This week’s capsule review:
To be blunt, the ship has long since sailed on my having any emotional buy-in to the denouement of Orb. I don’t care about any of the current characters much, and things have gotten so silly that all tethering to reality has let go. Still, having loved it once and really liking it for a long time, I keep hoping it at least ties things up coherently and with some dignity. It has ambition and still does interesting things from time to time. But this week’s episode put a pretty big dent in those hopes.
First off, the ludicrous popinjay is no more. But Schmidt was an absolute goner after the events of last week – Chi Chikyuu telegraphs its punches in that way. It was his turn to die for the plot’s sake, and so he did. Still I was sorry to see Schmidt go, because he was at least an amusing fellow. Sadly Nowak isn’t dead, but he’s the veritable cockroach that would survive a nuclear holocaust. The upside there was we got to see him humiliated, but the way that went down was so comically ludicrous that it robbed the moment of most of its fanservice.
Schmidt and the rest of his merry men gave their last full measure so that Draka could run to… Bishop Antoni? In the first place, that’s an absurd move on her part. I would even go so far as to say incredibly dumb. But hey, okay. She goes to the cathedral, manages to get him rousted out of bed in the middle of the night (yeah, sure) and then proceeds to spin a tale of how she can spin heliocentrism to make a killing. And of how it isn’t really heretical either for good measure.
And of course, he buys it. The only saving grace here is that Antoni has already been established as greedy and disdainful of his (now late) father. But the rest of it just about had me speechless. How I wish it’d had her speechless, because I don’t think Draka has had a single line of dialogue that sounded remotely like something someone in her time and place would actually say. But this was really the cherry on top. There’s no way in hell a guy in Antoni’s position – no matter what he believed personally – would throw over church doctrine so casually based on the midnight ravings of a crackpot girl who interrupted his beauty sleep.
So that’s a writing cardinal sin right there to be sure. But it’s matched by the fact that this is an anti-climax of biblical proportions. Seriously, after 22 episodes and the death of every decent character, it’s all tossed aside as a “never mind” when a bit player decides he’s going to cowboy his way around Church doctrine? It’s an insult to the audience to be sure, but also to the historical precedent. Sorry if that sounds high-handed but it’s true – to trivialize the suffering of those who fought for decades and centuries against a firewall of ignorance and oppression in this way is just so totally wrong.
The only upside really was the comic value in seeing Nowak’s reaction to all this. It had everything but the “womp womp” sound byte playing over it. That at least did feel like justice, but also dangerously as if we were (again) being led towards supposedly feeling some sympathy for the man. And then of course there’s the sheer hypocrisy of Antoni, who was complicit in everything Nowak and his successors did. If an episode can make me laugh a couple of times – even at it – I guess it’s accomplished something positive. But I sure as hell wouldn’t have believed you if you’d told me a couple of months ago this is where we’d end up.
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