The retcon is that the whole spore drive program was actively suppressed, because any knowledge of Discovery and/or Control would lead to cosmic apocalypse. And so part of Section 31’s imprimatur was to work behind the scenes and prevent it and other disruptive tech from seeing the light. And other civilizations did the same, because the same thing happened to them at some point in their history.
It’s pretty sweaty, and requires quite a bit of stretches credulity, but it beats a lazy handwave.
I often feel the same. Actually good homemade stuffing is amazing. But then they go and put big chunks of celery or fucking pickles of all things for some reason in it.
I always forget The Orville exists and that I’ve been meaning to watch it, so I’ll go and watch an episode and enjoy it, but the handful of episodes I’ve seen are just enjoyable fluff. They don’t stick with me at all, and I feel no compulsion to keep watching. When does it get compelling?
I really felt like they missed an opportunity not returning to her later on. The moment that her actual fate got leaked to the public, that planet would have become a place of pilgrimage for Bajorans, and someone would have tried to make it the seat of a schismatic sect. It could have upended the entire Bajoran theocracy.
I felt like Molly and the rest of the tribe were pushed into the background
Having read the book, that was kind of the point. They didn’t have agency, because it was literally robbed from them at every moment. And during the part of the story where Ernest is under scrutiny and forced to own up to his sins, his wife is as passive as it can get, because she’s on death’s door and bed-ridden. It would be artificial to give her a big presence there, because in reality she was in the process of literally disappearing from the world. Molly actually gets more of an emotional presence onscreen, in part because the book is a more journalistic account and first hand sources of who she was are limited. I would like to have seen some scenes of her moving on with her life afterwards at the end in place of that weird epilogue.