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rgrif42
Reviews
The Orville: If the Stars Should Appear (2017)
Nice Homage to Isaac Asimov
Perhaps Asimov's most famous short story, "Nightfall" quotes from the same Ralph Waldo Emerson poem about a society that sees the stars only once every thousand years. This episode involves a biosphere within an enormous spaceship that's been adrift for a thousand years and the people living there are clueless that they are even on a ship until the Orville crew open the "walls" that form the artificial sky in the biodome and the stars shine through. Also reminiscent of Robert Heinein's "Orphans of the Sky" (1941) also involving a ship so long adrift that the memory of being within a ship moving through space has been lost.
The Orville: Pria (2017)
Saving the past without changing the future
Original teleplay, but I'm loving the way this series borrows concepts from other science fiction sources without being completely derivative. The writers are clearly fans of science fiction, not just writers who think they have ideas that turn out to be cheesy. The key concept in this episode was that the way to get something valuable in the past without changing time, is to get that object and remove it to the future just before it would be destroyed in its own time line. Saw this theme originally in Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder" (1952) where big game hunters could kill a T-Rex just before it would have died anyway from a tree falling on it. John Varley's "Millenium" (1983) was a short novel where future man was rescuing people from our era by removing them from airplanes just prior to a crash.