Karma Ending Explained: Directed by Lee Il-hyung, the new Netflix Korean series 악연 might have left some viewers confused about how it ends and who survives. So here are the details about the series. The K-drama stars Park Hae-soo, Shin Min-ah, Lee Hee-joon, Kim Sung-kyun, Lee Kwang-soo, and Gong Seung-yeon in the main roles. It is adapted from the webtoon Akyeon by Choi Hee-sun. The series consists of 6 episodes, with each episode having a runtime of approximately 60 minutes.
Karma Kdrama Recap
The Karma series opens with a gripping scene in an abandoned building. Park Jae-yeong played by Lee Hee-joon is tied to a chair as a man attempts to light the place ablaze. It is not long before the building is on fire. Firemen arrive to extinguish the fire, and as they gurney him out, they come across a man with a burnt body but still alive. He is rushed to the hospital, where we meet Shin Min-a’s character, a doctor who readies to treat him. Since it’s an emergency, the patient’s name isn’t written down immediately. Later on, as the patient finally mutters his name, the doctor’s mouth drops—she knows this patient from her past.
The story then goes back 15 days to reveal how all this started. The character, played by Lee Hee-joon, is deep in debt and has been dodging calls from a loan shark. In the end, the loan shark arrives at his house, abducts him and delivers him to an illegal human organ trade place. The loan shark threatens to take Hee-joon’s organs instead if the debt isn’t settled. Hee-joon begs for additional time and is given a 30-day deadline to pay the money or the consequences will be applied.
Once he is released, Hee-joon is shown back in his factory job. There, he meets the coworker Jang Gil-ryong, a Korean-Chinese worker facing layoff. In an unexpected twist, Hee-joon receives a call that his father was in an accident. When he arrives at the hospital, he learns his father was only slightly hurt. The man who struck his father offers to pay a sum in exchange for not reporting the incident, a transaction that Hee-joon accepts.
Later, after he returns home with clothes for his father, Hee-joon finds an insurance policy. As it happens, he will inherit 500 million won when his father dies. That plants a sinister idea in his head —if he can kill his father and make it look like an accident, he can use the insurance money to pay off his debt and live a calm life.
Hee-joon then goes to Gil-ryong and pitches him a murder plan, offering him 30% of the insurance payout. He lies and gives the policy a value of 200 million won, promising 70 million to Gil-ryong. But the receipt shows a total real amount of 500 million, leaving Gil-ryong demanding 150 million instead. They come to an agreement, after which Gil-ryong is assigned to stage the death as a car accident.
The day he’s supposed to kill someone, Hee-joon gets a solid alibi — he eats at a restaurant, goes to karaoke, buys food from McDonald’s to prove he’s elsewhere. Gil-ryong carries out the murder instead. The next day, Hee-joon receives a call from the police that his father has died. He visits the hospital, pretends to mourn and waits to claim the insurance payout.
But things start to go wrong. The police state that the body was buried up in the mountains, and it does not appear to be accidental. It feels like a premeditated murder. Hee-joon starts to freak out, asking who buried the body. Was it with Gil-ryong or another?
Next, the story introduces a different character — Han Sang-hoon, who is on a date with his girlfriend, Yu-jeong. She proposes they retire to a hotel after dinner. Later that night, she gets an emergency call and tells Sang-hoon to drop her home. Although he had been drinking, he does so. Sang-hoon accidentally runs over someone on the way. By the time they check up on the person, he is already dead.
In a panic, he shoves the corpse into his trunk. At that moment, he catches sight of a witness — Kim Beom-jun. Sang-hoon knocks him out and puts him in the trunk too. He subsequently takes the two of them to the mountains, buries the body, and pays Beom-jun 10 million won to keep quiet. But helping comes at a cost, in Beom-jun’s book: 20 million more, or he’ll give her a warning to disappear.
But Beom-jun keeps returning to collect more cash. Sang-hoon turns paranoid and attempts to push Yu-jeong. Then, at a car repair shop, a mechanic observes that the car should be damaged from the front if he hit someone from the front. This puts Sang-hoon on alert, and once he reviews his dashboard camera footage, he’s convinced it wasn’t him who caused the accident; he has been framed. It was all part of Beom-jun’s plan.
Then Sang-hoon calls Yu-jeong and meets with her in a parking lot and tells her the truth. But, lo and behold, she’s in on the plan with Beom-jun. In the heat of the car argument, Beom-jun pops up and knocks Sang-hoon out cold; they carry him to the same abandoned building in order to bury him alive.
But plans don’t go as intended. Sang-hoon wakes up, goes a little crazy and drives over Yu-jeong with his car, killing her. He attempts to flee, but Beom-jun catches up, kills him, and buries both their bodies. The final twist? All of this — Yu-jeong’s murder, Sang-hoon’s death, the entire setup — was caught on camera by a private detective agency hired by Sang-hoon’s wife.
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But when Park Jae-yeong attempted to collect the insurance money after his father died, the bank froze the process. They did not know whether his father’s death was actually an accident. It left Jae-yeong exasperated. Meanwhile, Jang Gil-ryong began to request the 150 million won he had been promised for assisting with Jae-yeong’s father’s murder.
As Gil-ryong starts to blackmail, so Park Jae-yeong plans on killing Gil-ryong. He brought him to an empty building to kill him. But Gil-ryong saw through his plan. He subdued Jae-yeong, bound him to a chair inside the building, and then Beom-jun showed up.
Beom-jun murdered Jang Gil-ryong and then set the building on fire. He also wanted to steal Jae-yeong’s identity because Jae-yeong’s face was already on TV for killing Sang-hoon. And in this uproar, Beom-jun thought, this is the opportunity to disappear and be born again under a new name. But in attempting to flee the burning building, he became trapped in the fire and was severely burned. Still, he survived.
At the hospital, Beom-jun gave his name as Park Jae-yeong. This surprised Dr. Lee Ju-yeon, as that name was associated with a traumatic event from her history. Three boys at school had sexually assaulted her, one of whom was Park Jae-yeong. Even now, she also occasionally has nightmares of that time. Seeking revenge, she was dangerous, so she hired a private detective to track down the boys. The detective learned that two of them were already dead. The only living one was the man in the hospital who said he was Park Jae-yeong.
Karma Ending Explained
Did Lee Ju-yeon Take Her Revenge?
Ju-yeon wants to take revenge on Jae-Yeong, the one who destroyed her life. But in truth, he is Beom-Jun, a man who murdered the real Jae-Yeong and assumed his role.
Beom-Jun gets the news that his father’s insurance money has been credited — just not to him. Instead, it was given to a church his father attended. Angry, he runs there, only to be greeted with a recording of his father predicting this reaction and asking the church to disregard him. It’s the last-ditch way his father has to get him to own up to what he has done. Jae-Yeong had the real person’s father murdered for money, only to die before cashing in, the cruel irony. That’s karma in action.
At that point, Ju-yeon arrives at the church, still haunted by memories of her attack. She’s sure Jae-Yeong is responsible, and she doesn’t care what he really is. She follows him after he downs some pills — intending to die — ready to end his life. She gets ready to stab him with a scalpel, but her boyfriend, Yoon, comes and stops her. He knows all, but doesn’t want her to throw away her life for a guy like him.
Later, Ju-yeon tells Yoon she used to dream about stabbing Jae-Yeong, but that it never brought her peace, just more pain. She’s glad he stopped her. Instead of killing him, she leaves after hitting him. He vomits the pills and understands he’s been played. Believing he’s in the clear now, he goes to the real Jae-Yeong’s home, where he finds an old magazine containing photos of Ju-yeon and finally recalls that he was the one for whom he ordered the assault via Yu-Jeong.
Before he can run, he’s captured by mysterious men in black. It turns out that Yoon works for loan sharks who are after Jae-Yeong. Since Beom-Jun nailed his role, it’s he who gets punished. They strap him to the table for surgery — but no painkillers. As a parting gift, the loan shark gives Yoon a watch that suspiciously resembles Jae-Yeong’s Rolex. Now that Yoon is debt-free, he is set to marry Ju-yeon. But the watch suggests a seedier secret — maybe Yoon isn’t so squeaky clean, either?
At the end, the private investigator attempts to tell Ju-yeon that Jae-Yeong and Beom-Jun were separate people, but she stops him. She is not interested in excavating the past anymore. As she walks into the falling snow, it’s evident: she has finally moved on.
Who Gets the Insurance Money?
In the end, Park Jae-yeong didn’t get the insurance money. The bank later disclosed that a few weeks before his death, Jae-yeong’s father had altered his will. He asked that the insurance money be given to the church he used to attend. He was ashamed of his son and thought giving the money to the church would atone for their sins.
Who Survives in the End?
In the end, only Ju-Yeon survives out of the six characters. She was the only one “who was truly a good person,” a victim who never harmed anyone. This brings us to the underlying theme of the story, which is that when you do others wrong, then karma will come to you. Therefore, she was spared since Ju-Yeon was nice and pure. However, the other five who were greedy and selfish, must pay the price. Karma came down hard on them, and it eventually cost them their lives.
Korean drama Karma is now streaming on Netflix.
Also Read: Karma Review: Dark, Twisted, and Entertaining Throughout
