There’s no burying the lede with that episode. Yeah, I’m stumped. Rafal is awesome as always – so is Sakamaoto Maaya. But this has to make sense or the whole premise kind of crumbles.  For a series that seems to celebrate reason and rational thought, the three explanations which spring to mind for me are all kind of deal-breakers. Rafal showing up last week as Nowak’s conscience made sense in context, at least to an extent. It’s not so easy to explain this one away.

• First possibility: Rafal is a ghost. Not a figment of a dying man’s subconscious, but an actual ghost in the literary sense. Why he’d be a ghost who can interact with physical objects and be older than he was when he took his own life is another question. If it’s this, that pretty much blows the previous 23 episodes to smithereens.
• Second: He somehow survived that original “death”. That, to be blunt, seems extremely unlikely in the first place. Especially since even if he could have faked his own death he would have needed outside help for the aftermath, and he was in solitary confinement. Also, by my math with the two timeskips a living Rafal would be around 40 even in Albert’s flashback. So – no.
• Third: This is some sort of alternate timeline. This is the one that seems the most likely to me. There are elements that don’t add up – like, why is Rafal only 6-7 years older (this one looks like he’s in his late teens) and still wearing his school uniform to boot? But the meeting at the end of the episode strongly hints at this possibility. Maybe this is some reality that exists outside of normal time, or something. But that would be almost as hard to reconcile with the core premise as the ghost theory. I suppose I could add a fourth “this isn’t the same Rafal” option, but that’s even more out there…

All this leads us to Albert, who has a couple of slightly surrealistic conversations building up to this revelation. First, his adoptive father lectures him about arete, a topic I wouldn’t imagine most medieval bakers were too knowledgeable about. He then sends Albert to deliver bread to a church he’s never delivered to, where he quickly winds up in a confessional talking to a too-eager priest (it should be noted that the timeline is again way off here, as the earliest cited date for use of a confessional box is 1563). There’s something off about this whole interaction, but it leads to Albert spinning the tale of his youth. And eventually, his tutor.

Again, in the midst of all this mess Orb delivers some interesting philosophical discourse. This time on the subject of whether the pursuit of knowledge should be governed by whether that knowledge is “useful to humanity” (yeah, that’s not subjective at all). Albert’s father – who to his credit does encourage learning and is the one who calls in Rafal-sensei – takes the view that it should. Knowledge is meaningless if it has no practical value. And learning should be undertaken with the intent of glorifying God. He advises his son to always doubt his learnings (good), on the grounds that if they don’t lead him to the path of God, he should stop (not so good).

Rafal, unsurprisingly, takes a very different view. Sakamoto Maaya ensconces us in the velvet of another nuanced and brilliant performance. This Rafal is different from the one we know in subtle ways, but still clearly the same person. If the Rafal we lost after two episodes had grown up, this is certainly what we would have expected him to be like. He schools the wide-eyed young Albert on constellations, the connections which we find in the sky, and busts out another ancient Greek concept – Thaumazein, “wonder”. Rafal is an eloquent exponent of curiosity and intellectual ambition, a reminder of what Nowak took away when he caused Rafal’s life to be snuffed out.

I can’t render an opinion on all this until we find out what the hell it all means, obviously. Next week is the finale and to say it has a big job to do is an understatement. That would have been the case even before this bizarre twist, but now the ultimate fate of the whole series pretty much rests on it. If I’m honest I can’t say I’m entirely confident, but I’m certainly curious.