Status quo for Orb this week, pretty much. Better than the first few episodes after the timeskip, but I’m still quite detached from the events happening on-screen. Things aren’t as ridiculous as they were, which is good. But they’re quite conventional, which I don’t think is a great look for this series. To fall back on that To Your Eternity parallel, both are series with a lot of creative ambition penned by mangaka who were very – very – young at the time. I suspect it’s much easier for a mangaka barely out of high school to close the deal with a conventional battle shounen than something like Fumetsu or Chi Chikyuu.

The episode here was pretty much conventional suspense drama, not much intellectual discourse this time, but well-executed. Schmidt and his merry band manage to slip through their encounter on the highway with a forged travel pass and some quick thinking from Draka. Once they arrive at the printing hideout they meet up with the rest of the Heretic Liberation Front. A chap named Bolko (is he a sergeant?)seems more or less in charge of them, and he’s naturally suspicious of who this new girl is. “A collaborator”, Schmidt assures him, and after the incident on the highway he has reason to stand by her.

We got a bit more speech to camera here with Draka appointing herself the one to keep Jolenta’s heart alive, as she’s decided that Schmidt is only interested in the practicalities. She’s someone who says or does whatever the plot requires so this is very much in-character, so to speak. Lightning-fast changes of heart have been demanded of her on multiple occasions already. But the major plot driver here is Frei betraying the others, which is what the plot needed to move onto the next stage. I did like the facedown with Schmidt, which was quite tense and worked well as a dramatic device.

Given that Frei has killed the horses before he spilled his guts to Schmidt, options for the operation are strictly limited. Mind you, that itself was pretty far-fetched – even if Frei wasn’t openly working with the Church he could have slipped away whenever he wanted rather than choosing to gloat. The explanation is that he wanted to give his comrades the chance to repent and confess, which patently flies in the face of the fact that he just tried to kill Schmidt, but whatever. Plot comes first now, we knew that already.

It all comes down to Draka’s (who’s already surrendered her precious coins to repair the printing press) argument that the best plan is for everybody to sacrifice themselves to help her escape. Eventually she decided to leave it up to a coin flip, which no one was  compelled to honor in any way, which she loses. But Schmidt decides to sacrifice himself (and his men) for her anyway. If I had any connection to Draka as a character this would probably have more impact, but it’s just a thing that happens, pretty much. We’ll see if Orb manages to make a silk purse out of this somehow, though at the moment I’m struggling to see how.