Orb: On the Movements of the Earth

Episode 21

I want to start by praising Orb's ability to craft tension. I'm inclined to focus on the big picture when I write about a thematically ambitious show like this, because there's no shortage of ideas to dig into. However, as a piece of animated entertainment, Orb deserves accolades. This week's opening scene is simple and great. It yanks the audience every which way, teasing us with the possibility that the inquisitors will discover their cart's true heretical intentions. Inevitable bloodshed is just one wrong answer away. While Draka's quick thinking defuses this particular powder keg, it reminds us how tenuous the resistance movement's position is. They're going up against the single largest religious and political institution on the planet. The deck is so stacked against them that they barely hold a single card. The betrayal later in the episode only emphasizes this point.

This is why Draka's vocal support of the heart of the movement is critical in this chapter. The resistance's plans are based on science and logic. Jolenta martyred herself because she thought it would give them their best shot, i.e., the most favorable odds. By printing Oczy's book, they're relying on the public's collective rationality to see past the suffocating veil of theocracy. These, however, aren't sure things. The letter molds crack easily. Paper burns. Literature can be erased. The Church isn't going to roll over because of a sound scientific argument about orbital mechanics.

Draka, however, probably isn't thinking that far ahead. While she's a schemer at heart, in this instance, I think she just feels a connection with Jolenta in the same way that Jolenta felt one with her. The legacy of heliocentrism is important and inextricable from Jolenta's legacy, but Jolenta's legacy is more than that. She was her own person, and she's gone now. Draka openly grieves for her because Jolenta deserves to be grieved for. It's only by holding onto those fragile human connections that any meaningful change can be made in the face of cruelty, fascism, and oppression. To prove this point, Draka later offers her father's coins as material to repair the broken letter molds. She symbolically abandons her conviction for profit and her past regrets to preserve Jolenta's heart. Alchemically, she transmutes that lead into hope for the future, ensuring that Jolenta's name is preserved as the manuscript's publisher.

I love watching the printing press in action. I'm no expert on the device, but to my eye, it looks like the animators did their research and enjoyed showing off the minutiae of its operation. It's a tightly edited scene with lots of intimate mechanical animation that emphasizes each step's human component. In other words, it's a perfect visual representation of the indelible link between technology and history. Humanity used its eyes to suss out heliocentrism and its hands to build the machine capable of distributing that knowledge. Orb recognizes that all of this is connected.

The anime's keen eye also extends to the episode's most dramatic sequence, as Schmidt confronts Frei's treachery. Their swordfight is quick and well-choreographed, and the setting sun casts an emotionally appropriate twilit glow over the scene. Yet again, humanity finds a way to undermine its progress. In this case, the revelation that Frei is the boy from the flashback several episodes ago is both understated and tragic. A lesser narrative would cast this as a condemnation of the cycles of violence that turn throughout the ages, but Orb's blade is thankfully sharper. Frei's betrayal is tragic because he reminds us that overwhelming societal oppression breeds its sycophants alongside its rebels. The Church is the root cause, no matter how you look at it. Some people just want to be the boot, and there's nothing you can do or say to convince them otherwise. Schmidt, therefore, does what he has to.

Schmidt ends up being the key figure in the episode's final scene. While Frei's betrayal doesn't shake his convictions—bloodshed is business as usual for him—Draka's words about Jolenta clearly do. The Heretic Liberation Front was a union of convenience. Jolenta's ambitions were a means to achieve Schmidt's ambitions, and vice versa. However, Draka's appeal to the heart of their rebellion gives him pause. It cuts through his tunnel vision and makes him consider the possibility that there might be another more desirable future, and it might be incompatible with his own. Draka gave up her conviction, so why shouldn't he?

This, too, is religious thinking. Orb covered this previously when considering the inescapable importance of faith, whether you put that faith in God or in your fellow man. Catholicism, at its core, asks you to sacrifice your personal desires for the sake of grander spiritual salvation. The problem with the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages, however, is that it contorted those aspirations to prop up the growth of itself as an institution of unfathomably wealthy and powerful men. God's will was just a pretense for plain old human greed. By leaving her fate up to a coin flip, Draka invokes the most divine and unknowable of wills, and it rejects her. Schmidt, then, overturns that will. The key difference between him and the Church is that when Schmidt invokes his human obstinance, he does so for the sake of another. Neither she nor Draka are doing this to save their own hides. They're doing it for the cause. They're doing it for the next generation. That's why every movement needs faith and heart.

At this point, it's salient to remember that we know how Orb ends. It's a piece of historical fiction, and there's been no indication that it will stray from the basic outline of this time period in Western civilization. The Inquisition will end, the Church will splinter, the Reformation will succeed, and heliocentrism will be adopted as fact and further refined by astronomers who no longer fear for their lives. However, Orb's success as a narrative relies on its characters and their journeys with their own relationships to religion and science. That's where it continues to exceth Draka and Schmidt make huge strides this week, and I hope these won't be their last.

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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.