, just whoever is in charge of divining their meaning, which is also pretty much how religious oppression works.

I'm not sure if this comes across as the compliment I mean it as, but on my last rewatch of this episode I was trying to remember which TNG episode it reminded me of, only to realize that I was thinking of ... this episode of The Orville. The 2D universe feels like something that could have made a great TNG episode, but instead it made a great Orville episode. Phrased differently, I'm just very happy with this episode as a spiritual successor to old-school Trek.

It's nice to get some background on how society operates in a post-scarcity culture. The answer is kind of "the same way it works in Star Trek," but having the Kelly describe how a person's reputation has replaced money as the marker of success is a nice bit of world-building which doesn't really change much about this episode beyond making the world a bit deeper.

I'm also glad to see a bit of character-repair for LaMarr after what "Majority Rule" did to him. As I said on that episode, I do like the character in other episodes and this one explores his nature much better. MacFarlane has talked about trading the LaMarr and Malloy comedy double-act for a deeper character:

There's a little bit of sacrifice because they're so good together; you can no longer have them sitting next to each other, but what we gain is an identity for the character that really ended up A, giving us a story, and B, gave us an anchor to this rogue's gallery down in engineering.

• Mindscape 58 | Seth MacFarlane on Using Science Fiction to Explore Humanity, YouTube

On first viewing, I remember being kind of disappointed to see LaMarr get Scotty'd, but having somebody important down in engineering does make those scenes more compelling in future episodes. Compare to "Firestorm" last week when that redshirt got bonked: it felt quite disconnected from the main cast, since our only inroad there is Larry Joe Campbell's Lt. Commander Newton, who we know very little about. It's a solid change.

Lastly, it's a small bit of work, but Isaac reassessing LaMarr after he chews out the science team for mocking Yaphit is more great faceless acting from Mark Jackson. Love to see him convey his changing opinion of LaMarr with just a "look", if it can even be called that much.

Mildly amusing: watching the "previously on Doctor Who" I could tell pretty much when I tuned out of the previous episode. At some point, I switched to scrolling through my phone while listening to the episode. It was really only the final scene with the electricity effects, which is decent considering how much I didn't like the last one.

Farting aside, the comedy is improved here. "I think you'll find the Prime Minister is an alien in disguise ... That's never gonna work, is it?" Elsewhere, the good to bad ratio is just a lot better than the first half. Jackie always adds some heart and Harriet Jones gets to do more than hide in closets and grimace about farts. She's a likeable character whose solid introduction sadly wasn't really capitalized on given future timeline changes. The Doctor's memory of her ("Elected for three successive terms. The architect of Britain's Golden Age.") is much better than what he ends up doing to her Prime Ministership.

We get some additional mentions of how young Rose is, which always kind of throws me. Billie Piper of 2005 is already into her second career and has been a public figure for seven years. Her music career started when she was just 15 and ended at 18, so even though she's already been retired for five years, she's still only 23. Still, she's not entirely believable as a 19-year-old, which is probably for the best given she ends up with a significantly older man.

The absolutely-no-budget alien explosion is very fun: the cutaway and throwing blobs of practical guts around feels like something out of Red Dwarf. It looks as obviously cheap as it is and that makes it timeless, because it looked like that from day 1. Contrast that with the CGI which must have looked a lot less pokey to viewers 20 years ago.

I'm not even really trying to scold folks who pirate, I do it too, I just don't bother to grandstand about it. BFD I'm pirating 30 year old video games. Y'all think if I bought a 200 dollar used one on Ebay the original studio sees a dime of it? C'mon now.

Right here is where you're essentially in agreement with the meme. You recognize that walking into a used game store and shoplifting their copy of the game is objectively worse than downloading an additional copy of the game, where you haven't harmed somebody else to get yours.

I don't think the argument is that "Piracy is completely and entirely victimless in all cases," but that it's a false equivalency to equate piracy with theft. They're not the same thing, is all.

Certainly, but I don't know how to tie those back to a Batman '66 reference.

It's true, I've seen Jeff Goldblum do it.

9:39 "Please understand that social media is not a place to get news and information."

Now I don't know what to think about this video I just watched on social media.

The Penguin is the #30 show you must see before you die? Holy recency bias, Batman!

Neat, thanks for explaining!

You should read her words rather than just the intro to the article quoted in the OP.

'I made that choice. And now I'm watching my dad suffer because of it,' she responded.

She has admitted it. That's not a free pass to make bad decisions, but most of the quotes in the article are about her trying to change and do better.

'I'm learning everything I unlearned,' she said. 'And I'm going to fight for people who don't have a voice.'

'The guilt I carry is heavy, but I won't stay silent anymore,' she added.

'We all make choices,' she said. 'But we can make better ones next.'

I definitely have conflicted feelings about this: it's like when some former white supremacist changes their mind, gets the swastika tattoos removed and speaks out in support of anti-racism. They don't deserve a medal for saying "Whoops, I fucked up" after fucking up extremely hard, but is telling them to fuck off serving the greater good, or just giving us an opportunity to feel superior?

The "stone" with the words in it has a suspiciously uniform appearance. I wonder whether it might be concrete and the letters pressed into it while wet, in which case basically none of it is true.

I had forgotten how this episode was structured; I remembered it as everything up until the reveal being part of the simulation, including the death of Lt. Payne in engineering. The episode is obviously much better than that, foreshadowing the plot by having Alara cope with her trauma in the simulated boxing gym.

This episode does a good job of leading you on and making you think that all of this could really be happening up until Gordon gets swallowed. They could have kept the viewers in suspense a little longer than that if that creature had hauled Gordon away screaming instead of eating him and Alara declaring him dead.

That's a good point. It's pretty clear this far into the show that main characters are off the table for anti-climactic deaths. Still, I don't mind too much because the "it was all a dream" (simulation) story reveal is one of the least satisfying around. It softens the blow a bit to know ahead of time that this episode is going to have some form of reset by the end. Given the experience involved, I even wonder if it was done deliberately for that reason. I like that by the time of the reveal we're already waiting for what kind of reveal it will be instead of it just being out of nowhere, which is the least satisfactory kind of these.

The scene where Grayson says she's going to "shower and change" then just about falls into the abyss is a fun subversion of the standard horror trope where a woman in a state of undress gets attacked. Having her basically announce an upcoming Psycho pastiche only to hard zag away is a really fun time and one of my favorite "jokes" in an episode that's already doing a lot of good stuff comically: "Looks like a big screensaver, doesn't it?" / "She's not getting a pizza."

It's also a ton of fun to see Robert Picardo from Voyager show up as Alara's father. Overall, just a great, strong episode. I don't have any complaints, they really got it all right here. The Orville running on all cylinders.