The Orville Crew's Interstellar Mission Is So Vague For A Simple Reason
Seth MacFarlane's "The Orville" goes through a lot of changes over the seasons. The show grows from season 1's reasonably straightforward "Star Trek" pastiche into a truly interesting and personable sci-fi series in its own right as time goes by ... and will likely continue to do so, if we ever actually get "The Orville" season 4.
A lot of this is because it took MacFarlane an entire season to find out what "The Orville" should be. However, there's one aspect of the show that doesn't really change, no matter how much time goes by and how much the show evolves: The titular space ship's mission is never very clearly defined. Instead, The Orville's task is decidedly of the vague "fly around in space and complete missions of the week" variety.
As it turns out, this was completely by design. In an interview with Trek Movie, MacFarlane specifically noted that he saw no need to make the Orville's mission any more complex than simple exploration. This decision was made in order to keep things streamlined and allow for a wide variety of plots:
"We say it in the pilot, that it is an exploratory vessel. I like the simplicity of that, because it keeps your options option. You can be ferrying people. You can be on a rescue mission. You can just be out there mapping or searching for new stuff. I like the simplicity and the breadth of that classification and that to me is what we have locked in on."
The Orville's vague space exploration ties into the Star Trek show that inspired it the most
In a sense, the Orville's mission of generic exploration isn't too far removed from the classic USS Enterprise mission statement ... which, seeing as Seth MacFarlane created "The Orville" to fulfill a need "Star Trek" had abandoned, is not a huge surprise. After all, both "Star Trek: The Original Series" and "Star Trek: The Next Generation" focus on exploration missions that offer as many plot options as the mind of a sci-fi show writer can conjure.
Visually and in spirit, "The Orville" has always resembled "The Next Generation" in particular. This is fitting, since the show is arguably the MVP of the "loose exploration" sci-fi theme. After all, it has more or less the same premise as "The Original Series," but isn't beholden to budgetary restrictions of the cardboard set variety.
In the Trek Movie interview, MacFarlane revealed that his fondness for the show that influenced "The Orville" so much runs truly deep. In fact, he views "The Next Generation" as the best "Star Trek" example of the rare genre-breaking show:
"In the world of sci-fi there are a handful of franchises that have done that thing where they reach the broadest of audiences imaginable. 'Twilight Zone has done that, 'Star Wars' has done that, and some incarnations of 'Star Trek' have done that. For me 'The Next Generation' is the show that did it the most. It really tapped into an audience that wasn't necessarily there for the sci-fi, they were there for the people."