1x07 Majority Rule

[5.7/10] This one is pretty dumb. I could frankly stop there. But the “What if reddit, except everything?” premise is stupid enough to warrant further explication, so here we go.

Let’s start with this. Somewhere in “Majority Rule”, there is the germ of a good point about social shaming with inadequate empathy and rushes to judgment. Unfortunately, that’s not really what we get here. Instead, we get a ridiculously caricatured version of online social interactions and a superficial media satire whose only real message is “mobs bad,” missing basically all of the nuance in the topics it addresses.

There’s legitimate issues to explore on this topic in the vein of So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed and the fact that people can be pilloried in the court of public opinion without, necessarily, much fairness in the evaluation, let alone a path to penitence and redemption. But The Orville hasn’t proven itself capable of tackling those issues, and certainly fails to do so well here.

Frankly, this episode comes off alternatingly whiny and self-satisfied. Oh no! Celebrities who are culturally insensitive or do stupid things publicly have to make public apologies for it! What a crime! Talk show hosts are more likely to throw fuel on the fire than be fair arbiters of right and wrong! What an insightful observation! The whole routine with LaMarr’s statue-grinding evaluation by the public just so superficial and caricatured, that even if it was more on point, it wouldn’t have much force.

Beyond that, it’s just a dumb realization of the idea. Look, maybe badges where people’s social standing and mental well-being gets determined by personal upvotes and downvotes could pass as a premise in the 1960s Star Trek series, but it just feels silly and implausible here.

If you want to make an allegory for modern behavior work, you need to construct a fictional equivalent that makes sense, or at the very least passes the smell test. That was one of the great things in “About a Girl” -- it raises a lot of issues through a set of cultural practices that were different from our own, but which were plausible in an alternate society. But even at its most extreme, the concept of an entire society ruled by reddit upvotes where social opinion dictates everything just sounds like such an absurd slippery slope presentation that the episode doesn’t even work on a pure story level.

There’s some mild tension in the threat that LaMarr will be lobotomized if his apology tour doesn’t go well. There’s also some good nuts and bolts Trek here in having to infiltrate a pre-warp society to investigate other researchers who’ve run afoul of their different rules and disappeared. The same goes for bringing one of the locals on board to convince them that there’s another way. But it’s all done in service of a thought experiment from a fourteen-year-old.

The worst part is the conference room conversation Mercer and the others have with that local resident of the insane upvote-driven planet. There’s such a ham-handed and smug moral expressed about the tyranny of the majority and mixing up fact and opinion. It plays like nothing more than knocking down strawmen and feeling like you just toppled a giant. And that’s before you get to more of the show’s tepid 21st century observational humor.

Usually on The Orville, the basic premise works but things are dragged down by comedy or relationship drama. But this is the first one where it’s the execution of the core idea that’s bad, especially given the misaimed (or at least oversimplified) point of the episode. There’s a good conversation to be had about call out culture and the way things are parsed out online, but “Majority Rule” is incapable of making an intelligent contribution to that discussion.