Jormungand: Perfect Order, as I noted back in my review, partially concerns a secret plan that Koko has that not even the members of her crew know about. As we come to the end of the show, she starts putting the last parts in place...and her uncharacteristic moves make Jonah question just what she's up to. He's slow to investigate, clearly not even sure it's something he wants to do in the first place, as he's come to befriend Koko on some level despite who she is and what she does...but he wants to know all the same. Koko promises to tell him when she's ready...and one day, she does, explaining a plan to end war, despite being an arms dealer.
I'm not going to go into the details of the plan. I want to just discuss it in broad story terms, because that's where the crux of my problem lies. It doesn't really matter what I think of the details of the plan, so much, or how it would work. It isn't about me poking holes in details. What matters is the impact it has on the story, and the impact the story has on it.
While the rest of the group agrees with Koko, Jonah, for what's really the first time, disagrees with her personally. He's always been against weapons dealers writ large, but he's been able to deal with Koko, with a friendship or mentorship sort of relationship letting him push his worries back to some extent. But now, he can't push those aside anymore. He realizes Koko's plan is going to get people killed - a lot of people - and he can't condone that, even for the goal of ending war. He disagrees with her, vehemently, going so far as to pull a gun on her.
Koko argues with him, and for the first time on the show, she actively mocks his arguments. She's always been respectful of his opinion, even when she might not agree - her tone has always been one of encouraging him to find his way and figure out what he thinks. She's always encouraged him to express what he thinks, and this is the first time we've seen her so strongly opposed to it that she gets angry. She's sure she's right, so sure that even Jonah feels the brunt of her anger.
To be fair to her, he did pull a gun, but...Koko has had guns pulled on her by all sorts of people, and this is the only time we see her lose her cool. It doesn't feel like it's the gun. It's the questioning of this particular plan.
Koko argues in favor of her plan, and Jonah just listens, dropping his gun and clearly unsure what to think at all. Finally, Koko asks him once more to go with her, to accept the cost.
He can't, and he sadly says goodbye and escapes, leaving a truly shocked Koko in his wake.
It's one of the show's most powerful moments...honestly, scratch that. It is by far the most powerful moment in the entirety of Jormungand, either season. No matter what happened, Jonah would always stand by and protect Koko, despite everything she represented and despite everyone she was linked to. No matter what, he'd listen and learn from her and from the rest of the group.
Jormungand, for all its darkness, was built around a familial bond between Jonah and Koko and the others. This moment tears a hole in that bond. Jonah has come to treasure it, but despite that, he's willing to leave it because he cannot agree to what Koko has planned.
Actually, I would almost have been fine if that was where the show ended. Jonah breaks with the group, leaves, and goes to find his own way in life, with us always wondering whether that changed Koko's mind or not. Fade to black. It'd be a hard ending, but...it'd feel very true to the show's conflict - to Jonah's internal contradiction between his travel with Koko and his hatred of weapons and those who deal in them. I don't know if I'd feel totally satisfied, but it would feel legitimate.
But that isn't where it ends. We get two more episodes. Jonah goes to work for a while with Koko's brother Kasper, with whom he also has a complicated relationship - Kasper being basically the reason he hates arms dealers in the first place, as he sold the weapons that killed Jonah's family and led to him being a child soldier, but also the reason he came to work for Koko and the man who provided a good home for other children Jonah had been trying to care for while serving as a soldier.
This...would actually be a fascinating setup for a third season - Jonah traveling not with Koko, but with Kasper, seeing a different take on the arms trade and a different set of people, while Koko wrestled with her project and how to deal with Jonah's desertion. But rather than that, it's mostly skipped through - we get little glimpses of their activity in the interim, with Koko proving her power in a more limited fashion to one of her old adversaries, and Jonah working for Kasper and trying to adjust, but we don't see much of what happens.
We jump two years ahead, and Kasper (and therefore Jonah) ends up guarding Koko during the last stage of setup for her plan. He has a discussion with her about how the world has gone further down the tubes and what it means for the arms trade - and what her plan will mean for it as well. He has a different take on things than her. Kasper notes that he's pretty sure her plan will end up good for his business, thus why he's helping. Jonah does his job there, but afterwards, leaves Kasper too. Still not knowing what to think, he hurls one of his guns from the top of a cliff, but can't quite throw away the other.
Then he goes back to Koko and her group, says hi to everybody, and joins up again, watching while Koko activates the plan she told him about with, so far as I could tell, absolutely no modifications whatsoever.
The end.
So...here's my problem.
We had an amazing, dramatic moment in which Jonah split with Koko, for the first and only time on the show. Something should have come of that. Instead...the show ends with him just right back with the group and them about to do the exact same thing that he was worried about in the first place. It's not like we really see him slowly changing his opinion or anything...that would at least be something. It's not even clear his opinion has changed - it's more that he can't choose, so he surrenders.
We spend two episodes on...well...not much. Maybe it'd be different if we focused entirely on Jonah during those two episodes - if the entire thing was about him and what he learned over the course of his two years away from Koko that made him turn around and agree with her...but it isn't. We spend more time on Koko and the generally ineffective people that were investigating her, or sometimes on Koko conversing with Kasper. Meanwhile, the one person who objects to her plan just kind of sits by the wayside, and then comes back without us really being able to understand why.
He goes from being absolutely opposed to her plan, enough that he draws a gun on a friend and flees the closest thing he has to a family, to just deciding, "eh, guess I'll go back now." It reduces a powerful emotional moment to a childish temper tantrum. It's just a regular old case of the kid getting annoyed with the parents and "running away from home," only to come back for dinner.
There's a number of ways this could've worked well. What I was hoping would happen was that Jonah's leaving would shock Koko into going with a lower scale or more targeted version of it (which is, judging from other events on the show, entirely possible) that would still accomplish the goal. It feels like that could've been the way things would go - that Jonah could come back in the end and either Koko would've already come up with a moderated plan, or he could help her reach one, and we could end up with a pretty solidly happy ending that way. It didn't feel outside the realms of possibility and I'm shocked that - unless I drastically missed something - that wasn't what we got. When Jonah leaves, Koko is clearly tremendously shocked...but the shock seems to subside pretty darn quickly. It really feels like more could've been done with that, and this would be the ending that would give the most dramatic moment on the show the most meaning.
Otherwise...they really, honestly could've gone with Jonah staying away for good - with him not being willing to fight against Koko's plan, but leaving that life behind and finding a normal life for the first time. That's suggested in his interactions as he leaves Kasper, but the show doesn't go that way either.
Another possibility, though one I'd hate, is for him to come back and fight. To decide to actively oppose her. Honestly, though...I'd be unhappy with that as an ending too. For one, it trivializes his relationship with Koko and the rest of his friends, making them just "the enemy," and that's not right. Jonah's arc was about becoming more than violence - learning to be a complete person.
That's another reason I like the "moderate the plan" ending concept - it completes that transition. Jonah comes back and uses diplomacy - finally able to express himself. It'd be the culmination of his development as a character and of what Koko herself wanted for him. She'd always encouraged him to express his views...wouldn't it make sense for the end of the tale to be that he does?
There are probably dozens of ways that the story could've ended, some better than others. Maybe you agree with me, maybe you don't. That's fine. I just...felt like the way this was handled squandered a storytelling opportunity, and stopped some character arcs that I had really enjoyed. For me, the ending of Jormungand really didn't work, and I felt like it wasn't an adequate wrap to the stories of some complicated characters. The way it is written, it's just another instance of Koko speaking and Jonah being uncertain what to think but going along with it in the end...and that's just where they'd been multiple other times on the show. It would've been nice for this to be something different. Instead...it was kind of the same thing, just with a delay.
That's my problem, really...that's what hurts Jormungand. It's an ending that comes after two episodes that suggest things are changing, but instead leaves them where they were. It walks right up to the edge of something fascinating and then just stops there...and finally steps back away, going back to the path it had been walking before. It's an unsatisfying ending to a pretty decent show. It doesn't ruin the show overall...but it does nothing to help it, and in removing the power of one of the show's greatest moments, it definitely dampens the overall impact of the show.
Your opinion may vary - and if you watch and enjoy Jormungand, I hope it does, so for you, things can end on a good note! For me, it just wasn't right.
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