Gosick - Episode 24 (Completed)

Thanks to her mother Cordelia's borderline coup as Saubure finds itself drawn into the midst of war, Victorique finds herself freed of the shackles of the Ministry of the Occult only to be faced with yet more danger in the face of "evil" Brian Roscoe, who seeks to kill her for the effect she has inadvertently had on the woman he loves.

In the ensuing struggle Victorique somehow comes up trumps, gravely injuring "evil" Brian Roscoe in the process - despite this however, Victorique's determination to see no further deaths on her account (it's fair to say that "good" Brian Roscoe and Cordelia don't exactly fare well) lead to her saving her would-be killer at least temporarily, while Victorique also finds her brother willing to let her go about her own business.

With our favourite gothic lolita set loose and sporting a new hair colour thanks to the necessity of events around her, the rest of the episode from here largely concerns whether or not she will ever be reunited with Kujo, who finds himself plunged into the midst of war as a front-line solider with the constant threat of death which that brings.  As Saubure gets itself back on track thanks to Jupiter Roget, so we also eventually see a happy ending for our main character pairing as everything works out well sooner or later and those involved come to live happily ever after.  Awww....

Despite the latent emotional power in its closing scenes, this finale to Gosick felt a little disjointed and uneven as it went about tying up its loose endings and resolving everything - certain items still weren't given much attention (why we didn't know about the Roscoe twins earlier and Victorique's hair colour change were both thrown into proceedings arbitrarily), and there was never any real feeling of urgency in this finale as you might have expected.  It's the kind of problem that has plagued Gosick throughout, yet despite that the series as a whole has managed to be entertaining largely off the back of its Kujo-Victorique dynamic, which worked marvellously and ultimately added an extra frisson to these closing episodes which otherwise would have been missing.  I still can't help but feel that Gosick could have offered us much more than it eventually did, but by the same token it wasn't a bad series either that, at times, really showed what it could do in making for an impressively impactful offering.  Had it been a little more consistent, we might have been talking about the show in the kind of glowing terms we were hoping to use for it, but such is the nature of the beast that this is a series which didn't quite cut the mustard despite making a brave effort at times.