It’s ironic that Chi.: Chikyuu no Undou ni Tsuite didn’t skip an episode for the new year (which is almost unheard of for anime to my recollection) cause boy howdy, this series does love a time skip. And this is a big one – 25 years this time. To be frank it’s a good “time” for it, because I could feel the narrative perceptibly losing steam on the path it was headed the last few weeks. I’m not sure I’d say it was a dead end, but at the very least it was a path I was less interested in taking than the ones which Orb had taken before.

As far as I can tell this new “Liberation Front” organization doesn’t have any historical parallel, even an anachronistic one. That said, so-called “peasant revolts” (which actually included lots of non-peasants) were increasingly common in the late middle ages. And for good reasons – the ones spelled out in this episode, pretty much. Chi Chikyuu has always taken a liberal view of specific historical events and figures in order to make its point more dramatically, and that seems to be the case with this new arc as well.

I do know this – Naturalism as a philosophy (which has its roots in ancient Greece) was almost unheard of in the Middle Ages and indeed, didn’t begin to reappear in earnest until the Enlightenment. But Schmitt (Hino Satoshi) seems to be an outlier even within his own organization. There’s still a lot of blank space to be filled in here, but it’s implied that it’s more of a general anti-orthodoxy group, and Schmitt and his unit are the ones specifically wedded to Naturalism (and anarchy). In practical terms though they free heretics, and seek to destabilize the Church and its leadership. As such, heretical teachings (like Oczy’s journal, perhaps) are obviously of potential use to them.

Schmitt and his lieutenants Fry and Lewandowski make use of the latest technology, which in this case is explosives. Schmitt gets himself arrested in order to pull of an inside job and liberate (in addition to some random heretics currently in the hands of the Inquisition) a book (whether specifically Oczy’s I’m not sure) that will be of use to their leader (whose identity we don’t know). The heretics initially ask to join his squad, but Schmitt puts them to his usual initiation test – they must declare that they don’t believe in the Holy Scriptures. And yeah, that’s a big ask for the average medieval bloke, especially one looking to reform rather then destroy the religious order.

There’s also a backwards timeskip here, as we jump back again to 25 years earlier. But not as far as I can tell to anyone we know. A family of three is fleeing a village the father says has gone mad – possibly one of those peasant revolts – when his younger brother intercepts them on the way out of town. He espouses some politically radical but perfectly valid positions, and when Aniki refuses to stipulate to them, proceeds to slash him and then go after the son. His mother saves the boy (presumably at the cost of her own life), and it’s clear that he survives and becomes important in the “present”. But I don’t get the sense that he’s Schmitt, so details on that are still to come.

Lastly we have an abandoned village, supposedly to the plague, where Schmitt and his men stop to resupply and rest (and for Fry to study the book). But it’s not abandoned, and in fact Church militia is close by. They’re serving Antoni, and outnumber the trio sufficiently that they secret the book and flee for the moment. They have a prisoner already, one who Antoni is more interested in, and I’m guessing it’s Nowak but then 25 years is a long time. I presume we’ll get a lot of this cleared up next week.