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?
The thing is there is so much source material that they could refresh it with a completely new take and new characters. But.the shared universe has become unwieldy, both in production a nd in narrative.
What they should be doing is backing off the slavish attention to continuity and letting auteurs do their thing without worrying about setting up future installments or following up stuff that came before. And they seriously need to slow down their rollouts. When it was still new, it was exciting to be getting two new shows and three new movies in this world every year. But the novelty is gone now, so they only have the strength of their stories to hold them up, and lately, those have been suffering because of the brutal production line.
Of course, that was for a close-up of the bill itself which was actually relevant to the plot.
Iirc, there’s nothing stopping a production from simply using real bills, aside from the cost. It’s really only when you see them in bulk that props are necessary. Plenty of shots where someone is counting their money will also use real bills just for simplicity’s sake, but that cash is tightly controlled by the props department and they’ll switch it out for fake bills for general use.
You see, the secret is that humans - and especially children - are incredibly self-centered, and will rarely bother to think of the other people in the world at all. Santa is for them, not other people.
In universe, that works. The sad reality is that the goatee-and-shaved-head look (which Avery Brooks sported both in his previous TV roles and in real life) was considered by studio heads at the time to be “too urban” (ie, “too black”). It wasn’t until the show had established its roots that Brooks had enough leverage to change Sisko’s look to what it should have been from the start.
All it would take is a Short Trek where someone rediscovers the network and encounters a group of advanced beings living there, who explain that it has been closed to current warp-capable beings because they have proven themselves not ready for the privilege yet.
Discovery was like Alexander the Great stumbling onto warp drive.
They couldn’t have destroyed the network, because it was strongly implied that it was a fundamental aspect of the universe itself. What would have been better is if some higher-dimensional beings living there said “You abused the privilege, and your rights to use this network have been revoked”.
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.