Teresa Reviews The Kidnapped Japanese Consul (2022)

Teresa reviews The Kidnapped Japanese Consul,” the Chinese “Checkmate” TV series version of “The Kidnapped Prime Minister” and found it difficult to follow the stripped-down version of the short story.

(c)2023 by Teresa Peschel

Source: Ebay listing

Fidelity to text: 3 kidnappers

The story was stripped to its essence while adding extra pressure on Situ Yan to save the day.

Quality of movie: 3 kidnappers

The subtitles were awful. I had to rewatch large chunks to understand what was going on. Worse, it left too many unanswered questions about the kidnappers.

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

Also, follow Teresa’s discussion of these movie on her podcast.

“The Kidnapped Prime Minister” is the second short story Checkmate has had its way with. “The Nemean Lion” — buried inside The Case of the Haunted Girls’ School — was the first, although that’s not acknowledged anywhere. Because it’s a short story, I didn’t expect a complicated, lengthy rewrite but they could have included some more detail. Sadly, this version is so stripped down that you’re left wondering why Wang Chaowei betrayed his boss, a motive that was made clear in Agatha’s original short story and in the Poirot episode.

Maybe this will become clear in the remaining episodes of Checkmate? All four of them, where they adapt Three Act Tragedy and Curtain, squeezing them into submission?

I don’t know how that’s going to work, seeing as Checkmate likes leisurely storytelling with plenty of extraneous detail and added, unneeded complexities. They’ve already used up 20 of their 24 episodes covering five novels and this short story.

Wait. Back up. Who is Wang Chaowei? Glad you asked. He’s the Chinese equivalent of Captain Daniels, betrayer of the Prime Minister because of family and political reasons. Here, though, you’re left very unsure of motives.

The original short story’s been stripped down to bone. The Japanese consul has vanished in Harbin. General Lu (a loose amalgamation of Lord Estair and Mr. Dodge) is desperate to find him to avert a diplomatic crisis. So, to get Situ Yan to cooperate he doesn’t just ask. He threatens Luo Shaochuan and Zhou Mowan with death by ticking time bomb if Situ Yan doesn’t cooperate and solve the case. It’s incentive and demonstrates that General Lu — who knows Luo Shaochuan — doesn’t know anything about Situ Yan. He would have been happy to save China from a diplomatic crisis.

Mr. Kondogawa is the important government official in this version. Mysteriously, the Chinese wiki lists another name for him: Jin Tengchuan. This might be the imposter who took Kondogawa’s place under a mask of gauze and whom we never meet. But it wasn’t spelled out. As near as I could tell, Kondogawa was targeted because someone wants war between Japan and China but he doesn’t.

That someone is Wang Chaowei, his translator. But he’s not working alone.

He’s most definitely not working in cahoots with Jin Yanping, the chauffeur (O’Murphy in the short story). That unfortunate low-level staffer does what he’s told, steers the limousine to the fatal rendezvous point, gets dragged off and kidnapped, and then, at the climax, is shot to death before he can be rescued and tell what he knows. He suffers the traditional fate of redshirts and NPCs everywhere: He doesn’t matter.

You’ll see a cluster of people at the climax surrounding the kidnapped consul and chauffeur and dragging them to some other hideout. None of them are identified, despite having critical roles to play in the kidnapping’s planning and execution.

Will we see them again as we learn more about the overall story arc about saving China? I kind of doubt it, having now seen what passes for justice in the Republic of China era. The lucky kidnappers and conspirators will die a quick death by ricin instead of a slow, agonizing one via torture by the state to extract every possible morsel of information, true or not.

I’m not guessing much when I say this. One of the oddities of Checkmate is that a suspiciously large group of people Situ Yan runs across during his investigations die by suicide. It starts almost right away: the university student, Bai Lu, committed suicide as soon as she got off the train in Harbin after Situ Yan solved the case onboard the Orient Express. Is her sudden, unexpected, and tragic death connected to the larger arc? Who knows?

I believe there was a suicide in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd sequence, along with The Haunted Girls’ School. The banker, Yu Daren, behind the murders in One, Two, Buckle My Shoe died while in police custody of ricin poisoning as did Lawyer Lin Yuan Pu from Five Little Pigs. There are probably others, lost in bad subtitling and underwritten stories.

What we do learn from the police officer who investigated Zhou Zhe’s death (in Five Little Pigs) is that he’s heard the word “Oracle” in connection with a Japanese spy ring. He won’t say anything else, probably fearing sudden death caused by ricin added to his lunch.

Does the policeman’s information tie into the kidnapping of the Japanese consul? Yes, because — and I had to watch it twice — Mr. Kondogawa doesn’t blame Situ Yan or the Chinese government for the poor security that allowed him to be kidnapped. He knew it was an inside job. He’d been betrayed by more than one traitor, too. His translator, Wang Chaowei, had to have had more help than his disaffected aunt in Fengtian and some neighbors. The consul’s kidnapping wouldn’t just cause a diplomatic incident. It would undermine peaceful relations between Japan and China.

Keep in mind that China had been under pressure from Japan for years, as well as Russia. It makes for complicated reading from multiple sources but you can sum it up like this: The Chinese wanted to control their own destiny and their own lands. Their two closest neighbors, Japan and Russia, wanted access to both land and rich resources and didn’t care how the Chinese felt about it. Wars were fought, big and little. The Japanese already had footholds in China as a result of fighting with the allies against Germany in WWI and they wanted more.

Japan was ruled by an increasingly militaristic and aggressive government wanting to conquer all their neighbors. At the same time, the Chinese government was riven by internal conflict between regional warlords, all of them vying to become the next emperor. The last thing the government needed was more trouble with Japan.

The logic is easy. If you were a conquest-minded and patriotic Japanese citizen, causing a diplomatic incident with China would help lead to the desired outcome: war.

Fortunately, Situ Yan can think under pressure. He knows the overall political situation; every educated person in China did. He doesn’t want his best friend and the woman he’s coming to love die. He recognizes how high the stakes are.

His solution, presented to General Lu, is one of pure logic and derived using only the information at hand and his little gray cells. Poirot would approve.

The chauffeur has vanished. The translator and the consul have also vanished. Who could tell the chauffeur where to drive without exciting concern? The translator. Not the consul, who speaks poor Chinese. Did anyone see the face of the consul after the shooting incident? No. Was the consul treated at any nearby hospital for glass shrapnel in the face as would be expected by having a shotgun blast through the car windows at close range? No. Does the chauffeur have close family in Fengtian? No. Does the translator have close family in Fengtian? Yes.

Thus, the logical conclusion. The translator, Wang Chaowei must be involved, and so it proves. But he’s disappeared along with the fake Japanese consul.

The real Japanese consul is rescued in the nick of time and the crisis is averted. For now. The larger crisis, the one that Situ Yan has come to believe connects all the cases he’s investigated since the beginning, is waiting for him.