THE ORVILLE 1x07 "Majority Rule"

I can only start this review by remarking that "Majority Rule" may be the most horrifying episode of The Orville yet. It certainly doesn't reach the pitch-black, sun-starved depths tonally that Black Mirror thrives in, but its premise is Black Mirror-level dark. It's also thematically similar to the Black Mirror episode "Nosedive" (leading me to wonder if it wasn't an influence when Seth was penning the script for "Majority Rule"). In "Nosedive", people physically rate everyone on a scale of 1-5 following their interactions, which generates a superficial society in which people's true opinions must be concealed. The premise of rating people is lifted from "Nosedive" and dropped into "Majority Rule", though in contrast its rating system elevates each individual's voice rather than suppresses it.

   The plot is extremely simple: when Alara, John, Claire and Kelly land on a 21st-century-esque planet named Sargus 4 in search of two Union anthropologists feared to be in trouble, John makes a visual joke about what may constitute too much or too little grinding - but does so with the help of a statue of someone apparently deeply revered in this unknown society (you decide if this is a reference to the monuments being destroyed recently). And when the video is uploaded to social media, John is downvoted so rapidly that he is swept up by a legal system which allows everybody on the planet to vote on his fate.

   This is a pretty bleak dystopian nightmare (and it's a nice twist, actually: from the promos I expected this episode to be a social commentary on racism), but a significant problem is that the population of Sargus 4 is criminally undefined. Are we to presume that 500,000 downvotes - apparently the threshold figure between social acceptance and being shunned - is a significant amount and that, therefore, the ten million downvotes required for what is essentially a guilty verdict is a large percentage of the overall population? Remember, everyone on Sargus 4 must wear these badges and has the opportunity to vote, but ten million downvotes being a fair number for a guilty verdict is either validated or voided by how that figure correlates with the population. Ten million downvotes is nothing if a planet has six billion potential voters (people would be getting lobotomised left, right and centre in that case), but much more impactful if the planet only has sixty million. It's frustratingly unclear.

   But that doesn't throw a black cloud over the entire episode: in fact, it's barely more than a niggle in the grand scheme of things. While ignoring this question, the episode seeks to find a way to rescue John from his predicament before the outrage on social media balloons to the point where he will be essentially lobotomised (or Gentled, for any fans of the excellent Locke Lamora novels) for his crime. And the answer is particularly simple: overwhelm social media with cute, faked suggestions of John's good side. After all, nobody can hate someone who looks after their 90-year-old grandma, or a veteran reunited with his dog.

   In the end, the count stops just four votes shy of the ten million required to condemn John, but it may not have been necessary. I can't be the only one who felt John's insincerity on his "apology tour" was horribly written. I understand the episode needed to raise the stakes by having more people turn on John during the second act, but his apology tour scenes were written to be far too obviously insincere, which detracts from what could have been easily explained as people failing to accept his apology.

   But at the end of the day, you can pick your social commentary since there's so many to choose from. Is the moral of this story that a utilitarian society - especially one so extreme - is not always the most ideal? Is it that the reality of giving everybody's voice equal weight probably doesn't marry well with the idealist's hope? Or is it something darker, something about social media and its influence, and how far we could go if the influence of social media in various areas of our society was strengthened?

   Whatever the moral, this was an episode of The Orville that reached a level of intensity the show hasn't managed before. It felt simultaneously attached to and detached from the tone omf the show, and that's what makes "Majority Rule" so chilling and scary, and so ultimately standout.

RATING: 9/10

POINTS OF NOTE:

• "Government by American Idol."
• Sargus 4 has no sense of money. It's a shame The Orville used this premise as a throwaway concept to make Sargus 4 seem even further removed from our own society, because it could have been a great plot premise to explore properly in a future episode.
• Alara looks really good in that hat. Speaking of which, cultural appropriation reference much?
• And while we're speaking about Alara, The Orville is still talking about Alara's ex - we've now moved on to her searching for a new boyfriend. 
• I love how we see our human main characters as humans and, alongside them, characters like Alara in the same vein, yet a Sargus 4 resident refers to them as "aliens" and blows my tiny mind. To Sargus 4, these characters are aliens.