© 魚豊／小学館／チ。 ―地球の運動について—製作委員会
Our merry band of heliocentric heretics welcomes a new member into their fold. And I think they’ve got a winner. I liked Jolenta from minute one. Despite the stodgy academic setting, Orb cleverly introduces her with a pseudo-action scene that immediately communicates both her passion for study and her anxiety over the subterfuge she must stoop to to participate.
It hadn’t escaped my notice these past few weeks that Orb was coming up pretty light in the female character department. In fact, I think Jolenta is the first named woman to be featured in the story. Still, it’s better late than never, and with Jolenta, Orb certainly seems invested in prodding at the misogyny of the time. The male students are cruel to her, the one guy who’s nice to her is a smarmy bastard who just wants to take credit for her work, and her father, while somewhat encouraging, also tells her to keep her head down. Nevertheless, Jolenta cannot bring herself to abate her passion for science. She’s endearing and defiantly nerdy, and her personality should play interestingly with Oczy’s and Badeni’s.
Incidentally, while the narrative attempts to keep this a secret by hiding his face, Jolenta’s father is definitely Nowak. I can see how the framing might have worked in the manga, and it probably would have made for a neat twist down the line. However, it doesn’t work quite as well when the actor playing the character in the anime has one of the most distinctive voices in the industry. I’d recognize Kenjirō Tsuda‘s signature purr anywhere. This isn’t a knock against the anime, but I just found it funny that the adaptation still attempted the obfuscation. It might have been an opportunity to rejigger the story to avoid or rework the eventual big reveal.
More importantly, Nowak’s daughter becoming a filthy heretic will almost certainly fuel some juicy drama and/or introspection down the line. He’s no stranger to killing kids (Rafal was only a couple of years younger than her), but remember that he rationalized that brutality because he wanted to secure a peaceful world for his daughter. Like most patriarchs, though, he failed to comprehend that she’d be her own person with her own agency. If she contributes to the proof of heliocentrism, it’ll be the perfect ironic nail in the coffin of his legacy, and if he tries her as a heretic, that, too, will undermine his whole reason for being an Inquisitor. Nowak might have set his sights on heaven, but no matter what happens, he’s already doomed.
Turning back to Oczy and Badeni for a moment, their banter reveals deeper layers to their characters and their relationship. Again, I’m drawn to irony, and I think it’s wryly hilarious that Oczy, the assassin, is the duo’s moral compass, while Badeni, the monk, is the selfish egomaniac. Granted, Oczy is almost certainly motivated by his fear of judgment and damnation at the hands of a vengeful God, but that doesn’t change the fact that he feels obligated to respect the wishes of a complete stranger, with no material benefit for him (quite the opposite, in fact). And it’s not exactly surprising that Badeni doesn’t care about anyone or anything outside of his eventual scientific proof, but his utter lack of remorse is quite something. These are great developments, too. I feel like I have a stronger bead on both of their personalities, and it sets up a story that isn’t just about Oczy learning astronomy. There’s also plenty of room for Badeni to learn humility.
Badeni’s most egregious comment this week is his request to burn all of the research materials if he himself doesn’t live to prove their hypotheses. He figuratively spits in the face of Orb‘s biggest theme so far: the continuity of human scientific progression across many generations. I like, too, that Orb emphasizes this point by contrasting Badeni’s pride against Jolenta’s entirely reasonable quest for credit and respect. Both of them are fighting against the status quo, but Jolenta, by virtue of being a woman in 15th-century Poland, is on a much lower rung of society’s ladder than Badeni is, and she’s asking for much humbler acknowledgments.
Although Jolenta relents when the count asks to verify who truly wrote that treatise, she reaffirms her commitment to research when she solves Badeni’s puzzle behind her schoolmates’ backs. If there’s one advantage to being Nowak’s daughter, it’s that she probably gained a good sense of which battles to pick openly. It’s cute, too, that she appears to get a rush from being bad, and that her idea of being “bad” is doing homework in secret. Being the nerdiest person in a story about astronomy would be quite the feat, but she’s well on her way to proving her mettle on that front.
As I’m writing it, this review feels more scattershot than usual, but that reflects how I enjoyed a lot of the small details in this week’s episode. For instance, I liked the brief mention of research performed by Arab astronomers. When I was taught this history in school, it focused on figures like Copernicus, Brahe, Galileo, and the rest of the major European players. In truth, though, scholars in the Middle East advanced a wide swathe of scientific studies during the so-called “dark” ages, and those studies had an underappreciated impact on the expansion of Western thought and knowledge when the Renaissance finally kicked in. While I don’t expect Orb to leave its European setting, it’s nice to see that it doesn’t limit itself to a Eurocentric historical perspective.
Finally, a fun fact: I learned just this week that “oczy” is the Polish word for eyes. That definitely would have made my closing argument in the prior review even stronger. The more you know.
Rating:
Orb: On the Movements of the Earth is currently streaming on
Netflix.
Steve is on Twitter while it lasts. He is busy pondering the orb. You can also catch him chatting about trash and treasure alike on This Week in Anime.
