Thanks for visiting Anime Rants. Orb continues to be my favorite anime of the season as 2024 comes to an end. As you can tell from the title, freedom is an important theme in this episode. Freedom is the grand ideal behind Oczy’s heretical actions. In order to be truly free, your thoughts must also be free. This is the whole idea behind freethinking. We need the freedom to question the ones telling us what to think. Oczy points this out. He is a freethinker in the truest sense of the word.
Episode 13: Freedom
Episode Rating: 9/10
The beginning of the episode was somewhat anticlimactic because the action was over with so quickly. Oczy fought with Nowak and was able to pin him down. He probably would have killed Nowak if not for the backup inquisitors, who shot three or four arrows into Oczy’s body. He passed out immediately, but due to anime logic, he survived. (I think without modern medicine and cleanliness, he should have died after that many deep puncture wounds. Still, I’m glad the character is alive.)
Oczy wakes up in the inquisition chambers, kept alive by the doctors. He will soon be questioned and tortured for information. Then he will be executed for assaulting inquisitors. However, before all that, Oczy was unconscious for an entire week. During that time, he went through a near-death experience in which he dreamed he was a young student of a wise monk who studied astronomy. We know Oczy knew a monk like this in his past, so this dream was probably drawing from his memories.
Together, Oczy and the monk go to the top of a huge tower that I assume represents humanity’s progress. The two men have some interesting discussion, and the monk tells Oczy that all his actions have been the service of a certain grand ideal. Oczy asks what the ideal is, but the monk says he will have to figure that out for himself. It isn’t until later, when he wakes up in the inquisition chamber, that Oczy realizes what’s been driving him: it is the ideal of freedom.
My favorite part of this episode was when Oczy discussed this idea a little with Nowak. The inquisitor pointed out that without strict code of order imposed on them, men are no better than savage beasts. Oczy says, “You may be right. But if we can’t question that code, that’s no different from beasts either.” In the end, Nowak couldn’t understand, but I loved that conversation.
Unfortunately, Badeni was also captured. This seems ridiculously unfair after Oczy’s brave sacrifice, but such is life. In a flashback, we learn that Badeni burned everything – all the evidence of heliocentrism, including Oczy’s book. (Or so he claims.) But that means that they have nothing to give up to the inquisitors, and the torture could last indefinitely. Oczy asked what to do in such an event, and Badeni said they’d just have to face the nightmare before them.
Nowak begins to torture Oczy to make Badeni talk. At first, the torture is blunt force trauma with a club. Oczy is soon bloody and bruised. This part of the episode was also interesting to me because Badeni isn’t acting as heartless as I expected. For one thing, he makes no attempt at all to shift the blame onto Jolenta. He reveals nothing about her. Furthermore, he tries to convince Nowak that torturing Oczy is useless.
Badeni’s logical explanations go nowhere. Nowak is convinced that he’s lying. The inquisitor takes out the pear of anguish to use on Oczy. To be continued.
~Thanks for reading~
Written by 7Mononoke
Click for more posts about Orb
Anime Rants 