You might have gathered from that introduction that I was not thrilled with the second season of Jormungand, known as Jormungand: Perfect Order. You would be right in that assessment.
It's not that Jormungand suddenly becomes garbage. It's still a decent enough show...it's just that a lot of the positives from the first season start to fall back, some of the negatives are enhanced, and some new negatives are introduced. It is not a bad show. It's just nowhere near as good as the first season was.
We've largely got the same cast as back in Season 1, and they're all still good. Koko remains interesting, Jonah remains the contrasting viewpoint mixed in with loyalty and protectiveness, and the rest of the gang still provide a good family dynamic that can be fun but also has a darker atmosphere beneath. The complexity that made Jormungand interesting in the first place is still there.
The show's action is still strong, too - though the inconsistency is still there to some degree as well, particularly if you judge against the first season episodes too. There's some great moments in this (in particular, an early highlight with snipers Lutz and Lehm making some very cool, very fast shots), but things just don't always line up quite right if you look between the episodes or between the seasons. In particular, Valmet is almost criminally underused in Perfect Order after providing some of the standout action sequences in the first season - I can't think of one awesome Valmet fight scene in Perfect Order, and I can think of several back in the first season. Perfect Order seems to largely give us "sit there shooting a rifle" Valmet rather than "John Woo hero" Valmet. There are some cool action sequences - the aforementioned sniper bits, some cool car chases, and some tense showdowns with explosives - but nothing quite as standout as the best of the first season.
The focus of the show has changed this season, though, with the arms trade aspects taking a bit of a backseat - still present, but not as much of a focus - to a few other factors of varying levels of interest. First up, we have a law enforcement plan to try to control Koko's actions in their favor. Second, we've got some sort of secret project that Koko is planning that even her crew doesn't know about. And third, we've got exploring the ever-loving heck out of the backstories of almost every member of Koko's crew.
Sadly...none of those bear particularly great fruit over the course of the season. The law enforcement plot kind of derails early on, and while it provides a few powerful early moments, it feels like something that would've been much better if it were stretched out across the season instead of being more focused in the early part. The secret project...I'll get to. The backstories, though...those are a huge problem.
It's strange - the first season has flashbacks too, but it handles them much more artistically and blends them much better with the rest of the show...and takes less time, too. The first season will handle flashbacks with a quick look back, usually to a single moment in the character's past, with only Jonah (one of the two main characters) getting a full episode really totally devoted to where he came from - and it produces those flashbacks better, showing rather than telling.
Perfect Order is apparently from the "tell, don't show" school of thought. Most flashbacks are heavily narrated, and most flashbacks go into a frankly unnecessary level of detail about the past - they don't show you just the events that drive the present, as Valmet and Jonah's respective flashbacks did in Season 1. Instead, Perfect Order's flashbacks usually show quite a bit more, and spend much more time than they need to spend. There's entire episodes that are almost entirely flashback based, and there's narration going on over the top of them for most of their run.
It's weird how the show handles that narration, too - there's a couple cases where it makes sense, in that a character actually is telling the story to the others, but there are other cases where the narrating character clearly isn't telling the story to anyone...and cases where the narrating character isn't even one of the characters we generally follow. It's not necessarily wrong - I mean, Jonah is used as a brief narrator in the opening of Season 1 just to intro the show concept, and that works fine - but it's jarring how it happens here, particularly when I'm listening to a character that's not even a member of Koko's group explain, in detail, his involvement behind the scenes in a whole lot of stuff I'm not even sure I'm supposed to care about.
It just saps a lot of momentum from the show, and Perfect Order's plots suffer for it. Where season 1 has a number of very complicated episodes involving Koko and her crew having to work their way through with careful strategy, diplomacy, and perfectly applied force, Perfect Order spends more time in the past and just doesn't have that much time to develop good conflicts in the present. They don't quite fall flat, and there are some good moments, but everything feels much more simplistic than in the first season.
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| No extra points for pointing out how boring your own flashbacks are, show. |
Again, that's partially season 1's fault, but still - it's a really jarring and sudden shift.
There are some weird elements with some recurring characters, too - some odd choices to bring back characters to basically do exactly nothing...even one group of former rivals that shows up for a surprisingly long time in an episode to basically declare, in a manner which takes far too much time, that they're retiring. There's some amusing stuff in the bit, but really, it adds nothing.
Jormungand: Perfect Order kind of specializes in wasting the viewer's time like that. It's not that it lacks entertainment value - most of the "useless" sequences are still actually fun to watch...it's just that when you look back afterwards, there's a lot in the show that really doesn't add anything to the overall tale, doesn't add to characterization of any of the characters we're following, doesn't build any tension, and doesn't serve to resolve anything we really cared about. The bits of added characterization we do get could have been done in a much shorter time and much more organically...overall, it just feels like there's a much clumsier hand overseeing the show this time around, enough that I wonder if the writing team or director changed. It feels like an entirely different style of telling its story.
It also earns its TV-MA rating, but not in the best ways. There's more sexual content than in the first season, and in far more direct and blatant a manner, including a considerable amount of pretty pointless nudity. It's still not like that's the show's focus by any means, but there are points where it gets somewhat uncomfortable, and not in a good way - not in any way that's helpful to the show at all. There's one scene late in the show, in particular, that involves Jonah. Nothing happens, and in no way does the show imply anything happens, but it's still a completely unnecessary scene that absolutely doesn't need to be part of the show. The point of the scene is pretty clear - it's supposed to make us feel a little off balance, and make us doubt the show's status quo a bit - but its purpose could've been fulfilled equally well in a different manner and in a different setting.
But my largest problem with Perfect Order has to be with its ending. I'm going to avoid spoilers here, and save a deeper analysis for a later post, but here's the gist of my problems: The show has a late twist that seems to mean a whole lot...but turns out to mean absolutely nothing. There's a major can of worms opened up that turns out to be empty. It's a deeply unsatisfying ending that squanders a dramatic moment that the entire show was actually building towards, hurts my perception of the rest of the show to that point, skips a surprising amount of time in the lead-up and probably wastes a full couple seasons worth of further events, and is...not really told all that well besides.
Jormungand: Perfect Order can still be fun to watch...but it isn't remotely up to par with the first season. It just can't get itself moving - it keeps getting in its own way, slowing itself down, and focusing on details that really aren't as important as the stuff that falls by the wayside. Part of the reason the first season was successful was that it nicely managed to combine separate elements into a cohesive whole, making a show that, while flawed, presented a united front - the characters, the diplomacy, the action, the philosophy, all of it joined together and furthered one story. Perfect Order, on the other hand, feels chopped into pieces. It feels like there are walls between the different parts of the show - obvious breaks where the show is now serving this purpose or that purpose - rather than the generally graceful blending of the first season.
If you watched, and liked, the first season, my advice to you is to pretend that's where the show ended. Pretend that the second part of "Hill of Doom," the ending episode of season 1, is the show's finale. Ignore any little bits in "Hill of Doom" or previous episodes that suggest otherwise, and make yourself satisfied with it.
Otherwise...well, I hope you can deal with this season better than I could. For me, this really damaged Jormungand, enough that it's going to be hard to go back and watch the parts of the show that I liked. I'm not going to go as far as to say it ruins things. I don't think a bad ending should invalidate anything good a show does. But...the ending, combined with the rest of season 2's performance, does change how I think about things, and not in a good way. For all that there were parts I enjoyed in Perfect Order, I think I'd prefer that I hadn't watched it - I think I'd enjoy looking back as season 1 more if I hadn't.
Perhaps you'll find it different...but if you enjoyed season 1, approach this one with caution.
Dubbed or Subbed?: One thing that didn't decline is the quality of the audio production. As with Season 1, the subtitle work and the dubbing are both of great quality, and you won't find me complaining about either. My preferred style is still dubbed with this show, for the same reason as before - hearing the various accents of the characters around the world helps emphasize the global nature of Koko's journey.
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