Orb: On the Movements of the Earth

Episode 16

Act 3 of Orb begins 25 years later, with a new cast and conflict on the boundary between science, history, and religion. It's a big change. Before we dive in, however, I want to take an extra moment to reflect on where the second act ended. Jolenta ran for her life to parts unknown. Nowak wept for possibly the first time in his life. Grabowski gazed upon Oczy and Badeni's legacy, tattooed on the heads of beggars. In other words, it was pretty bleak, with some scattered rays of hope peeking through. Nothing about Orb's story has been uplifting or easy. It's full of friction caused by the caked blood of countless generations, and if this week's events are any indication, that isn't going to let up anytime soon.

This episode opens like a Michael Mann heist movie, which is a very cool aesthetic space for a period drama like Orb to work in. kensuke ushio's soundtrack evokes that atmosphere quite well with its sparse percussion building tension as the prisoner carriage approaches the church. The whole scene is put together like something out of Heat—just substitute Pacino and De Niro's diner conversation for a debate about theology and natural philosophy. Otherwise, you've got subterfuge, explosives, robbery, and plenty of blood. I admire Orb for never sitting still, and this adaptation continues to adapt well to those shifting tones and circumstances.

The Church's grip on the populace has weakened during the time skip, leading to the existence of the Heretic Liberation Front. Oppression breeds rebellion, a tale as old as time, and this mirrors Christianity's many schisms in the middle of the millennium. However, to my knowledge, Martin Luther never blew anybody up with gunpowder, so Orb's lead radical of choice is instead the fictional Schmidt. In addition to a dapper mustache, he sports an ideology that is pro-God and anti-Church. Given the corruption we've seen behind the scenes of the Inquisition, this seems more than fair.

A flashback set directly before the time skip reinforces the Church as the architect of its own comeuppance. An entire town burns their crosses because they've become too destitute to put up with the Church's opulence. Again, these were real frustrations that resulted in the Protestant Reformation—those tithes and indulgences gilded Catholic cathedrals, and they made the ensuing schisms and struggles just as rooted in class as they were in scripture. And they weren't bloodless either. Orb's example is condensed and melodramatic, but its brother-on-brother violence is appropriately allegorical and biblical. Religion can save people from the brink of despair, and it can push them closer to it as well.

Schmidt calls himself a naturalist, a broad philosophical movement rooted in the veneration of Nature as the ultimate and only expression of reality. The Church, on the other hand, posits God as the creator of all things, so He is therefore unknowable to and beyond the confines of the natural world. Naturalism and religion aren't necessarily incompatible; Badeni, for example, researched heliocentrism as a means of understanding God through the beauty of the cosmos. Schmidt, however, adheres to an extreme interpretation of naturalism. He wants to “restore God to a state unblemished by human ideals.” This is easily understood as a reaction to the Church's overextension of its power and violence, but Schmidt has more going on than that. He feels that the root of the problem is not merely in the institution, but in humanity itself. He's a zealot, meeting violence with violence. He literally (and explosively) dismantles the foundation of a church to get what he wants. Most importantly, though, he's not a scientist, and I don't think he wants to become one. I'll be interested to see whether heliocentrism is just a means to an end for him.

I'm also interested in where this new arc goes in general. I like that we've moved even further away from the ecclesiastical world. The main figure in this episode is a heretical folk hero, and the other protagonist described in the press release is a girl from a nomadic tribe. We haven't met her yet, but we've seen her eyes staring back at us in the new version of the OP. They are both a far cry from the buttoned-up and budding scholar Rafal who kicked off this story, but that's the thematic point of Orb. That legacy is available for anybody with the courage and the brains to grab it.

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Orb: On the Movements of the Earth is currently streaming on Netflix.

Steve is on Bluesky now, and he's okay with that. He is busy pondering the orb. You can also catch him chatting about trash and treasure alike on This Week in Anime.