Saturday 29 December 2012

Jormungand: Perfect Order - Episode 12 (Completed)

With all of her cards on the table, it seems as if Jormungand is ready to be unleashed, and Jonah's decision to defect from her ranks is going to do nothing to change that.  Or is it?

This finale to Perfect Order sees us fast-forward by two years, and there's no sign of Jormungand being put to use to stop war, death and destruction around the world.  Indeed, if anything the intervening period has simply proved Koko's point, with a third World War drawing ever closer on a planet wracked with terrorist incidents, civil wars and conflicts based around everything from religion to the need for water.  It seems that the Jormungand project isn't dead however - Koko has used the intervening two years miniaturising her quantum computer so that it can be operated from the "safe haven" of a satellite orbiting the planet, thus perfecting her world-changing device.


Against this backdrop, Jonah seems to have tired of spending time with Kasper and has decided to move on once again - a decision that, ultimately, takes him back into Koko's fold.  Does that mean that he now agrees with her methods on the eve of Jormungand's activation?  Hardly, but faced with a lunatic world and a lunatic individual, Jonah seems to have made his choice.

Having masterfully set up its finale, and after opening this episode with a chillingly believable look at a world heading for ruin and a global war, Jormungand feels rather like it has copped out at the last moment by shifting its focus back to Koko and Jonah's relationship rather than showing the fruits of Koko's labour, for better or worse.  With Kasper vowing to continue to deal arms no matter what Koko tries to do but the CIA seemingly on-board with her plan, we were left with a genuinely intriguing setup and a future world as evisaged by Koko that I'd love to be able to look into, but instead this series plays it safe and leaves the rest to our imagination.  As endings go it's hugely unsatisfactory, but it doesn't hide the fact that as a whole I appreciated Perfect Order far more than the first series, and that I appreciated its grandiose plot thread to end the series even if it didn't make full use of it.  It might not be a classic, but I have to give at least some kudos to Jormungand for the way it leveraged its characters and certain aspects of its story if nothing else.

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