Teresa Reviews Nemesis II (2018)

(Ms. Ma: Nemesis episodes 29-32)

(c)2024 by Teresa Peschel

Agatha adjacent: 3 guns

Loose ends, but also anyone can be a victim, anyone can be a killer, no one is above suspicion, and conspiracies lurk in the shadows.

Quality of episodes: 4½ guns

Those loose ends and dropped plot threads made me want another episode but wow!

Read more of Teresa’s Agatha Christie movie reviews at Peschel Press.

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Ms. Ma: Nemesis doesn’t merely incorporate five Miss Marple novels into one big arc. It’s loaded with Agatha’s classic tropes.

Take the hidden couple whose machinations nearly lead to the murder of our heroine along with plenty of other murders. I refer to Ms. Ma’s ex-husband, Jang Chul-Min, and his complicated relationship with Chief Prosecutor Yang Mi-Hee. Are they lovers? They might have been, once, but Korean TV wasn’t going to go there so there’s only the merest hint. Their current relationship is along the lines of boss and employee or master and slave. Prosecutor Yang is his boss yet in the final set of four episodes we learn that she — powerful, ruthless, clever, and evil — isn’t the big boss. Not at all. To the big boss, whom we never see clearly, Prosecutor Yang is just another pawn with delusions of adequacy.

Which leads us to another favorite Agatha trope hidden in plain sight, and I almost missed it, despite the name giving it away!

Let me explain. In her spy thrillers, Agatha favored vast conspiracies that rooked the public, stole billions, and sequestered power in the hands of the deserving elite instead of the rabble. A global elite if you will, who fly above the rest of us in private jets and make the rules for peasants to obey. Her conspiracies spanned the globe, beginning in 1922 when she wrote The Secret Adversary where Tommy and Tuppence had to save England from a mix of Bolsheviks, revolutionaries, and corrupt government officials. In 1924, in The Man in the Brown Suit, Anne Beddingfeld ran afoul of a criminal conspiracy stretching from England to South Africa, with a hidden corrupt government official masterminding it. In 1927, Agatha and brother-in-law Campbell Christie cobbled 12 short stories into another tale of worldwide corruption and conspiracy in The Big Four. She didn’t stop mining this vein until 1970 with Passenger to Frankfurt.

Her spy thrillers were normally standalones, but not always. Poirot got involved a few times. So did Miss Marple. Recall At Bertram’s Hotel (1965). The hotel is a cover for a criminal gang involved in theft on a grand scale while hiding behind a respectable façade.

And that’s the clue I nearly missed. The name of the conspiracy that Prosecutor Yang belongs to, launders illicit money for, prosecuted corporations to get them to knuckle under, why she needed Ms. Ma’s husband to take over Korea Corp, consorts with gangsters, and murders little girls for, is named Bertram.

Is the idea of vast political corruption, ties to mobsters, and widespread bribery among highly-placed and respectable Korean businessmen, judges, lawyers, and congressional representatives farfetched? It’s not! Korea has endured political and financial scandals galore for decades. The Korean audience for Ms. Ma must have been nodding their heads in recognition as the scheme was unveiled.

Sadly, we never learn how Prosecutor Yang was recruited, other than guessing that she, devious and ambitious, was spotted early on as being corruptible. She has no qualms hiring the thugs she’s supposed to prosecute to kidnap children and murder high-profile witnesses. Her reach extends to prison-yard killings, leading me to wonder if she came from a gangster family and covered it up. She’s ruthless enough to taunt Jang Chul-Min that she should have chosen his wife as her partner in crime instead of him.

Jang Chul-Min fits another Agatha trope: he’s a weak man, greedy, and not too bright, who’ll never measure up to the strong, clever women around him. He knows it, he resents it, but he’s too spineless to do anything about it, even when it ends in the strangulation of his beloved daughter, Min-Seo.

Yes, the show went there and handled it beautifully. It felt intensely realistic that Ms. Ma had trouble accepting her husband was intimately involved in their daughter’s kidnapping and presumed death. When she learned from Eun-Ji that the dead child was Eun-Ji’s sister, she was … relieved. It meant there was a chance Min-Seo was still alive, that her husband who hated her would never have harmed their daughter.

Which he didn’t, yet he was foolish enough to not understand Min-Seo had to die to conceal the conspiracy. You can guess who got her hands bloody. This led to another nice callback to Nemesis. Where is the body of Verity Hunt? In the garden under a shroud of white Polygonum. Where is the body of Min-Seo? In the garden under a shroud of white chrysanthemums, which symbolize grief in Asian culture. Like Clotilde Bradbury-Scott, Jang Chul-Min visits her grave to mourn his foolish determination to have everything he wants without paying the price.

Similarly, Eun-Ji (a very smart girl!) points out Ms. Ma’s own refusal to face the truth. The news of Ms. Ma’s escape from the prison asylum made every media outlet in Korea. If Min-Seo was alive, she’d be 19 and old enough to visit the police and state that her mother didn’t kill her, thank you very much. But she didn’t. She had to be dead.

Our blind gang boss gets his moment to shine too, providing not just safety to Ms. Ma and Eun-Ji, but a vital clue. He knows detectives, particularly ones like Inspector Han. They’re like dogs who refuse to give up the hunt. They also, because they don’t trust anyone, make backups of their evidence. That flash drive is what you saw Inspector Han give to Choi Woo-Joon seconds before they were run over by gangsters hired by Prosecutor Yang. The boy survived even though Han did not.

Inspector Han’s faith in his sidekick, Detective Cheon Do-Soo is rewarded. He investigates further, following his dead boss’ footsteps. Detective Cheon is having trouble accepting that an important prosecutor would be a criminal, but he slowly, slowly comes to realize it’s true. He proves his loyalty after Prosecutor Yang confronts Ms. Ma and Eun-Ji. In the ensuing fight to the death, Ms. Ma smashes a vase into her face, like Yang had smashed in Eun-Ji’s sister’s face. But it’s a very close call. Ms. Ma and Eun-Ji escape because Detective Cheon rearranges the crime scene to protect them.

Proving that Ms. Ma would have been a far better choice for Bertram, she and Eun-Ji release their copy of the flash drive to every media outlet in Korea. The ensuing firestorm of scandal ensures she can disappear again, but she’s no longer alone. She’s got a found family. Ko Mal-Koo, who’d like more of her and fanfiction writers need to write that up; Eun-Ji who’s become her niece, and her new son, Choi Woo-Joon. I’ll assume that Jang Il-Koo, grandfather gangster, is there too.

This all worked, despite dangling plot threads tying Deputy Bae Do-Hwan to Chief Inspector Park (what was that about?) and so much unfinished business with the adaptations of A Murder Is Announced and The Body in the Library.

Ms. Ma: Nemesis is absolutely worth your time. You’ll watch it twice.