If you’re in a hurry, here’s a capsule review or Orb at 17 episodes.

My engagement level with Chi Chikyuu has declined pretty precipitously over the past few weeks. The funny thing is that it happened with the manga too, only much earlier. I dropped off there during the stretch where I still found the anime really gripping. I chalked it up to the manga  artwork (which undeniably was a turnoff for me) but maybe the anime was papering over cracks in a more substantive way that I wasn’t conscious of. My sense at the moment is that the writing has just kind of gotten untethered from whatever it was that made it successful as a narrative.

Indeed, things have just gotten sort of weird and random (and silly). We’re now following a nomadic tribe, which I originally thought might be Sami people, but they were never in what’s now Poland. It’s implied that this group survives partly by “plundering” but it’s also a farming and foraging community. It also runs as a strictly egalitarian commune, which doesn’t sit well with Draka (Shimabakuro Miyuri). She’s a (hilariously) modern-thinker who preaches Adam Smith capitalism to the village elder, who’s happy to rely on her innovative ideas but not her political philosophy.

Draka is, in a word, silly. She’s totally out of place in this setting, a completely modern woman in every sense but the way she dresses. She’s a plot device in other words, or also a means for Uoto to make some sort of statement. She has an uncle who’s her only surviving relative (her father was killed while plundering), who’s now sickly (though not as much as he claims to be) and a drunk but was once an inspiration to Draka. While she was wallowing in self-pity after her parents’ death, he gave her the wisdom of “three magic spells” to reshape her life.

In fact, this conversation is easily the most interesting scene of the episode, and the ideas it introduces the one flash of the intellectual depth Orb flashed at its best. He tells her first that God doesn’t exist – and that disbelieving in Him will free her to gain control of her emotions and motivations. Next, to think – to learn and read and make connections,  and to try and understand how the world works. And finally, “conviction”. Though not necessarily about anything specific – the uncle  says that his conviction is to “survive, even if it means abandoning my convictions”. As he will later demonstrate.

While most pioneers of the Enlightenment were devoutly Christian, what Uncle says here is kind of the elephant in the room with Orb. No question these are subversive ideas in context, and a natural outflow of the heliocentric challenge to Church orthodoxy. As it happens Uncle has found the book Schmidt and his men hid in the abandoned house, and he goes down there to read it and drink the wine he pilfers from other villagers. On one of these visits Antoni and his men come a-calling, and Uncle promptly offers to serve up his niece on a platter in exchange for his life.

I’m curious to see where Uoto goes with this whole God question. But in truth, everything since the torture porn and timeskip has played like Chi Chikyuu fanfiction. There’s no groundedness – it’s all kind of thinking out loud. Draka’s inner monologue when reading the book was laughably absurd in context, and thus perfectly fitting with the trend in the story. The strength of this series was always its determination to explore big and difficult ideas, so that feather is still in its cap. But it was much more effective when it was doing so through the lens of a story and characters that felt real and in the moment. Without that element, it becomes nothing more than an abstractly interesting oddity.