Karma ending explained: Who dies during the climax of Netflix K-Drama?

Karma is a new Netflix K-drama about six characters whose fates are entwined – here’s how the complex story plays our, including details of who dies.

Karma takes the overlapping story device of Pulp Fiction, and combines it with themes of revenge and retribution akin to Park Chan-wook’s vengeance trilogy. With a spot of Squid Game thrown into the first episode.

The six Karma episodes largely focus on six characters – The Witness, The Debtor, Glasses, Ju-yeon, Gil-ryong, and Yu-jeong – a group of seeming strangers who become interconnected, and whose decisions impact each other in shocking and sometimes deadly ways.

The Netflix show is full of twists and turns, as coincidences, double-crosses, and mistaken identity drive the narrative forward. But it build towards a satisfying conclusion where the deserving (mostly) get their comeuppance. Warning: SPOILERS ahead.

What happens at the end of Karma?

Netflix

At the end of Karma, five of the six characters end up dead, with only Ju-yeon surviving. She’s pretty much the only innocent on the show, and deservedly walks away unscathed, with events helping Ju-yeon move on from her past trauma.

The series starts with a spot of arson and murder in an abandoned warehouse, which sets up the first mystery – who is the burned man that survives that ordeal and ends up in hospital?

Turns out it’s The Debtor, aka Park Jae-yeoung, a teenage rapist in his past, who endeavours to have his father killed in the present, for the purpose of collecting a tidy insurance sum to pay off loan sharks.

But Karma strikes Jae-yeoung, and he ends up burning to death in that aforementioned fire, alongside Chinese thug Gil-ryong, whom he tasked with killing his dad.

Glasses doesn’t fare much better, as a sexual liaison leads to a spot of drunk driving and the illusion that he’s run someone over (who was actually already dead).

Glasses then behaves pretty badly, and ends up being killed with a shovel, and buried next to gold-digger Yu-jeong, whom he’d previously murdered by pinning her to a wall with his car.

The right fate, for the wrong reason

Netflix

That just leaves Kim Beom-jun, who worked in partnership with Yu-jeong to separate men from their money, and was capable of much worse, committing the shovel murder, setting fire to the warehouse, and assuming identities to cheat and steal.

By pretending to be Park Jae-yeoung, he’s nearly murdered by nurse Ju-yeon, who believes him to be her rapist. But having drugged him with Fentanyl, she’s talked out of killing the monster by her doctor friend.

In another strange twist of fate, however, the loan sharks think he is Jae-yeoung, so kidnap Beom-jun to harvest his organs. When he ends up on the operating table, the person holding the knife is… that same friendly doctor.

“Think of this is bad karma” says the doc, as he withholds general anaesthetic, and administers the right comeuppance for the character, just for the wrong reason. Meaning Beom-jun is now dead too.

At the end of the concluding episode, a Private Investigator has the information that Ju-yeon has been searching for concerning her rapist, which will lead her to the fact that he’s now dead. But unaware of this, she says: “You don’t have to tell me. There’s nothing else I want to know.”

The final shot is of Ju-yeon smiling as she leaves her hospital and heads out into the falling snow, suggesting the man who haunted her nightmares is now gone, and she’s finally able to move on from her horrific past.

All six episodes of Karma are now streaming, while here’s a list of the best shows to binge on Netflix, as well as the best thrillers on Netflix.