I'm not the first to note it. The best Star Trek in the last 10 years has come from a non-Trek show called The Orville. It's sold as a sci-fi drama/comedy but in all but name and but for a slight tonal shift, it's Star Trek the way that those of a certain age remember it.
Case in point, this week's "bottle episode", Lasting Impressions.
Unlike "normal" Trek, The Orville manages to do a lot of what seem like "normal" 25th Century stuff without getting blown up or malfunctioning. They moved an asteroid off its deadly, planet killing path once and absolutely nothing went wrong. No aliens inside, no overloading of the ship's engines, no surprise attack of enemy ships hiding behind it. Just a quick shove and on to the next thing. Their holodecks also don't run amok every week. This week, it did as it was told and produced the simulation as ordered. No computer generated mayhem, no alien misunderstanding, no one trapped in the matrix. It was the person who malfunctioned...
To me, this indicates a bit of an advancement in the writing of this sort of show. In the 80s and 90s, this stuff was all new-ish, so certain rehashed tropes were forgiven. Today, not so easy. The Orville writing staff seems to be one that grew up with Next Generation stories and are interested in evolving the concept of sci-fi story telling beyond what we've seen already.
This week, the crew recover a time-capsule from "our" time and Gordon uses the data in a smart phone to extrapolate a simulation of the young lady who once owned it. Since this is Star Trek...er...The Orville, naturally he falls in love with her. Sure, Geordi LaForge and Commander Riker once or twice fell in love in the holodeck but the pin on which this story turns is very different and very human and the writers manage to freshen a tired sci-fi trope by injecting a dose of humanity.
This is small story telling on a beautiful scale. Sci-fi as the tool to tell a very human story that addresses one of the grand philosophical questions: How much of a person's reality is shaped by those around us? I won't spoil the answer for you.
What interests me here isn't just the story that was told. I'd love to see a follow up where the simulation is informed that she IS a simulation and that her time-capsule contribution has allowed her to actually travel to the future. How much of a person really can be captured in our texts, e-mails, pix and videos. How much memory would be enough to let a truly sophisticated computer create a simulated person that would not only pass a Turing test but fall in love with the tester?
That's truly impressive sci-fi writing right there. Not just a story that makes you reflect on what it means to be human but one that asks questions it never even asked...
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