The Resurrected, directed by Leste Chen and Chao-jen Hsu, is yet another example of a series where the creators were as confused as the audience as to what its thematic core is. The most baffling part, however, was that despite being titled The Resurrected, the so-called magical act of bringing someone back to life lasted only a few fleeting moments. By the time the series ended, I was left wondering whether it was meant to be a crime thriller, a revenge saga, a fantasy drama, or merely the chaotic sum of its creators’ confused vision. That said, let’s find out what The Resurrected was all about.
Spoiler Alert
Why did Hui-chin and Chao Ching resurrect Kai?
Chang Shih Kai and his mother, Yueh-hsin, ran a syndicate where they abducted girls and made them work for them. They ran a phishing scam and they had established a compound, an illegal call center, where these girls worked and made calls to people to scam them. Hui-chin’s daughter, Jin Jin, and Chao Ching’s daughter, Hsin-yi, were abducted by Kai and his men. The mothers, for the longest time, didn’t know what had happened to their children. But, sometime, a raid was conducted on the compound, courtesy of the courage shown by Jin Jin, who was able to inform a bank employee that they needed help. But even after Kai was taken into custody, he was just charged for being involved in the scam. The mothers were obviously not satisfied with that, since he and his men physically abused girls and even killed those who did not obey their orders. Luckily, they met Huang I-chen, who happened to be a lawyer and whose daughter had also been abducted by the syndicate. Huang I-chen made sure that Kai got the death penalty and nothing less than that. Kai was supposed to pay compensation to the families of the victims, but he never did that, as he proved in court thaṭ he did not have any property to his name which he could sell to get that money. But obviously that was not true. Hui-chin and Chao Ching knew that Kai, very slyly, had transferred whatever property he owned to his mother’s name. They knew that his mother was shrewd enough to not let her name be tarnished, and she pretended to be gravely hurt by whatever her son had done. Huyichin and Chao Ching were present when Kai’s death penalty was being carried out. He died a painless death and the mothers thought that the way he was executed was not fair. Jin Jin was in a coma whereas Chao Ching’s daughter, Hsin-yi had been killed by that man. They felt that even Kai needed to suffer the way their daughters did. They knew of a nearby village where a few shamans lived. Hui-chin and Chao Ching had seen them bringing people back to life. They decided that they needed to resurrect Kai, torture him, and get their money from him. They bribed a police officer and people from the mortuary, and finally got the dead body of Kai. Kai was resurrected, and the mothers had exactly 7 days to get their money from him, since after that time period, the one who was resurrected passed away. After Kai came back from the dead, a can of lies was opened, and the mothers realized that the mystery was much more complex than they believed it to be.
Why did Chao Ching abduct Jin Jin?
Eason and Pong were the other two members of Chao Ching and Hui-chin’s group, and they were helping them get revenge on Kai and his family. Eason’s grandmother was in a coma because of Kai, while Pong was somebody who used to work for Kai back in the day. Pong had seen the kind of atrocities that were inflicted on the girls in the compound, and so he decided to help Hui-chin and Chao Ching in whatever way he could (though he had ulterior motives too that we will discuss later in the article). After Kai came back to life, he realized that the only way he could escape from captivity was if he could turn the mothers against each other. In order to understand how he did that, we need to shed some light on what happened between the girls when they were in his captivity. Kai used to frequently rape An Chi, I-chen’s daughter, while Jin Jin had started helping him out in whatever way she could, just so that she got leverage over him and was able to escape from the compound at the opportune moment. One time, Hsin-yi, Chao Ching’s daughter, tried to escape from captivity using Pong’s help. Somebody saw her in the act and reported it to Kai. As a result, Hsin-yi was tortured, not given food for days, and kept in deplorable circumstances. Hsin-yi died in captivity eventually, and after that, nobody knew how Jin Jin ended up in a coma. Kai told Chao Ching that it was Jin Jin who snitched and told him about Hsin-yi’s escape plan. This was the reason why Chao Ching got Jin Jin discharged from the hospital and didn’t tell Hui-chin where she was hiding her. She wanted to be sure that Jin Jin was not helping Kai out, as if that was the case, then she would have killed her too.
Chao Ching wanted to kill Jin Jin so that she could be resurrected with the help of the shamans and reveal the truth. Hui-chin was obviously against it, as resurrecting her daughter meant that she would only be alive for the next 7 days. Chao Chin grew suspicious of Hui-chin, and she was not ready to believe a word she said. Meanwhile, Eason and Pong were doing their respective jobs, and they didn’t know how to bridge that gap that was created due to certain misunderstandings. Eason’s job was to woo Christina, Kai’s sister, and influence her so much that she robbed her own mother and gave them all the money. Eason would have been able to do that, but the growing animosity between the mothers got in the way of his job and ruined the entire plan. Eason had feelings for Hui-chin, while Pong felt close to Chao Ching. So the group was divided, and Kai took advantage of it. The plan to extract money from Kai went down the drain after Christina was able to make her brother escape from captivity. What Kai didn’t know was that the mothers had sorted their issue out, and they were just putting up an act to mislead Kai into believing that everything was going as he would have liked.
Why did Chang Shih-Kai kill his mother?
Hui-chin did not share a very good relationship with her husband, Sun Kuo Chiang. This man had an affair with a woman named Chou Shu-ting who worked for a politician named Kuo Chih Chieh. Chao Chin firstly got in touch with Hui-Cin’s husband, made him sign the release papers of his daughter, as without it the hospital wouldn’t have released Jin Jin, and then blackmailed him to expose the minister with the help of his current wife. The syndicate laundered money for influential people like the minister himself, and Kai’s mother, Yueh-hsin, was the one who was in charge of the entire operation. It came to be known in The Resurrected that Kai and his sister were adopted by Yueh-hsin, and she used to physically abuse them when they were young. Kai loved his sister, and he wanted to make sure that her mother didn’t hurt her. That was the reason why he had entered the crime world, as he knew that Yueh-Hsin wouldn’t do anything to them so long as they were earning good money for her. Yueh-hsin had the crypto wallet with her, which had all the money they had earned through their phishing business. Hui-chin and Chao Ching’s plan from the very beginning was to get their hands on that wallet, but they weren’t able to do so until the very end. Hui-chen let Kai believe that she wouldn’t mind even if he killed Chao Ching, since that woman had the audacity to kidnap her daughter and blame her for Hsin-yi’s death.
The plan was to break into Yueh-Hsin’s fortress and disrupt the charity function, where all the who’s whos of the town were going to gather. The charity event that was being held there was merely a front to launder all the black money of those affluent people. Kai didn’t know that even Chao Ching and Pong were going to be present there. Chao Ching warned the minister that he would have to expose Yueh-hsin and her entire syndicate if he didn’t want to be perceived as an accomplice in their crimes.Kai killed his mother with his own hands, and he took revenge on her for ruining his childhood. In fact, Kai was even more enraged, as just a day back he had lost his sister. After making him escape, his sister wanted to kill him because she had realized that so long as he was alive, people would look down on her and call her the sister of a fugitive. But they met with an accident on the way, and Christina ended up succumbing to her injuries. With the crypto wallet in his possession, Kai felt that his plan had succeeded and he had managed to use the misunderstanding between the mothers to his advantage. But he was wrong, as he didn’t know that it was the mothers who were playing him and not the other way round.
Who was Pong working for?
At the end of The Resurrected, Hui-chin and Chao Ching came face to face, and Kai believed that if he provoked Hui-chin, she would kill Chao Ching. Hui-chin played along, and she did shoot at Chao Ching, but in reality she didn’t hit her. The moment Kai believed that Chao Ching had been shot, he told Hui-chin how he had intentionally created a misunderstanding between them. He confessed that their girls also hadn’t snitched against each other, and it was somebody else who had informed him about Hsin-yi’s escape plan. But that’s when Chao Ching got up and told Kai that they were just playing along so that he killed his mother, took the crypto wallet from her, and helped their cause. Before Kai could even realize it, his body shattered into a million fragments, as his seven days had come to an end and the magic that had brought him back to life finally ceased to exist.
But that’s when something unprecedented happened. Pong came out of nowhere with his gang, and he told Hui-chin and Chao-chin to hand him the crypto wallet. So basically Pong was helping them out not because he wanted justice for what had happened to the girls but because he too was eyeing the money that Kai’s family had. Pong, I believe, actually had feelings for Chao Ching, which was why he asked those men who were with him to not kill the ladies. I feel those men were not really Pong’s gang members, and to some extent he was obliged to work for them. Maybe he owned them for a moment, and when he would have gotten to know about Chao Ching’s plan, he would have decided to use it to repay his debt. We had seen that those men had come to his shop once earlier, and by their demeanor, it did feel like they didn’t share a very amicable relationship. I believe Pong had landed himself in some sort of trouble in the past, and he had no way out but to betray the trust of the ladies, even if he didn’t do it wholeheartedly.
Will Jin Jin Become The Leader Of The Syndicate?
It seemed as though the creators were desperate to cram all the twists and turns into the final few minutes of the series. Needless to say, those twists felt contrived and ultimately weakened the impact of the overall narrative. So we got to know that in a fit of rage, An Chi had pushed Jin Jin from the first floor of the compound just before the police raided the building. She didn’t intend to kill her, but she was triggered in the heat of the moment. Jin Jin miraculously opened her eyes while she was being taken in an ambulance. It came to be known that Jin Jin had come in contact with a man named Yang, who was apparently even a bigger player than Kai and his mother. Kai wanted to backstab his mother using Yang’s influence, and that’s when Jin Jin decided to pitch her plan to him. She told him that she could help him leak enough information that could be used by the police to bring down the compound. She told him that if he dealt directly with her, then they could remove the mother-son duo from their path, who had become a hassle of late. In a way, Jin Jin wanted to dethrone Kai and his mother and take their position. Which means that she was inclined to enter the chrome world, as probably the money and the opulent lifestyle allured her. Whether she was truly in a coma or merely pretending, we never got to know by the end. Perhaps she had orchestrated an elaborate plan, arranging for someone to inject drugs into her system so the doctors would believe she was unconscious. Maybe the idea was that she’d regain consciousness the moment Kai and her mother were exposed. We also didn’t get to know a lot about Yang, who I believe was pulling the strings from behind. We would have to wait for The Resurrected season 2 in order to find out what Jin Jin’s real motivations were: if she actually intended to become the next kingpin or if she was just playing along to escape from the compound and get rid of the man who had tortured her so much.
