The Orville: Old Wounds

Welcome! Thanks for joining me here. As a thank you for supporting the Starfleet Leadership Academy I’m excited to share this episode with you. I always have fun doing these episodes. It’s fun to watch other shows and see what there is to learn. And there’s a lot in this one. I’m going to talk about stoicism in a leader, what’s really important to the people you work with and even more as we watch the first episode of the first season of The Orville, Old Wounds.

<<Transporter>>

It’s the year 2418, and Commander Ed Mercer is starting one of the worst days of his life. Coming home from a day at work, he walks in on his wife, Kelly, with some guy named Darulio in bed with her. “Splooge” Sheets and everything are totally blue now! And his reaction? Full on stoicism. “I’m done.”

And now it’s 2419. Mercer meets with Admiral Halsey. “There’s a ship available. The USS Orville.” He gets his first command and a promotion to Captain. The ship is almost ready; it just needs a helmsman and a first officer. Mercer knows who he wants on helm – his buddy, Gordon Malloy.

Holodecks are a thing here! “This is a program I wrote.” Malloy is playing in there when Mercer recruits him. They head up to see the ship, and we see right away how this show is gonna go, “What is that, is that a beer?” And you can tell it’s future beer because it’s in a metal bottle thing.

They get to the ship, kind of like a sleek, flat fish with 3 loops sticking out the back. Unique, pretty cool. We don’t get the full on Star Trek hero shot of the ship, and no 12 minute flyover, but it’s cool. Mid-size, not the flagship or anything like that. Just one of the fleet.

There’s an all-hands for the Captain to introduce himself. Lots of platitudes to the crew, good enough for a first hello, but nothing that’ll inspire confidence in anyone. He holds the senior staff afterwards to meet them. There’s Alara, a Xeleyan (silayan). Her homeworld has high gravity so they basically have super strength and can jump high and stuff like that. Mercer doesn’t start off well here, “How old are you?” I mean, that’s pretty awesome, right? First interaction with the new boss and he immediately questions your qualifications. Yeah. Sweet.

Then there’s John Lamarr, the navigator. I love this guy. I mean, he is like 97% of the people whenever a new head-honcho comes on board. “Our last Captain let us have soda on the bridge.” Like, good to meet you, whatever, hey…am I still gonna get to do this thing I like to do? They play it off here as kind of funny, but I think this is so important to anyone stepping into a leadership position. Most people aren’t looking for you to wow them; they’re not looking for you to be their friend. They just want to be comfortable at work and don’t want things to change too much. Like, I’m good at what I do, just let me do it and let me drink my soda.

Then we meet Bortus. He’s the second officer and one of the more alien aliens that we see. He’s Moclan, and Mercer is eager to get to know him. “I’ve never met a single gender species before.” Yeah, they’re all dudes; all male. At least that’s what we’re made to believe at this point in the series. There will be more on that later. He’s super by the book and humorless. He shares, “Moclans only urinate once a year.” Yeah…cool. Good to know.

Chief Medical Officer Kasidy Yates…I mean, Claire Finn. Played by the amazing Penny Johnson Jerald who was on DS9 as Sisko’s eventual partner and was also pretty awesome on 24. She’s super skilled and has specifically requested this position. “This is your first command and I think you could use my help.” He immediately gets defensive and pushes back, but she’s here for it and throws it right back.

Finally we meet Isaac. He’s a Kaylon, which are sentient robots, basically, and is on the Orville as a kind of emissary between his culture and the Federatio…I mean, the Planetary Union. Oh, also, super racist, “Aren’t you racist? We regard you as inferior.” Yeah, this’ll be fun.

Lamarr and Malloy do some bonding while Mercer gets the ship’s first assignment. They’ll be delivering supplies to a science outpost on Epsilon 2. They go through the launch sequence to leave the station and head out, and it is, pretty much beat for beat, right out of a Star Trek pilot. “Malloy, take us out.” And this is where we get our hero shots of the Orville…along with Lamarr drinking his soda from a cup we know is from the future because…yep, because it’s metallic! “Engage quantum drive.”

On their way, the get word that an executive officer will rendezvous with them en route and Mercer is not happy “no, no, no, no.” It’s his ex-wife, Kelly Grayson. He is livid, but the Admiral says he has not choice but to make this work. And then he says, “Ed, she requested it.” Hmm, that’s interesting.

They pick her up and Mercer meets her in his office. Malloy kicks of the ‘ol gossip mill “She’s a total bitch.” They all get in on it, except for Bortus, “perhaps we should not be talking about this.” Dude! Go, Bortus! He’s exactly right!

Mercer and Grayson’s meeting doesn’t go great. He gets really petty. She tries to apologize, but he doesn’t want to hear it. When they were married, she feels like he was married to the work and not to her. He keeps fighting back so she agrees to request a transfer when another XO comes available.

They get to the science station and the head scientist, Dr Aronov asks them to come to the surface, they don’t need any supplies but they do need help. Mercer, Grayson, Alara and Dr Finn head down to meet him. Mercer is, um, all business “and this is my ex-wife.” Grayson ignores it and gets to business. “we need protection, From the Krill.”

The scientists have made a lot of cool stuff. They spliced together a redwood seed with a tardigrade so it can grow anywhere and in anything. And, they made this super cool device that super-fast-forwards time within a field it creates. Mercer and Grayson don’t quite get it when they see it used on a banana to show what it can do, “An anti-banana ray.”

The scientists, though, want to use it to fast track crops and to help provide food to colonies. Pretty cool. But they also see the potential for it to be used as a weapon. To super-age entire armies or grow troops faster, all kinds of stuff. The Krill, who are the apparent enemies of the Union are already after it. Mercer calls up to notify Union command when one of the scientists pull out a gun and tells them to stop. He holds the crew and the scientists hostage as he calls to the Krill to come down.

Their ship arrives “We just detected a Krill destroyer entering orbit.” And sends two shuttles to the surface. Malloy says a thing that I’ve actually thought so many times on different Star Trek shows! Like, they all run on shifts, so you have a start of shift and end of shift. But what if the big baddies show up 15 minutes away from the end of your shift?? “There’s no way we’re going to be off by 5 today.”

On the planet, Alara takes out the lab tech guy, they detach the device and try to find a way out of the facility and back to their shuttle. The Krill land and attack. Man, they look super cool! What a great alien design. They firefight their way through a bunch of Krill. Alara’s strength busts them out of the facility and they we see her do a super jump to get the device to the shuttle. The teams makes it shortly after. They all buckle up and head up to the Orville.

Up in orbit, the Krill ship attacks the Orville. They’re outmatched, Malloy wants to use the maneuverability of the ship to help them. “This is something I call hugging the donkey.” It’s pretty cool, he just circles around the ship, hugging it tight enough they can’t really be fired on.

On the shuttle’s trip up, a Krill comes out of hiding. “We have something better. Seatbelts.” Mercer slams on the breaks and the Krill flies, headfirst into the windshield! It’s going to be a tight maneuver to get the shuttle doors pointed towards the team. Malloy is doubting himself but Bortus says, “If you can hug the donkey, you can do this.” They screech into the shuttle bay! It totally works! But, the Orville’s engines and deflectors are severely damaged. Mercer and team get to the bridge and the Krill hail them. They tell them to surrender the device.

Mercer tries to distract and delay him. “Sorry, I’m a little distracted, my wife had an affair.” He gets tired of it and fires on them again. It’s apparent they can’t withstand another attack. But Grayson has a plan. She works with Dr Aronov to time the temporal field device thing and one of the redwood seeds. “Ok, you win.” They shuttle the device, with a seed glued to it, over to the Krill. It makes it, they activate it and, “Happy Arbor Day!” A giant redwood sprouts in the middle of their ship, destroying it!

They limp back to a space station. Grayson tells Mercer that she’s going to request her transfer, but Mercer doesn’t want her to, “I am asking you to stay.” He sees that they can work well together and wants to continue that.

She leaves and meets with Admiral Halsey. “You made a hell of a pleas for us to give him that command.” Oh, wow! So he got the ship because of her! Looks like we’ll see Commander Kelly Grayson working to make right on what she did to start this episode off.

<<Red Alert>>

What a blast! A super fun episode that owes its entire existence to Star Trek. And I don’t mean that in a disparaging way at all. I think this was super respectful to Trek while still being true to what people expect from Seth MacFarlane.

It’s no secret, but Seth always wanted to be on and to make Star Trek. He was actually in two episodes of Enterprise! He served as an engineer under Trip Tucker and was transferred to the Columbia later on. There’s even a film he made as a student floating around out there where he re-created the TOS Enterprise and crew. Super cool.

And the connections don’t end there. Brannon Braga, who worked on TNG, Voyager and Enterprise, is a co-producer of The Orville.

This is totally just my thinking here, but when I was watching this episode, I couldn’t help but think this helped inspire Mike McMahan’s approach to Lower Decks. Scenes like, “Oh, Justin, you’ve got a ladybug on ya,” would totally be on that show!

The effects on the show are pretty good for network TV. Not incredible but nothing too bad. The soundtrack is awesome, really majestic.

More than anything, with this episode, and the series, really, I appreciated how it’s not just Family Guy in space. Like, I remember that’s how they were advertising it. MacFarlane uses humor to make the characters more relatable, but it’s not so over the top that it’s ridiculous. And, in some cases, it makes character’s reactions a little more realistic than what we get in Star Trek sometimes.

When I saw this the first time, I watched it on the plane coming back from TV tapings in Las Vegas, but I loved it! I was all about The Orville, and I still am!

<<Command Codes>>

There is a lot to dive into from this one. I’m going to talk about taking the time to process and express your emotions, what’s really important to the people you work with, what happens in a truly hierarchical organization and, yep, we’re gonna talk fraternization too.

Stoicism is a school of philosophy from the Hellenistic period. Stoics uphold the virtues of wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice. It focuses on the social responsibility of loving your neighbor, forming virtuous relationships, and helping others. Epicetus and Marcus Aurelius are popular Stoics.  

Nowadays, when people say they are stoic, or that they faced a tragedy with stoicism, they are not talking about this school. It’s the difference between capital S Stoicism and little s stoicism. What most people refer to now is the practice of being passive and unemotional.

So when I describe the way Ed Mercer reacted when he saw his wife in bed with a blue Rob Lowe as stoic, I do not mean he is practicing a philosophy of personal ethics. No, I mean he is being unemotional and not visibly reacting to what happened.

What I know about emotions, and, believe me, I don’t really know a lot, is that you have to process them. And this will look different for every situation, person and emotion. As humans, we can’t just have an emotion and log it away in some databank. Well, I guess we can, but it doesn’t just sit there. It changes and it grows. And, eventually, it’s gonna come out! And likely not in a way that makes sense with the initial emotion. “You’ve been put on report for coming into work 6 times for being hungover.”

Mercer responded stoically, little s sotically, and tried to make it seem like everything was cool. He even tells Grayson that he thought he was over the whole thing! But it was impacting his work and probably his personal life too. He went from being the golden boy that could do no wrong, to someone that got command of a ship as pretty much a pity assignment.

Now, I don’t know what exactly he should have done; I’m not him. Maybe he should have talked with a therapist. Maybe he should have written a book, or maybe he should have screamed and cried into his pillow! But, instead, he drank and tried to look like it was all good.

The obvious impact of this was it derailed his career track from potentially being one of the youngest commanders of a heavy cruiser to running supplies to science colonies. But beyond that, we also see him outright fail as a leader.

When he was introducing himself to the senior staff, he was inappropriate and waffled between being a leader and trying to be a buddy. He, very publicly, brought up his divorce to just about anyone who would listen, and he even insulted the scientists he was sent to help out. He’s impatient, inappropriate and only interested in himself.

Now, had he actually processed his emotions, I can only assume he would have started out closer to the leader we see him become as the series progresses. As I’m recording this, we’re waiting on the 3^rd season to air, but through the second season, he does some amazing things to support his crew. He even puts his career on the line for Grayson. But after watching this episode, I would never have guessed he’d amount to much of anything.

On top of mostly blowing it with his senior staff when he first meets them, he greets the entire crew with a slew of platitudes. It’s apparent that he wants to do well and that he wants to make an impact, but he’s just not equipped at this point. Stuff from intro to senior staff

Beyond that, the reality is, to the person just showing up to work every day, that kinda don’t care about your big, new plans as a leader. You walk in, like Mercer, with this idea of how cool the new world you’re going to create is, but really, all the people are thinking is, “Our last Captain let us have soda on the bridge.”

If you’ve been listening to the Starfleet Leadership Academy for awhile, you know about the place I worked where I was brought in to quote, fix the culture, right? The prior leadership there was removed for harassment and for creating a hostile work environment.

Well, when I got there, I had this huge, grand vision. And, to be honest, with the team there we accomplished a lot of it. But that first week or so that I was there, no one could care less about my person-first leadership approach. They just wanted to know one thing. Would they be allowed, yes, allowed, to eat at their desks.

Like, to put this in context, you have to understand that the people that worked there didn’t have their own desks, they didn’t even have their own chairs!! No, they had to come in at the start of their shift and hope they could get the chair and desk they wanted. Did they care about how I was going to address that? Yeah…a little, but what they really wanted was to be able to eat and drink at their desks.

I mean, it seems so insignificant, but, it was huge! One of the team members was challenging me when I said they could eat and rink at their desks on work time. They kept asking, what about this, what about that? Finally, I think they had come up with the thing I’d say no to, and they would expose me for the fraud they knew I had to be. They asked, what about pizza? And I said, yeah, even pizza. And they literally started crying! It was that big of a deal!

In this, I learned that my plans and visions were important, but not nearly as important as the little, day-to-day things that are comfortable and familiar. Mercer’s trying to make a good impression on his team – and failing, by the way – but he’s trying, and all Lamarr cares about is if he’ll be able to still drink soda while working.

So, yes, come in with those dreams and visions, but focus on what is important in the exact moment to people. Never lose sight of that! In fact, I’m going to get a little political here.

In the history of the United States, we’ve had 46 presidents  - 48 if you listen to some conspiracy theorists. Some have been pretty good, some have been really bad. But they all came in with these visions of grandeur and planned on changing the world. But to most Americans, every 4-8 years, we’re all just a little more bitter and a little more broke. They may have some big vision of some socio-economic something, but most people just want to show up and drink their soda. Also, almost any politician is incapable of affecting real change, but that’s a whole different podcast, isn’t it?

I wanted to make a quick note of one of the failures Mercer makes when meeting his senior officers. He uses the term ‘my.’ “You’re my chief medical officer,” Yeah, she’s not his medical officer, she’s THE medical officer. Any time a leader refers to someone belonging to them, that’s a problem. And I’ll tell you, I’m a lot more likely to do cool stuff for someone that refers to me as a colleague and not as something they possess.

Ok, last one for this bonus episode, and one that people have feelings about. HR calls it fraternization, but I am not HR. I’ll put it in more plain terms. Don’t dip your pen in the company ink. Don’t date the people you work with. Period. That simple. There is absolutely nothing good that can come from it.

Most companies have rules around relationships within organizational structures, but it really is common sense. One of the pillars of leadership that I follow and encourage others to is to always put the mission ahead of yourself. It is more important that you help your organization achieve its mission than it is for you to look good, or get that promotion, or even to make that sale! At the same time, when you’re in a relationship with someone, you have to dedicate yourself 100% to them. And, put simply, you cannot do both of those things at the same time. At some point, you’re going to have to make a choice between them, and that’s not fair to anyone involved.

If you end up involved with someone at work, follow your company’s policies, but also figure out who is going to find a new job. Some companies are big enough that you might be able to transfer or work in a different department, but that’s not necessarily sustainable. If one of you are in a leadership position, you may end up with some connection that will compromise you.

Look, don’t get yourself in the situation Ed and Kelly did. There are over 7 billion people on this planet – find one that doesn’t get their W2 from the same company.

<<Hailing Frequencies>>

Thank you so much for supporting me and the Starfleet Leadership Academy! I appreciate you more than you can know. I’ll see you in the regular feed with another regular episode, and keep your eyes on this feed for more bonus content as well!

Until then, Ex Astris Scientia!