I suppose a mythology episode of Noblesse was pretty overdue.  After a heavy dose of it in the OVA and the premiere, this series has mostly turned into a school life comedy.  That’s fine with me, because I happen to think it’s pretty good at that.  And the characters are interesting and likeable.  Nevertheless Noblesse does have a rather large overarching plot, and it had been almost totally ignored for a conspicuously long time.

As if making up for lost time, this episode was a major infodump. But it went in some directions I wasn’t necessarily expecting.  It all  starts with who’s clearly a very important visitor to the campus, an old gent named Gejutel K. Landerge.  If that name sounds familiar that’s because he’s Regis’ grandfather, and Regis quickly shuffles Yusuke and Manabu out of the way in recognition of the big dogs coming out to hunt.  Gejutel seems very surprised to find three modified humans working in the vicinity of his grandson – and even more to discover whose house everyone is shacked up in.

Apparently all this traces back to a place called Lukedonia (I think that’s where the Schmenge Brothers came from).  This is the country of the nobles, of which the Landerge are one of the twelve great clans.  They consider Rai a traitor, and that’s why Regis and Seira (also a member of a great clan, the Loyard) were dispatched when news broke that he may have awakened.  Gejutel was in turn sent to follow up on them, and now he arrives at Frankenstein’s house – and it turns out there’s a long history between those two.

So just what is Frankenstein?  Whatever it is, he seems to be the odd duck of this cast.  He’s not a noble, seemingly, but a human.  That however doesn’t explain his longevity, or how he came to be so powerful that even the heads of great noble families with their “soul weapons” can’t bring him to heel.  For Frankie this seems to have been about social upheaval – he set about taking revenge on the nobles for the sins they perpetrated against humans (mostly through blood pacts, apparently).  Some 800 years ago Gejutel and another great noble, Ragar Kertia, were sent to bring him in to answer to their ruler.

And that’s where we end, more or less.  Still unknown is how Frankenstein became the force he did, and at what point he became Rai’s loyal acolyte.  But Rai was (and is) clearly on bad terms with the aristocracy, so maybe they were soulmates of a sort.  All in all it’s quite a well-executed backstory – I miss the personal touch of the more nichijou material, but this is nicely-constructed enough to keep me curious for answers.  If indeed Noblesse is fated to be a one-cour series – and I’ve heard no suggestion to the contrary – it’s pretty obvious that the anime is only going to scratch the surface of the manhwa’s story (just as Kami no Tou did).