Jormungand - Episode 12 (Completed)

With Dominique and his dangerous duo well and truly on the case of Koko and her own band of troops, has our enigmatic arms dealer finally met her match?

Of course not - after a brief flashback into the origins of former Mafia man Grego amongst her number, we quickly see the tables turned on Dominique's henchmen, before the boss man himself is put out of commission in the ensuing car chase as Grego looks to escape and ensure Koko's safety.  The danger over, the only real question here is who hired these goons to take out Koko?  With so many enemies in high places, the answer isn't likely to be anything other than a worrying one.

With this resolved in short order, our attention can return to Valmer, who does her utmost to shake the attentions of Jonah before heading off to complete her vengeance.  There's no prizes for guessing her target, as she turns up at the gate of the Daxinghai Company's pipeline plant and has no hesitation in laying waste to all those present as she searches out Chen Guoming, albeit not before finding herself reliant upon the help of Jonah as he finds his comrade once again.  Her mission completed, there are some final twists in this particular tale - twists that threaten to prove fatal for some of those involved.

Despite marking the series as completed, this is in fact only the half-way point of Jormungand, with more to come in the autumn - something which I'm ultimately looking forward to.  Don't get me wrong, the series has a number of flaws - it's overly insistent upon depicting all of its major characters as intensely deranged in some shape or form, and it often struggled to depict and animate gunfights with any kind of panache, which is a pretty big issue for a show so filled with gunplay and heavily armed individuals.  In spite of this, the show as a whole kept my attention with some compelling scenarios and storylines (although even this is arguably a little repetitive with its "assassins of the week" nature), but above all thanks to the enigma which is Koko Hekmatyar, perhaps the spring season's stand-out character.  While it would be easy to write Koko off as another deranged character within the cast, her portrayal actually hints at far more than that - we see a certain, twisted sensitivity to her and evidence that she can be shocked by the brutality around her behind the facade of a tactical and psychological genius beyond compare in her field.

Even at the end of this series is still feels like we know so little about Koko and her family, but she's someone I want to know much, much more about - a simple fact which will have me tuning again for her continuing adventures later this year, even if this show is no Black Lagoon.  Come on, I couldn't finish this piece without mentioning it at least once...