Warning: Spoilers ahead for Karma
The crime K-drama Karma delivers much of its suspense through a nonlinear narrative. The story of six people whose fates are tied together by a gruesome past act begins in the middle, when a burn victim is brought into a hospital in the fictional town of Guhoe, South Korea. Doctor Lee Ju-yeon (Hometown Cha Cha Cha’s Shin Min-a) saves his life, but when she learns his name—Park Jae-yeong, unrecognizable due to the severe burns across his face—she wishes she hadn’t. It will not be until the season’s end that we learn how Ju-yeon previously knew Jae-yeong, and why she shudders at his reintroduction to her life.
Karma immediately jumps back two weeks, and we meet Park Jae-yeong (A Killer Paradox’s Lee Hee-joon) before the fire. He is a factory worker in crushing debt to loan sharks. The lead loan shark (played by Signal’s Jo Jin-woong) kidnaps Jae-yeong and gives him a threatening peek behind the scenes of his organ-harvesting operation. If Jae-yeong doesn’t pay him back within 30 days, the loan shark says, he’ll end up on the operating table himself.
A desperate Jae-yeong hatches a plan to kill his own father, Park Dong-sik (Uncle Samsik’s Choi Hong-il), for a 500 million won life insurance policy. The execution of this plot leads to the karmic deaths of five people and a hard-won sense of peace for another. Let’s break down how it happens, and how the six main characters in Karma are all connected.
Who is Kim Sung-kyun’s Jang Gil-ryong?
Once Jae-yeong decides to kill his father, he needs to find someone to actually commit the act. He lands on Jang Gil-ryong (Moving’s Kim Sung-kyun), a Korean-Chinese man who was recently fired from Jae-yeong’s workplace. Gil-ryong is a member of the Korean-Chinese mafia, and is desperate for money to send home to his kid. While Jae-yeong and Gil-ryong don’t know one another at work, Jae-yeong identifies him as a potential killer-for-hire.
Jae-yeong tracks Gil-ryong down to a car junkyard where he lives, and hires him to kill his father. Jae-yeong tells Gil-ryong that he must make it look like a hit-and-run accident, or the insurance company will not pay the policy. He instructs Gil-ryong to run his father over as he is leaving church, identifying an alley on Dong-sik’s route home that does not have CCTV coverage.
How much is 500 million won in U.S. dollars?
How much is Jae-yeong willing to kill his father for? Five-hundred million won is about $342,550, at the time of this writing.
Who is Park Hae-soo’s “The Witness?”
While we won’t know it until Episode 5, “Rewind,” Gil-ryong asks a friend to help him kill Jae-yeong’s father. That friend, Kim Beom-jun (Squid Game’s Park Hae-soo), was previously in prison with Gil-ryong. Viewers mostly know him as “The Witness.” Beom-jun is the person behind the wheel of the car that hits Dong-sik.
If their plan had gone smoothly, Dong-sik would have died quickly, Jae-yeong would have received his life insurance payout, and Gil-ryong and Beom-jun would each have gotten a cut. However, not only does Dong-sik survive being run over twice, but his church friend witnesses the accident. Beom-jun throws a severely injured Dong-sik in the back of the car, and tells Gil-ryong he will come up with a new plan.
How Yu-jeong and “Glasses” are connected to Beom-jun
Yu-jeong (Flower Crew: Joseon Marriage Agency’s Gong Seung-yeon) is a beautiful woman Beom-jun knows from their hometown of Guhoe. The two get along because they have a common interest in swindling others out of their money. Yu-jeong is the one who picks Beom-jun up when he is released from prison, and the two fall back into a life of crime together.
Yu-jeong is the honey trap, luring in rich, married men. Then, when the two are about to sleep together, Beom-jun barges in, posing as Yu-jeong’s boyfriend. They then blackmail the targets for their silence.
“Glasses” (Running Man’s Lee Kwang-soo), aka Dr. Han Sang-hoon, is Yu-jeong’s latest mark. She has brought him to a rural hotel the night of Dong-sik’s murder. She is waiting for Beom-jun to show up for the next part of their grift, but Beom-jun has been waylaid by the failed killing of Dong-sik.
Beom-jun decides to kill two birds with one stone, as it were. He instructs Yu-jeong to get Sang-hoon to drive them back to Seoul in the middle of the night. Beom-jun waits on a bridge over a foggy mountain road with a dead or dying Dong-sik. When Sang-hoon drives under the bridge, Beom-jun throws Dong-sik over the bridge and onto Sang-hoon’s windshield below. The poor man finally dies and Sang-hoon is convinced it was his fault. Wine-drunk and with a woman who is not his wife, he immediately decides to cover it up.
Why “The Witness” blackmails “Glasses”
This is where “The Witness”, aka Beom-jun, comes in. Posing as an innocent bystander on a bike, Beom-jun plays the victim. Sang-hoon “forces” Beom-jun to help him bury Dong-sik’s body in the nearby mountains, but really this is all part of Beom-jun’s plan. Sang-hoon pays Beom-jun 10 million won (roughly $6,850) for his silence, but Beom-jun continues to extort Sang-hoon for money over the coming days.
Beom-jun and Yu-jeong might have gotten away with it. However, a throwaway comment from the car mechanic Sang-hoon hires to fix his broken windshield has Sang-hoon reconsidering the entire accident. He checks the video from his windshield cam and realizes that Beom-jun staged the whole incident.
Sang-hoon kills Yu-jeong and Beom-jun kills Sang-hoon
Unfortunately for Sang-hoon, he still doesn’t realize Yu-jeong was in on the grift. When they meet up, she drops her innocent act. Yu-jeong and Beom-jun drug Sang-hoon and bring him to the giant abandoned building in their hometown of Guhoe. The building is familiar as the location of the fire that led to Jae-yeong’s burns in the opening sequence of the show.
Yu-jeong and Beom-jun plan on burying Sang-hoon alive, but Sang-hoon wakes up in their car while they are busy digging the hole. While Sang-hoon initially considers trying to escape with the car, instead he chooses vengeance. He drives the car into Yu-jeong, killing her instantly. Beom-jun uses his shovel to kill Sang-hoon in retribution.
Unfortunately for Beom-jun, Sang-hoon’s pregnant wife has hired a private detective agency to find proof of his affair with Yu-jeong. Two of the agency’s workers follow Sang-hoon’s car to the abandoned Guhoe warehouse and catch Beom-jun’s murder of Sang-hoon on camera. They send the evidence to the police, and Sang-hoon becomes a wanted man.
Beom-jun kills Jae-yeong and Gil-ryong, and Steals Jae-yeong’s identity
Meanwhile, Jae-yeong is angry at Gil-ryong for botching the killing of his father. Because of the suspicious circumstances of the hit-and-run accident, the insurance agency has delayed the payment until they can investigate further. Gil-ryong is also angry. He wants payment for the hit job because he needs to get out of Korea. He was caught on CCTV killing a policeman who came to his junkyard to investigate Dong-sik’s death.
The two meet up. Jae-yeong plans to kill Gil-ryong, but he is really bad at it, and Gil-ryong gets the upper hand. Gil-ryong brings an unconscious Jae-yeong to Beom-jun, who is currently holed up at the Guhoe warehouse, also on the run from the police. When Beom-jun realizes that he and Jae-yeong bear a resemblance, he hatches a new plan: steal Jae-yeong’s identity. He kills both Gil-ryong and Jae-yeong, and sets the building on fire. In a karmic moment, Beom-jun becomes trapped in the fire he set.
Who is Shin Min-a’s Lee Ju-yeon?
(Content warning: This contains descriptions of sexual violence)
Karma’s final episode, also titled “Karma,” begins with the same sequence as the series’ first episode. In it, we see Beom-jun arrive at Ju-yeon’s hospital as a burn victim. Now, however, we know he is not actually Park Jae-yeong, as he claims. We also now know why Ju-yeon so despises Jae-yeong.
By Karma’s ending, we know that Ju-yeon, Yu-jeon, Jae-yeong, and Beom-jun all grew up in Guhoe. Ju-yeon and Yu-jeon were in the same class, and Yu-jeon was jealous of Ju-yeon’s effortless beauty. When she decides to seek revenge on a naive Ju-yeon, Beom-jun suggests putting her in the path of unsavory men.
Yu-jeon gets Park Jae-yeong to meet Ju-yeon for a blind date, and to lead her to a secluded area where two young men are waiting. They kick Jae-yeong out of the way, and take Ju-yeon to the same abandoned warehouse we see throughout the series, where they tie her up and rape her. Later, Ju-yeon finds out that Park Jae-yeong was not a fellow victim of the attack, but was actually in on the whole thing. This is a cruel betrayal on top of the sexual trauma she has experienced.
Decades later, she manages to get through the day without thinking of the incident, but her sleep is still haunted by nightmares. Then, a man claiming to be Jae-yeong shows up at her hospital. She hires the same private detective agency that caught Sang-hoon’s murder on camera to find out where Jae-yeong and the two men who raped her are now. The agency is headed by a kindly former detective played by My Mister’s Park Ho-san. While the other two perpetrators are dead, the detective confirms that Jae-yeong is at her hospital. He, too, has been fooled by Beom-jun’s identity switch.
Ju-yeon spares Beom-jun’s life
Initially, Ju-yeon plans on killing Beom-jun, whom she believes to be Jae-yeong. After Beom-jun leaves the hospital against medical advice, Ju-yeon uses the private detective agency to switch out Beom-jun’s pain medication for fentanyl. She follows him to Dong-sik’s church, where he confronts a nun about Jae-yeong’s father’s insurance policy. The company finally paid out the 500 million won, but to the church rather than to Jae-yeong. Dong-sik changed his beneficiary a week before his death. Jae-yeong killed his father for nothing.
Angry and probably in a fair amount of pain, Beom-jun storms out of the church. He pops some of his pills before entering the same alley where he drove over Dong-sik a few weeks prior. He begins to feel the effects of the fentanyl, just as Ju-yeon approaches with a scalpel. He tries to convince her he isn’t Jae-yeong, but she just heard him confront the nun as Dong-sik’s son. She doesn’t believe him.
Before Ju-yeon can cut Beom-jun’s throat, however, her doctor boyfriend, Jeong-min (Island’s Kim Nam-gil) arrives. Jeong-min doesn’t stop her, but he encourages her to think before she acts: “Think about everything you’ve endured. You shouldn’t ruin your life over scum like him.” Unlike almost every other character in Karma, Ju-yeon doesn’t choose murder. She walks away, and finds peace. When the private detective later approaches Ju-yeon with confirmation that Beom-jun is not actually Jae-yeong, she tells him she doesn’t want to see it. After the events of the past few weeks, she is finally able to move on.
Ju-yeon’s boyfriend kills Beom-jun
But there will be no such peace for Beom-jun. He thinks he has evaded death once again, but does not know about Jae-yeong’s 30-day ticking clock. The time for him to repay his loans is up, and Beom-jun is kidnapped by the loan shark’s henchmen. They, too, think he is Jae-yeong. He is brought to the organ-harvesting facility, where all of his organs will be cut out and sold for profit.
The black market surgeon is revealed to be Jeong-min, Ju-yeon’s boyfriend. He works for the loan shark as a side hustle to pay off his student loans and save for marriage. Today is his last day. “Just think of this as bad karma,” he tells Beom-jun, as he cuts into him.
The loan shark gives Jeong-min a farewell gift that the doctor later opens. It is a Rolex watch that has passed hands—or wrists—throughout the series. It was in Dong-sik’s apartment, before Jae-yeong stole it and wore it as his own. Before Beom-jun killed the real Jae-yeong, he took the watch. Finally, the loan shark took it from Beom-jun and gave it to Jeong-min.
What does the ending of Karma mean?
The characters in Karma get what’s coming to them. Yu-jeong, Beom-jun, and Jae-young all played a role in the sexual assault committed against teenaged Ju-yeon. Later, they committed their lives to pursuing their own selfish desires. Similarly, Sang-hoon prioritized his own reputation and pride over others’ lives.
Gil-ryong is arguably the most moral of the main characters who suffer the consequences of their horrific actions. It is implied that he is willing to hurt others not for his own advancement or pleasure, but to provide for his child. His options to do so are limited by the racism he faces as a Korean-Chinese man living and working in Korea. However, he is still willing to murder an innocent man in Dong-sik.
Karma can be interpreted outside of a religious context, through a secular lens of interpretation of social interconnectedness. Humans impact one another, whether we want to or not. And, sometimes, the consequences of how we treat one another can feel or look like karma. However, like the recent Netflix Korean-language film Revelations, there is also a religious interpretation to take away.
Before Dong-sik is killed, he prays to God. Sitting in a pew, he speaks of how ashamed he is for the sins his son has committed. He offers his life up for these sins. Shortly after, his murder leads to the suffering and death of five sinners, including his son.
