Teresa Reviews The Mirror Crack’d II (2018)

Teresa reviews The Mirror Crack’d II (2018), the second four-episode arc in Ms. Ma: Nemesis, and is curious which way the story is going

(c)2024 by Teresa Peschel

Agatha adjacent: 3 ½ asthma inhalers

After the previous changes to Mirror, we’ve suddenly returned to the source material.

Quality of episodes: 4 asthma inhalers

The tension ratchets up another notch when Ms. Ma’s husband arrives and more of the past is revealed.

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

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

I still can’t decide if Lee Jung-Hee is guilty of murdering Bae Hee-Jae. The more I see of her, the less I like her and the more she becomes Marina Gregg. She’s a liar. She told Ms. Ma one thing and Inspector Han the opposite. He, being an experienced cop, told his sidekick later that she lied to him about what happened at the reservoir that rainy night when she might have witnessed a murder. A flashback tells us he’s right. Lee Jung-Hee lied. She might not have seen the murder per se, but she saw someone carrying a dead child into the woods, drop the girl’s backpack (later proved to be Min-Seo’s), dump the girl’s body on the ground, and bash in her head with a rock.

Why did Lee Jung-Hee lie? We don’t know yet. Ms. Ma’s reworking of The Mirror Crack’d has already taken up eight episodes, and they’re not finished yet. But I still don’t see how she could have murdered Bae Hee-Jae with a poisoned cocktail because she’s critical to Ms. Ma’s own redemption story. Or maybe not! This being Korean TV, they might not bother with the conventions of American story-telling such as not killing off major characters who hold critical pieces of information regarding who carried that girl’s body into the woods.

Lee Jung-Hee is a complicated woman. She secluded herself from the world for nine years because of what she saw in the woods. And, let’s not forget what she did to her husband, the “nation’s director” (love the Korean phrasing) Sung Jae-Duk and their adopted daughter.

Yep, Lee Jung-Hee is indeed Marina Gregg. She and her husband adopted a 13-year-old girl, Mi-Ye, from an orphanage because they had no children of their own. They were happy for months. But! Sung Jae-Duk confessed to Ms. Ma (she’d already heard the story from Lee Jung-Hee’s ambitious rival) that when Lee Jung-Hee became unexpectedly pregnant, she tossed their new daughter aside like a used tissue and lied to him about what she’d done. He was furious. They couldn’t find Mi-Ye; she didn’t return to the orphanage, the only home she’d known until her adoption into what she thought was her forever home. But I have to wonder how hard Sung Jae-Duk looked for a missing 13-year-old girl.

Hearing this story made me wonder what else Lee Jung-Hee lied about and what other secrets she’s hiding, besides her porn videos. Witnessing a murder of a girl, not much older than the one she adopted and then tossed aside, doesn’t sound like a good enough reason to hide for nine years. There might, might be something else, based on her hints to Sung Jae-Duk.

We’ll find out.

We also saw more of Ms. Ma’s former husband. Jang Cheol-Min is behaving suspiciously. He’s making phone calls to someone. He wanted to talk to Lee Jung-Hee about what she saw up at the reservoir, but when he met Eun-Ji, serving drinks at the party for the film’s investors, he froze.

But it wasn’t her that made him freeze. He spotted her hair ornament, which we first saw near the end of episode 12. It’s a cute little black and white pair of teddy bear heads, a bigger one and a littler one. Think big sister and little sister. And, very suspiciously, that exact same barrette was in the hair of the murdered girl. Did Lee Jung-Hee see this barrette too, that rainy night?

Remember what I said about a classic Agatha trope of smashing someone’s face to prevent identification? That murdered girl in the woods may not be Ms. Ma’s daughter, Min-Seo. She may be someone else’s missing daughter. Someone who’s not important enough to get police attention. Someone like Nora Broad, the girl that Clotilde Bradbury-Scott murdered to cover up her murder of Verity Hunt. No one outside Nora’s family cared when she went missing. Did anyone care when this mysterious young girl went missing?

Maybe Eun-Ji cares very much. We don’t know who she really is, anymore than we know what Lee Jung-Hee is hiding under her pleasant mask. Nor, at this point, do we know what happened to Mi-Ye or how closely she parallels Margo Bence from the novel. It could be the girl photographer who’s been shadowing Lee Jung-Hee at events. It’s unlikely she was the murdered girl because the timing doesn’t seem to work. On the other hand, no one knows what happened to her. When Lee Jung-Hee told Mi-Ye to leave, she vanished.

But if the murdered girl isn’t Min-Seo, then why was her body identified as such? For the same reason Verity Hunt was IDed by Clotilde and, in The Body in the Library, why Josie Turner claimed that body was her dead cousin, Ruby Keene. They needed to protect themselves and hide the truth. Who identified Min-Seo? If you watch the scene carefully, Ms. Ma never looks directly at her daughter’s body, never moves her hair (with the teddy bear barrette!) aside to see her daughter’s smashed-in face. She’s distraught, in tears, on the verge of breaking down, keeping her face buried in her husband’s strong shoulders. She trusts him to do that horrible task of identifying Min-Seo’s body.

Which he does.

He’s the agonized father and the police have no reason to doubt him. They’re not suspicious enough of everyone to say “trust but verify.” They took his word for it and didn’t waste resources or time on fingerprints, DNA, or confirming the identity via dental records. They trusted, but they didn’t verify.

Someone else who doesn’t trust Ms. Ma is Jang Il-Koo, a dying gangster boss who also lives in Rainbow Village. Ko Mal-Koo is his caretaker, gardener, and dogsbody. It turns out that Jang Il-Koo knows director Sung Jae Duk from years ago which is why he agrees to Ko Mal-Koo becoming Lee Jung-Hee’s bodyguard.

Jang Il-Koo also met the real Ms. Ma, reclusive novelist, years ago when she interviewed him. He remembers a deeply unpleasant woman and the woman standing in front of him, claiming to be her, is not her. He pointed this out to Ms. Ma but so far, isn’t going to reveal that she stole someone else’s identity. She, Eun-Ji, and Woo-Joon make Ko Mal-Koo happy. But what happens when that’s no longer true?

Someone else unhappy with Ms. Ma is Park Myung-Hee (Ella Zielinksy). She’s Sung Jae Duk’s assistant director and rapidly becoming a producer in her own right. It’s clear how much she dislikes her boss’s wife. She reveals to Ms. Ma that she knows who poisoned Lee Jung-Hee’s wine glass but she won’t tell her. She’s the one who made anonymous phone calls to people connected to the poisoning and, straight from the novel, despite disguising her voice, she can still be identified by her cough.

And right on cue, she’s poisoned by her own asthma inhaler. We’ll find out who did it next time!