Happy Halloween! *Bang* You’re dead.
Summary: When a shadowy Japanese company starts to interfere with Kaspar’s business dealing in South-East Asia, he decides to teach them a lesson and teams up with Koko to do so. Kaspar sends the company a message by having one of their members killed, thus baiting them into action. When Kaspar finally meets up with Koko, he is obliged to spend some time with Jonah showing him that he had kept his word, and that the three children that Jonah had saved were living healthy, happy lives. The episode ends with Kaspar asking Tojo, one of Koko’s men who had worked for the Japanese military, what he knows about a man named Hinoki Yousuke.
Impressions: Another quiet episode after last weeks madness. Well, relatively quiet. About as quiet as you can expect an episode of Jormungand to be. I’d say about 45-50% of this episode was flashbacks anyway, to the time when Kaspar and Jonah first met, and how Jonah came to work for Koko, so there wasn’t really anything new there. Yup, Kaspar, Chiquita, and all the rest are back this week, starting the episode by taunting me with delicious looking food toasting R’s heroic sacrifice (I’m pretty sure they still don’t know he was a spy) and talking about the recent trouble Kaspar has been having making any business deals. It’s all thanks to a mysterious Japanese company that no one seems to know anything about. If you think that this sounds like the next target that’ll get taken out by the combined forces of the Hekmatyar siblings, then you’d be correct. We’ve even seen who I think is one of their agents, in the weird girl with the cat smile, who I’m sure will be back next episode. You don’t have a creep-tastic smile like that and then have no role to play in larger events.
Anyway, Kaspar orders his team to take out the son of some military general, as a way of alerting this company that he’s on to them and that they’d better watch out. This is the only real action part of the episode, with everyone breaking in wearing skeleton masks (I really want one…), killing the guy and his friends who were staying with him, and then setting up the house to make it look like a robbery. If anything it reinforces one thing, and that is that you don’t really want to fuck with either Kaspar or Koko.
Jormungand has really been tugging at the good ol’ heart strings lately, and this episode also gives us some rather touching moments. Kaspar and Jonah are an odd couple, to put it mildly, and seeing them spend any time together is awkward and almost cringe worthy. The look on Jonah’s face when he sees that the kids are happy and living a good life is beautiful. It’s one of the rare times when you see the light come back into his usually dead eyes. I can understand that he didn’t want to intrude on them by actually getting out of the car, since the world he now lives in and the world they inhabit are so different, and he probably didn’t want to remind them of a time that they’d surely rather forget by tainting their lives now. Seeing that Kaspar had been true to his words makes Jonah trust him just a tiny bit.
For my part (and maybe this is because I’m a very cynical person), I was expecting the rug to be pulled out from underneath me the whole time, as you say. I was sure that it would turn out that the whole “going to school, happy life etc.” would be a ruse of some sort and that they’d actually be living in some horrible slave dungeon or something along those lines, and that Kaspar was only putting on an act to get Jonah to trust him. I still feel like that’s something that could be happening. I don’t want that to be the case, but it’s hard to judge Kaspar’s true character well enough to tell if he’d be willing to go that far to earn the trust of one child solider (maybe in order to get at his sister?) So I was pretty surprised when, at least from this episode, it looks like Kaspar did in fact keep up his end of the bargain.
This episode was again setting us up for bigger and better things, and this Hinoki Yousuke figure looks like he’ll be the next bigger target that the Hekmatyar’s will be going after. I’ll be interested to see how Koko and her brother work together, as well as Chiquita and Lehm, and I want to see more of Jonah and Kaspar’s awkward fun times. I have no idea what’s even going to happen next episode, so I’ll just let myself be surprised. Because you know it’ll be good.
Final Thought: Let’s just take a minute to really imagine the “fun” that Koko had when they arrived in Japan. Imagine Koko, with one stone faced kid in tow, surrounded by her scary-looking team, going to a bunch of amusement parks and riding on things like: A ferris wheel. Or a roller coaster Or a carousel. Just picture it in your mind. Imagine if it was one of those rides that takes your picture, like at Splash Mountain. Everyone would just be siting there, looking bored, except Koko (and maybe Lutz), who’d both be screaming their heads off at the fun they were having. And if that isn’t the funniest thing ever, then I just don’t even know.