Orb: On the Movements of the Earth

Episode 22

Orb's success as a narrative lies in its ability to balance its emotional and intellectual arcs. There are other great works that choose one or the other and do that well, but Orb rides the meridian, which is a precarious position with greater potential payoffs. This week's episode demonstrates how powerful those payoffs can be.

For the emotional component, the first part of this installment focuses on Draka's relationship with Schmidt. While not exactly adversarial, their connection has been stymied by their differences in background and philosophy. Draka, however, got through to Schmidt last week, and he attempts to do the same. When he expresses his hope that she'll come to appreciate the sunrise, he does so this time as a peer, not a proselytizer. It's a subtle but important distinction. Schmidt isn't trying to convert her to his religious beliefs. He wants her to understand him as a person.

Orb believes that religion and science are inextricable from the fabric of society, but it's through small, personal, and heart-to-heart communication that real sea changes are made. Although Draka doubts her sincerity, she reaffirms how much Jolenta's encouragement means to her (and I have no reason to doubt that Jolenta was genuine). Schmidt, previously, had been fueled by his beliefs, which enabled his violent zealotry for the heretical cause. History is saturated with examples of people justifying atrocities with their faith in a higher power. When Schmidt decides to put his trust in Draka, however, his sword wavers. Lacking the surety of the divine, he encounters the same fear that plagued Oczy towards the end of his arc. People are fallible. It's frightening to bet all your chips on them. Furthermore, by anchoring his faith to the terrestrial, Schmidt is forced to confront that his opponents are human, too. While he ultimately musters the conviction to protect Draka, note that he gives the inquisitors quick deaths, and contrasts that with the torturous death Nowak gives him.

If all faith in humanity is a gamble, then Draka decides to go all-in with Bishop Antoni. On the surface, this is self-evidently counter-intuitive. She's running from the Church to the Church. However, this ties back to Orb's insistence on the power of the personal. Institutional power looks impossibly huge and entrenched from the outside, but no matter what the system is, its fundamental components are human. You can talk to people. You can reason with people. You can kill people. No institution is immune from this influence, and that's the gamble Draka bets the legacy of Rafal, Oczy, Jolenta, and the others on. This is where Orb's long intellectual arc reaches a critical point.

I'd be disappointed if Draka convinced Antoni to believe in heliocentrism with her facts and logic while the rest of the inquisitors wept and clapped in the background. That's not how the real world works. Institutions may be vulnerable, but they're self-sustaining. Their participants and leaders have a vested interest in perpetuating the thing that gives them power, regardless of whether or not it's a house of cards. Therefore, I'm glad Orb resolves Draka's publishing woes with a truce mired in cynicism. That feels true to life. That's how the Earth moves.

After their prior encounter, Draka correctly pegged Antoni as an opportunist. He was willing to engage with her ideas because he saw the writing on the wall. He wanted to guarantee a place for himself at the table when the Reformation's dust settled. His Machiavellian outlook is also a fitting byproduct of his heritage. As the illegitimate son of the previous bishop, he grew up fully aware of the Church's internal hypocrisies, so it's no wonder he wouldn't be all that passionate about punishing blasphemy. When he took advantage of the Inquisition, he did so to cement his standing in the Church. To be clear, this doesn't make Antoni a good guy. He schemed to execute Jolenta to exploit his father's connection to Nowak and usurp his title as bishop. Still, Antoni is a powerful figure who can be reasoned with, and that makes him useful. When the chips are down, for better or worse, he knows that capital overrules orthodoxy

Divorced from this context, Draka's arguments and Antoni's comments are still theologically sound. There is nothing intrinsic to the Bible's text or to Catholic dogma that would chafe against the tenets of heliocentrism. Biblical scholarship is rich with allegorical interpretations that understand, for example, that God did not necessarily create the universe in seven 24-hour cycles. The people who lived thousands of years ago would have been able to parse and decode metaphors. Biblical literalism is only one school of thought, and it doesn't have to be the school the whole Church subscribes to. The heliocentrism squad seen throughout Orb have mostly believed that this arrangement of the cosmos could be syncretic with the Church's teachings. It eschews the overly complicated planetary paths of geocentric models and unites the solar system under one set of universally applicable physical laws. Badeni thought this was more beautiful, and thus more appropriate for the architect of all nature.

Heliocentrism, however, matters very little to this episode's resolution. Antoni doesn't care whether the sun or the earth is at the center of the universe. He only cares about where public opinion has swung or will swing. Draka, similarly, only cares about heliocentrism insofar as it connects to Jolenta's vision and the inevitable (and profitable) shift toward mass literacy. And Nowak has scapegoated heliocentrism for his whole life. He's turned into a physical totem—the old necklace—that he blames for all of society's ills, including the loss of his daughter. He's a true crusader, a blind sycophant, a hollow shell, and the best soldier there is. That's how Antoni can thoroughly dismantle him.

Antoni's comment about “a misunderstanding created by a small group of people” is a painfully glib summation of the Inquisition. The Spanish Inquisition alone executed thousands and impacted hundreds of thousands of Jews and Muslims who were forced to convert (i.e. tortured) or expelled from their country. However, he's correct in the sense of what history remembers. A figure like Antoni wields the power to scrub and sanitize. History is malleable. If someone like Nowak makes the Church look bad, it's easier to erase Nowak than to address the systemic issues that enabled Nowak in the first place. Thus, this victory feels pyrrhic. Nowak earned his erasure, but Antoni is arguably even more culpable as a more powerful beneficiary of the Church's influence. That power, however, allows him to eschew culpability. This, too, is how the world moves.

It's a frustrating conclusion, but I respect Orb for keeping it real and refusing to back down from moral complexity. Thanks to that, Draka and Antoni provide some of the most stimulating conversations yet. We're not coasting towards the ending. With a scant three episodes remaining, Orb is more breathless than ever.

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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.