I must confess Chi.: Chikyuu is losing me a little bit. Later than the manga did to be sure – we don’t have the artwork obstacle to deal with (much). But I feel as if things may have wandered down a bit of a narrative cul-de-sac here. I may be jumping the gun on this, but it feels like Uoto may be unspooling a thread they don’t know how to tie up. The larger themes are very much intact and still compelling, but the details aren’t proving to be as authentic or engaging. At least for me.

I sure as Hell hope I wasn’t supposed to feel sympathy for Nowak here, because I don’t. He who lives by the sword dies by the sword – I’d expect a pious hypocrite like him to know that verse. And even though Jolenta isn’t dead (thanks to a bunch of people who died to protect her, including the kid who set her free) Nowak believes she is. And if so he has absolutely no cause for complaint, based on the choices he’s made in his life. He’s a professional killer and torturer, and whether he supposedly believes in the cause is irrelevant.

Jolenta is a bit of a problem for me too. I mean I’m glad she’s alive – she’s done nothing to deserve punishment (including that mandibular extraction) never mind execution. But it’s not like she’s some sort of heroic figure or anything. She’s a victim, but there are lots of victims where the Inquisition is concerned. If she’d known her father’s job and continued to do her research that would be one thing – it would take a ton of courage. But as is she’s just a bright teenager dealing with the same idiocracy everyone (especially women) in her era did. When she got entangled she tried to lie her way out of it and failed, as most people would.

As such any flashback stuff with Nowak and Jolenta is lost on me. Who cares, about the gloves or otherwise. And Antoni being just as foul a human as Nowak doesn’t make the latter any less foul – I hope the pair of them get the other killed. But things do at least turn a little better when the focus shifts to Grabowski, though I had some problems with the B-part too. Grabowski seems like a pretty unexceptional guy, but also decent. He tries to help his flock, and – perhaps unusually – he did display at least some intellectual curiosity with his interest in Lucretius (which was his reason for joining the clergy, if you recall).

Badeni obviously considered Grabowski a lightweight and treated him pretty contemptuously as a result (though that was normal for him). As such it’s certainly ironic that Grabby should be the lynchpin of Badeni’s longshot plan to keep heliocentrism alive. At least Badeni’s note to Grabowski was humble, even if the man never was in life. Grabowski’s tip (Chekov’s book) seems to have been the impetus for Badeni and Oczy eventually being caught, and this obviously troubles him. He’s a believer, and trying to do the right thing as he sees it. But – and this is the most eloquent moment of the episode by far – he has an epiphany when reading the words of a man who died 1500 years earlier, thinking about the efforts it took to make that possible.

There’s irony in me having issues with the form Badeni’s plan takes, no question. I’ve argued that Orb has no obligation to adhere to historical realism where the Inquisition is concerned, because the fundamental truth of its themes is self-apparent. But the whole tattoo thing is very Golden Kamuy. It works there, because that series is a full-throated celebration of absurdism. This one not so much, and as a result that kind of falls flat for me. It’s a nice image but doesn’t pass the sniff test – it’s a dramatic device and nothing more.

But it does sort of work thematically I think. I like the idea that Badeni is forced to resort to the humblest of the humble in society in order to achieve what he considers the loftiest goal. And in Grabowski to rely on a man he considered a mere tool and a peon. Of course he’s not doing Grabowski any favors by passing this baton to him – we’ve seen what happens to those who choose to work on behalf of the truth in this time and place, and there’s no reason to suspect Grabowski’s fate will be any different.