When presented with a series that has seemingly separate plots, the hope from a viewer’s standpoint is that the stories merge at some point. It’s a heck of a lot more satisfying if they do. But how long it takes for those plots to merge will determine how much patience the viewers have with the series.
KARMA: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: An abandoned factory late at night; gas from a car is being siphoned out. A man who’s being held captive said his head hurts. Then the gas is poured around him and the building is set on fire.
The Gist: Firefighters amazingly find a man alive, albeit severely burned, in the fire. When he gains consciousness, he says his name is Park Jae-yeong (Lee Hee-joon). A young doctor, writing his name on a chart, pauses when she hears that name.
Fifteen days before the fires, Jae-yeong goes into his messy apartment; the landlord leaves a note that he’s three months behind on rent, but Jae-yeong doesn’t have the funds. His investment in cryptocurrency is tanking, and he owns a loan shark a whole lot of cash.
In fact, the loan shark enters Jae-yeong’s apartment and kidnaps him, bringing him to a location where he witnesses a surgeon taking body parts out of another debtor. This is the threat: Pay up or literally get sold for parts. The loan shark gives him 30 days to get the money.
As he despairs over how to get the money, he calls his father, which is when he finds out that his dad is in the hospital, having been hit by a car. His dad is mostly fine, and he spends his time at the hospital trying to extract the maximum amount of money from the Range Rover-driving person who hit him, who doesn’t want to go through insurance.
When he goes back to his father’s flat, he notices that he not only has some cash, but a Rolex. He also sees a life insurance policy on his father for 500 million won. He takes both, but later gets robbed and beaten senseless in a dark alley by a group of high schoolers. When the police officer who is seeking information from Jae-yeong says that the alley he was in has no cameras, it gives Jae-yeong an idea.
He approaches Jang Gil-ryong (Kim Sung-kyun), a former gang member who was recently fired from the warehouse where they both worked. He overheard how threatening he was to the boss that fired him and thinks he might be right for the particular job he’s looking to have done: He needs someone to kill his father and make it look like an accident. Using that same alley, which is next to his father’s church, will help them get away with it because of the lack of cameras.
Gil-ryong manages to do the deed, but things don’t go as planned, as the police officer who informs Jae-yeong about his father details: There’s a witness, and the body wasn’t found in the alley.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Because of its various storylines that may or may not mesh, Karma, written and directed by Lee Il-hyung and based on the webtoon of the same name, feels like the controversial Oscar-winning film Crash.
Our Take: Even though the first episode of Karma runs for an hour, the first story of this semi-anthology is relatively simple, at least to start. A man gets in over his head in debt, and he decides to kill his unsupportive father in order to collect on the insurance. But, as the title of the series implies, decisions like those are always going to come back and haunt the person making them, as well as causing collateral damage to other people involved.
The second episode involves a man who gets into a car accident that ends up killing someone, and has to figure out how to handle a witness to that accident. Then a doctor has to deal with the consequences when a name from her past reappears.
These plots may or may not get intertwined, but it seems that they likely will at some point during the season. What we wonder, though, is how long it will take before these plots start getting integrated, because the setups aren’t as propulsive as they should be. What we hope is that, once we establish the stories and players, things will move a lot more quickly.
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: Jae-yeong takes in the news that his father’s body wasn’t found in the alley and says to himself, “What have you done, you bastard?” It could be directed at himself, Gil-ryong or both.
Sleeper Star: Kim Sung-kyun is appropriately scary as Jang Gil-ryong, who finds out that Jae-yeong was going to cheat him on his cut of the life insurance payout.
Most Pilot-y Line: Jae-yeong’s way to extort more money out of the Range Rover driver is to pretend to smell alcohol on the guy.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Karma has the potential to be a fine series with intertwining plots, but it could also be an exercise in frustration, depending on how long those plots take to develop.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
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