Detection Is Best Served Cold in MS. MA, NEMESIS (2018)

Originally posted May 29, 2024.

“One of my names,” she said, “is Nemesis.”

“Nemesis? And what does that mean?”

“I think you know,” said Miss Marple. “You are a very well educated woman. Nemesis is long delayed sometimes, but it comes in the end.”

— Nemesis, by Agatha Christie

When my wife gets home from work, we like to unwind with vaguely investigative popcorn shows. The latest that we’ve finished is Ms. Ma, Nemesis (Miseu Ma: Boksuui Yeosin) (2018), a Korean thriller-mystery serial created by Hong Chang-wook with writer Park Jin-woo,that loosely adapts the Ms. Marple series by Agatha Christie. I was inspired to check it out by the glowing review over on Ah Sweet Mystery! A creative re-imagining of Christie that re-tools the component stories into one longform thriller? Sign me up! We had a great time with it, and the series is an interesting adaptation—but some of its original elements were the parts I liked most.

The series is based on five Ms. Marple books, some more than others: The Moving Finger, The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, A Murder Is Announced, The Body in the Library, and of course Nemesis. As far as Marple stories, this is playing the hits, so while some of these weren’t as back-to-front familiar as most Poirot cases, I knew the source material well enough. These mysteries are rolled into an overarching story in the style of The Fugitive or Crime and Punishment. This seems like it shouldn’t work for a detective who was originally a bit of a stationary detective, an elderly woman with an ear to the local gossip. But the end result really, really does.

A high-powered executive (Yunjin Kim) is accused of murdering her ten-year-old daughter Min-seo, with damning evidence (plus a stress-induced breakdown during her police interview). She goes to prison for nine years before discovering a potential witness to Min-seo’s death, at which point she pulls a daring escape and takes on the identity of the conveniently-identical mystery novelist Ma Ji-won. “Ms. Ma” settles down in cozy Rainbow Village, knitting and observing, as she searches for the witness, with the ultimate intention of tracking down her daughter’s murderer and killing them in revenge. She is pursued by Han Tae-kyu (Jung Woong-in), an initially Javert-esque police detective whose character arc shifts meaningfully throughout the story.

The setup is pretty dark, especially compared to the tone of most episodes and the amount of humour. Ms. Ma herself is a morally grey and not particularly nice individual, at least at first. She’s mercenary and remorseless, uses other people for her own gain, and in her old life, she once physically abused the daughter she’s avenging (this is treated seriously, for the record—the suggestion I think being that there’s a trickle-down of abuse dynamics from Ms. Ma’s father and husband to her own behaviour, and she’s haunted by her parenting failures). Min-seo’s actor is the most adorable apple-cheeked little kid they could find, but her violent death and body are shown onscreen, along with other incidents of children dying or in peril. I really would not recommend this one if you find fictional child death to be an upsetting topic. But it struck a difficult balance, with a nuanced portrayal of a flawed protagonist who goes through a subtle arc while still staying true to her initial characterization.

Now, I was a little skeptical that you could do a series of murder mysteries in a longform plot where the main character is centrally involved in the action and mystery, but the memorable characters and humour of the overarching drama are exactly what make the individual mysteries work so well. As a mystery reader you can get quite jaded: even if the characters are well-rendered (which they often aren’t), you don’t want to get too attached when they could die at any moment. But here, the cast of the individual mysteries are the same as the cast of the show’s slice-of-life side. Ms. Ma lures you into a false sense of security with several episodes of library lady antics before its first present-day murder. When this character died, I was genuinely devastated. This was someone we’d been laughing with for two episodes! There’s no such thing as a throwaway character here.

This is especially the case with Mirror Crack’d, which takes up a fair bit of the runtime, and Ms. Ma’s attempts to get retired actress Lee Jung-hee (Yoon Hae-Young) to admit what she saw that fateful night. Apart from being some of the best and tensest material in the series, I really liked the show’s take on Mirror Crack’d. It’s a book with a very memorable villain, but a lot of reported action and not a lot of real clues (more “psychological clues”). Plus there’s one point that, once you know the ending, feels like a really big plot hole. Ms. Ma fixes all of these issues while modernizing the plot a little. Characters who should be suspected receive meaningful suspicion. The “Lady of Shallott Look” is present but de-emphasized in favour of more tangible elements of the investigation. Basically, they take all the component parts and re-tool them into a tighter structure. Perhaps the amount of melodrama in this novel lends itself particularly well to soap/K-drama format.

Throughout these events, Ms. Ma eventually gains two recurring allies. One is Seo Eun-ji, a mysterious drifter investigating Min-seo’s death for her own reasons. Eun-ji is played by Ko Sung-hee, who I recognized from her small but memorable role in the legal/mystery K-Drama While You Were Sleeping, and has just as good a performance here as the sly, compelling co-investigator. The other is Ko Mal-koo (Choi- Kwang-je), a character who I can only describe as The Friendly Village Thug. Mal-koo is a gangster who is not currently in any gang, whose hobbies are gardening and playing piano, and whose role in the plot is to appear at a crucial moment to beat up all manner of hired toughs, goons, and henchmen, often after removing his suit jacket. In one memorable moment, he opens a character’s parasol and hands it to her to protect her from seeing the fight, or maybe just from the splatter. He’s great. My wife and I cheered every time he showed up on screen. There are some sweet and interesting found family dynamics between these three and a younger character Ms. Ma ends up taking under her wing.

The pacing of the first half of the show is much stronger than the second half (post-Mirror Crack’d) which oddly jumps through A Murder Is Announced and Body in the Library in very quick succession, bordering on “mystery of the week” format. (And I don’t want to get too deeply into spoiler-y detail, but Body in the Library‘s best trick is downplayed in order to emphasize its similarities with Nemesis.) At one point, the real Ma Ji-won shows up again, leading to Orphan Black-style hijinks where you have Yunjin Kim acting out fugitive-playing-writer-playing-fugitive, but this also goes by really quickly. I felt like this plot was a little under-utilized. There’s also some frustrating soap opera dithering where Ms. Ma strings along an orphan about whether she’s planning to adopt him: Yes she is, no she isn’t, he’s coming to live with her, they can never speak again, etc. Ma’am, you are going to re-traumatize this kid!

That said, the final episode has a fantastic payoff, building into a bloodbath that resolves all of the overarching plots and finally draws Ms. Ma into an open confrontation with her, erm, nemesis. Some K-dramas have a final episode that’s more of an epilogue; cooling down with the characters after a climax in the second-to-last episode. Not so here. It’s an explosive and impactful finale that really delivers on its premise. I’ll say one thing: they were not kidding about the “goddess of revenge” aspect, to the point that I was a little surprised they got away with where they took it, considering this is mainstream TV. Even if the back half has its bumpy moments, it’s a great show that’s well worth any mystery connoisseur’s time, whether or not you’re familiar with the source material.