Orb: On the Movements of the Earth

Episode 11

Nowak is the scariest character of the year. His villainy isn't exaggerated. He twirls neither his mustache nor his beard. He doesn't revel in the torture of heretics. He's a working stiff: he clocks in, logs his hours, and clocks out. He has a family. He begrudgingly trains the newbies, but he isn't too harsh on them either. He tells them how to get ahead. He keeps his head down. He yawns when he's bored. He's just a guy. The world is full of guys like him: cogs in the machine keeping the wheels of society turning. In many ways, I count myself among them, which makes Nowak so disquieting.

Orb is a story about the competing forces of progression and regression constantly pulling on the vector of human history. Each step forward is met with headwinds, and each stumble backward meets a pair of hands breaking the fall. There's nothing smooth or uniform about any of it; a single person is complicated enough as-is, and an entire civilization of them is too complex to move in unison. It's actually far easier to model the cosmos than it is to understand why people do what they do, so it's no wonder that scholars like Badeni, Jolenta, and Oczy bury themselves in their studies. It's a simpler system. You learn something, you get better at it, and you use that betterment to learn and understand more. There are complications and roadblocks, of course, and Orb hasn't been shy about dramatizing those. However, we can believe that scientific and artistic progression will be made, and history is full of positive examples of our grasp growing both grander and more granular.

Nowak makes us confront the more uncomfortable possibility that nothing ever truly changes—at least, not the stuff that matters. The blank expanse of prehistory dwarfs the precious few thousands of years of written records. Perhaps that darkness is the norm, and the film over our small bubble of light is terrifyingly fragile. The Nowaks throughout the ages far outnumber the Rafals. Entropy, too, is a law of the universe. Mirroring Badeni's statement from last week, Nowak explains how another "chi" steers the world. It's not true. It's terror*. We feared fire long before we learned to control it, and that control is itself thin and illusory. Only the fear persists indefinitely.

I don't want to sound too morose, though. I'm complimenting Orb! Any story that can make me feel this bad is doing something right. Take, for instance, this week's despair-inducing torture scene. It's the least graphic one we've seen out of the anime to date, but that doesn't dull its impact. If anything, it's much creepier to watch Nowak call the shots from a distance while a pair of fresh-faced inquisitors fumble with the thumbscrew. It's on-the-job training out of a nightmare, and it plays out like a black comedy that's just a few morbid steps removed from The Office. And that's the point—the normalization of this barbarity. There's no reason this can't or doesn't happen today. People, by and large, conform to the systems they find themselves in, and they reinforce those systems against the people who don't fit into them. The nature of those systems is of secondary importance.

Nowak is hollow, but he's a staggeringly quotidian kind of hollow. He keeps his work separate from his family. He's friendly to his daughter's friends. I don't think he's even putting on a mask when he sits down at the tavern. He neither wants nor needs to deceive Badeni and Oczy. I think he's just acting the same way he always does around his daughter, and that's no more the “true” Nowak than the face he wears when he's extracting confessions writ in blood. Nowak doesn't need the burden of interiority. He doesn't need curiosity. He conforms to the shape of his container. He'll make the pagans recant because that's his job. It's not more complicated than that.

Obviously, Badeni and Oczy are in deep shit right now. This week's cliffhanger hits with all the weight and inevitability of an oncoming freight train. This highlights that Orb is quite good at sustaining narrative momentum without sensationalizing or dumbing down its subject matter too much. It lets these characters (and the audience) believe for a moment that they're in the clear when we all know that this scene could not have ended any differently. As much as I love this series' subject matter, it's also fundamentally a well-constructed story that's pulled off big swerves without derailing. You don't have to be an astronomy nerd to appreciate that.

The biggest open question right now is Jolenta. Does Nowak know she's implicated in heliocentric heresy? Will Oczy or Badeni implicate her under the duress of torture? Badeni may have some tricks up his sleeve, but I think the most interesting direction Orb could head in is the one where Nowak has to dismantle his routine and confront his daughter as an inquisitor, not as a father. He is, after all, the only character to span both narrative arcs so far. While I wouldn't call him the secret protagonist, Orb clearly believes his continued presence has thematic importance. Can Nowak save his own soul? Or does Nowak not even possess one? Right now, beneath your feet, the earth rotates and revolves at unimaginable speeds. Some people, however, never move an inch in their entire life.

Rating:

*Based on the kanji in the eyecatch, Nowak literally says "blood" (chi), but I like the localization's decision to use "terror" here (unless there's another "chi" kanji closer to that definition that I'm ignorant of). It communicates the intent behind the word, and I like the alliteration it creates with last week's "truth." That stitches some phonetic connective tissue between them, akin to their identical pronunciation in Japanese.

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.