𝐏𝐡𝐚𝐧 𝐍𝐠𝐨𝐜 𝐆𝐢𝐚 𝐁𝐚𝐨

One of the more reliable signs that an industry has not yet come of age is its readiness to confuse motion with progress. Vietnamese cinema, in its current incarnation, generates a great deal of motion. Box office revenue in 2025 reached some 5.6 trillion dong, with over seventy million tickets sold, representing growth of roughly a quarter against the preceding year. Industry associations speak of records broken and ceilings shattered with the breathless enthusiasm of the newly prosperous. The government has issued resolutions. Conferences have been convened. One reads of “breakthroughs” and “new eras” with a frequency that would be encouraging were the underlying condition of the industry not quite so stubbornly unaltered. For beneath the noise of a commercially animated marketplace lies a cinema that has not, in any philosophically serious sense, found itself, and shows as yet only the most tentative signs of doing so.

The most revealing symptom of this arrested development is one that the industry’s promoters mention with remarkable frequency, apparently without registering its implications. Vietnamese cinema, at the very summit of its commercial achievements, is substantially a diaspora creation. Many of the country’s most commercially successful directors, among them Victor Vu, Ham Tran, Timothy Linh Bui, Charlie Nguyen, and Van Kiet, were either born or raised in the United States. Vietnamese cinema became known worldwide primarily through the so-called Viet Kieu, directors born in Vietnam but formed in the West. This is a fact that is routinely celebrated in the Vietnamese press as evidence of the country’s global connections, when it ought instead to occasion a rather more searching question: why is it that a nation of nearly a hundred million people, with a film industry now several decades old, remains so substantially dependent upon those who left it to supply the aesthetic vocabulary and technical competence that its domestic institutions have failed to cultivate? A cinema that must import its most capable practitioners from abroad is not a confident cinema. It is a cinema that has not yet trusted itself sufficiently to build the conditions in which its own talent might flourish on its own soil.

The roots of this dependence are not difficult to identify. Film producers have openly described the most troubling feature of Vietnamese cinema as the severe shortage of creative talent across the key positions of director, screenwriter, and actor, with the majority of those working in the industry not having received appropriate training. The majority of the current filmmaking workforce consists, by one account, of individuals without formal, structured training or sufficient hands-on practice environments. In production design alone, the industry is said to have a great many prop masters and occasional art directors who depend upon directors to make creative decisions on their behalf, with very few possessing the capacity to develop a comprehensive creative concept that might give a film a distinctive visual identity. This is not a minor technical deficiency. It is a civilisational one. The craft of cinema is cumulative. It is transmitted from one generation of practitioners to the next through institutions, through formal education, through the slow accretion of professional standards. Vietnam has not built those institutions with any seriousness. Only a handful of universities offer formal training in theatre and cinematography, and it was described, as recently as a few years ago, as genuinely good news that schools such as Fulbright and Hoa Sen were beginning to introduce filmmaking curricula. That the existence of a film programme at a university should be regarded as a novelty worthy of remark suggests how far the country still has to travel.

The commercial output that emerges from this environment is, predictably, of a particular and rather limited character. The dominant mode is the romantic comedy, a genre which requires of its audience precisely nothing in the way of aesthetic preparation, and of its makers only a reliable instinct for sentiment and the most rudimentary command of narrative. Horror, of the kind that resolves its frights within the conventional running time and offers no particular disturbance to the mind afterwards, has also proven commercially agreeable. One thoughtful Vietnamese producer observed that the industry in recent years has been strong in quantity and in noise, without being equally distinguished for depth, with a great many productions favouring safe and predictable storytelling under the pressure of commercial expectation. This is an accurate diagnosis, and one that the industry’s own participants have been honest enough to offer. What they have been rather less forthcoming about is the degree to which this tendency towards the safe and the predictable is not simply a commercial calculation but a rational response to an environment in which the costs of creative ambition are, in certain respects, rather high.

It is at this point that one arrives at the subject which any candid assessment of Vietnamese cinema must address, however much the prevailing social atmosphere in the country encourages a certain delicacy of expression. The creative environment in which Vietnamese filmmakers operate places upon them a set of constraints that no serious national cinema has ever flourished under. All films distributed in Vietnam must pass through a formal appraisal conducted by the Central Committee of Film Appraisal and Classification, with the principal tendencies of that body directing itself towards questions of social propriety, the management of disturbing content, and the exclusion of perspectives that might be thought to unsettle received narratives about the nation’s history and present condition. The phenomenon of self-censorship, by which directors moderate their own creative vision in anticipation of institutional objection, is sufficiently widely practised and openly acknowledged to require no elaboration. The rational filmmaker, understanding the system within which he must operate, does not write the script he most wishes to write. He writes the script most likely to survive the passage through the relevant committees without being returned to him in a condition requiring fundamental reconstruction. The result is a cinema haunted by the outlines of stories never told, of perspectives never ventured, of the human experience rendered in its most approved and untroubling configurations.

It is against this backdrop that one ought to read the curious fate of Vietnam’s most internationally distinguished recent works. Pham Thien An’s Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, which won the Caméra d’Or at Cannes in 2023, earned only a negligible sum in domestic release, as did Bui Thac Chuyen’s Glorious Ashes, honoured at the Festival des 3 Continents the previous year. Rain on a Butterfly, which carried off the principal prize in the International Critics’ Week at Venice in 2024, grossed less than one billion dong at home. These figures are routinely noted in the Vietnamese press as a lamentable failure of audience taste, and the absence of arthouse distribution infrastructure is correctly identified as a contributing factor. But the more uncomfortable observation is that films of genuine ambition occupy an uneasy position in Vietnamese cinema not merely because audiences have not been cultivated to receive them, but because the institutional environment in which those films must seek distribution is one that was not designed with such films in mind. The arthouse tradition, wherever it has thrived, has done so in conditions of relative creative latitude. Vietnam has not yet provided those conditions with any consistency, and the isolation of its most serious filmmakers from a domestic audience is, in part, a structural consequence of that omission.

Some Vietnamese film critics may have observed some years ago that the most apt word for describing Vietnamese cinema is “transitional,” characterising it as an industry born decades later than the rest of the world and matured quite slowly, in which each stage of development has shown little inheritance from the previous generation and a persistent lack of diversity, with the film culture of the north entirely distinct from that of the south, and the industry of today bearing no discernible continuity with that of the 1990s. This is a remarkable thing to say about a country whose cinematic tradition is now more than a century old, and its accuracy has not meaningfully diminished in the years since it was offered. A cinema without continuity is a cinema without memory, and a cinema without memory cannot accumulate the kind of cultural authority that allows it to address the world on its own terms rather than in borrowed voices.

Pham Thien An’s Camera d’Or at Cannes arrived precisely thirty years after Tran Anh Hung claimed the same prize with The Scent of Green Papaya. That thirty-year interval is not a gap that was being quietly filled. It was an absence. South Korea, during those same thirty years, was constructing the institutional apparatus of a serious national cinema with deliberate and patient intelligence, liberalising the conditions under which its directors could work, investing in the formation of a genuine critical culture, and exporting its graduates to the world’s best film schools before recalling them to a domestic industry capable of absorbing what they had learnt. The result was not Parasite by accident. It was Parasite by design. Vietnam has produced the aspiration without the design, the resolution without the reckoning, and the box office record without the cultural foundation that might give such records any enduring significance.

There is a particular kind of disappointment that comes not from a bad show but from a show that had every reason to be good and squandered it anyway, and Girl From Nowhere: The Reset is, regrettably, exactly that. To understand why it fails, one must first understand what the original series was actually doing, because it was doing something considerably more ambitious than its horror-anthology surface suggested. Rooted in Thai Buddhist culture, the series explored karma not as divine punishment but as natural consequence: actions plant seeds, and circumstances determine when they bear fruit. Nanno did not create karma; she accelerated its arrival, so that characters faced consequences within their lifetimes. This is a philosophically precise distinction and one that mattered enormously to the show’s moral texture. In mainstream conceptions of karmic justice, particularly those filtered through Western popular culture, karma functions as a kind of cosmic reward and punishment system administered from above. The original Girl From Nowhere was far more interested in the Buddhist understanding of karma as something immanent and structural, something already latent within the choices people make and the systems they inhabit. Nanno did not arrive to punish the wicked. She arrived to make visible what was already there.

This is inseparable from the show’s deeper engagement with a specific feature of Thai social life that rarely receives direct critical attention in mainstream media. Thai society is strongly structured by hierarchy based on age, social status, profession, and family roles, and the concept of kreng jai, rooted in Buddhist teachings that emphasise compassion and consideration for others, functions as a way of showing respect toward those of higher rank whilst simultaneously maintaining harmony and preventing anyone from losing face. Kreng jai is one of those cultural values that is genuinely beautiful in its intentions and genuinely corrosive in its consequences, because the same deference that prevents small humiliations also prevents necessary confrontations. Students do not question the knowledge of their teachers for fear of offending them and causing them to lose face, and journalists tend not to ask questions that may embarrass or call into question the integrity of politicians or policemen, because they do not want to disrespect authority or lose favour with influential people. What the original Girl From Nowhere understood, with real sophistication, was that this social code creates the precise conditions in which institutional abuse flourishes. The corrupt principal, the predatory teacher, the wealthy student who escapes consequences for drunk driving; these were not aberrations within an otherwise healthy system. They were the system’s logical products, protected by the very cultural mechanisms that were supposed to ensure harmony. The most prominent example of this was the Minnie arc, where a high school student kills four people whilst drunk driving, and her wealthy and influential parents pull strings to help her dodge the consequences. Her real-life parallel caused the same accident, killing nine rather than four, and was sentenced to only 138 hours of community service. The series worked because it named something real. The horror was not supernatural. It was sociological.

Nanno showed everyone their full potential for evil, demonstrating that people do not need much to sell their soul to the devil, and that we form social groupings primarily to protect ourselves. This was the show’s most uncomfortable argument, and the one it pursued with the most intellectual honesty: that the villains of each episode were not unusually wicked people but ordinary people operating within ordinary incentive structures. The school that enabled academic fraud did so because its reputation depended on results. The teachers who ignored bullying did so because intervening would have required confronting parents of higher social standing. The students who formed hierarchies of cruelty did so because the alternative was to be at the bottom of those hierarchies themselves. Nanno’s detachment, that flat affect and that bloodcurdling laugh, was not sadism. It was the perspective of an entity that had seen these patterns repeat across every institution it had ever entered, and had drawn the only conclusion available: that the problem was not individual but structural. The best episodes implied that any institution is merely a social construct that will collapse once people stop believing in it, yet their endings showed characters leaving their school only to find that the outside world worked in exactly the same way, suggesting they had not fully gained their freedom. That pessimism was the series’ most honest and most radical move. It refused to let the audience leave satisfied.

Now, one might extend a degree of charity to The Reset by granting its stated ambition: that it deliberately set out to be a different kind of show from the original. The shift in Nanno’s characterisation was intentional, as directors sought to modernise the character for a 2026 audience that had grown accustomed to dark academia and prestige horror tropes, with Armstrong’s portrayal described as more calculated, cold, and serpentine compared to the original’s manic energy. This is a coherent creative position on its face. Reboots that simply replicate their predecessors are rightly criticised for lacking creative courage, and the decision to reimagine Nanno rather than copy her reflects at least an awareness of that trap. But charity requires us to ask whether the version of difference The Reset chose to pursue is actually an interesting or defensible one, and the answer, examined closely, is no. The problem is not that it tried to be different. The problem is the specific direction in which it chose to be different, which is to say it chose to be safer, more emotionally accessible, and more conventionally satisfying, and these are precisely the qualities that the original’s power depended on refusing.

In an attempt to connect the narrative, the series brings back Sky as a central figure. However, his reintroduction feels forced and underdeveloped, functioning as a weak emotional anchor that never fully lands, with his role as a romantic interest lacking chemistry and serving little purpose beyond supporting an underwhelming finale. The decision to give Nanno a consistent companion is not inherently wrong, but it is philosophically catastrophic for the character, because Nanno’s power was always inseparable from her aloneness. She belonged to no group, had no stake in any particular outcome, and felt no attachment that could be leveraged against her. She was, in the most precise sense, an outsider to every social structure she entered, and it was that absolute outsider status that made her an effective mirror. The moment she is given someone to protect, someone she returns to, someone whose survival shapes her choices, she becomes a participant in the social world rather than its observer. A Nanno with feelings is a Nanno we root for. A Nanno we root for cannot hold up a mirror, because the moment we are on her side, we are no longer seeing ourselves in it. The Reset wanted to humanise her as a point of distinction from the original, and in doing so it destroyed the very quality that made the character worth humanising in the first place.

The individual episodes make this failure concrete in ways that general criticism cannot fully capture. The second episode, built around a group of girls on a volleyball team whose upskirting photos are sold by male classmates whilst the school principal responds by policing the girls’ skirt lengths rather than punishing the perpetrators, contains exactly the kind of institutional critique the original excelled at. Patriarchy ensures that the steady vigilance and reproach fall on the girls, with the implication that they cannot dress properly, whilst one of the boys is the principal’s son and therefore untouchable. This is a genuinely sharp premise, and it maps directly onto the kreng jai dynamic: the school’s instinct is to preserve the face of the powerful rather than protect the vulnerable, because challenging the principal’s son would require a confrontation that the institution is structurally designed to avoid. The failure is in the execution. Nanno’s resolution, orchestrating public humiliation for the boys and flipping the power dynamic, is satisfying in the immediate sense but shallow in the structural one, because it leaves the institution entirely intact. The original series would have found a way to make the audience feel the discomfort of that incompleteness. The Reset lets them leave feeling avenged, and a show that lets its audience leave feeling avenged has misunderstood its own project.

The finale episode, centred on a student council election and a candidate named Paradorn, is perhaps the clearest illustration of the series’ confused moral logic. The show fails to understand its own premise. Nanno is supposed to be here to teach lessons, but the irony is that Paradorn’s bad decisions largely came about because Nanno pushed him down that road. This is a devastating criticism, and it is accurate. In the original series, Nanno did not manufacture evil in her subjects. She revealed it. She created conditions under which the evil that was already present could not be suppressed or denied. The distinction matters enormously, because the original’s moral argument depended on the idea that the corruption she exposed was pre-existing, structural, a product of the systems these people inhabited rather than of Nanno’s provocations. When the Reset’s finale shows Nanno actively destabilising a candidate who begins the episode as a reasonably principled actor, and who escalates to violence partly in response to her interference, the series accidentally argues something far more troubling: that Nanno is not a revealer of evil but a creator of it. Nanno had already made up her mind based on Paradorn’s future, which she can apparently see, and she knows how his life is going to turn out either way, which raises the unanswerable question of what the point of any of this was. The original series never made Nanno’s actions feel pointless, because they were always in service of exposing something that existed independently of her. Here, the circularity of the logic collapses the episode’s moral architecture entirely.

If we grant the Reset the most generous possible reading of its intention to be a different kind of show, the version it should have aimed for was one that updated the original’s systemic critique for contemporary concerns whilst preserving its philosophical rigour. Critics noted that the updated social commentary tackled topics such as AI-driven academic fraud, influencer culture in schools, and the mental health crisis among Gen Z students. These are legitimately fertile subjects, and the episodes dealing with social media envy and online influencer dynamics at least attempt to engage with them. But the original’s power came from its willingness to trace individual behaviour back to structural causes, to show how the system produces the person rather than simply how the person misbehaves. The Reset’s episodes about social media, for instance, treat the phenomenon as a matter of individual vanity and cruelty rather than asking why an entire generation of young people has been trained to measure their worth in followers, or what that training has to do with the same hierarchies of status and visibility that have always governed Thai school life. The subject is contemporary. The analysis is not.

The original series understood that Nanno exists to tempt, to expose human aspirations as selfish, and to show that people form social groupings primarily to protect themselves, demonstrating that no one can resist her provocations and that people don’t need much to sell their soul. That portrait of human nature was genuinely dark, genuinely uncomfortable, and genuinely resistant to the kind of feel-good resolution that mainstream streaming drama reaches for instinctively. The Reset chose, at almost every turn, the resolution that the original would have refused. It wanted to be different, which is admirable. It chose to be different by being easier, which is not. Whatever made the original compelling has been stripped away and replaced with something louder, messier, and far less thoughtful, and it is hard to say who the revival is for, but it certainly is not for fans of the original. A truly bold reimagining would have found new formal and philosophical ground to occupy whilst keeping faith with the original’s refusal to comfort its audience. Instead, The Reset offers the discomforting aesthetics of the original without its discomforting ideas, which is the worst of both worlds: too dark for casual viewers and too soft for those who understood what the darkness was actually for. In its eagerness to deliver catharsis, it forgets that the original was compelling precisely because it withheld easy satisfaction. The corruption was never fully punished. The system was never truly dismantled. Nanno left, and the school remained.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Could they have been saved? On the drama's structural argument and the counterfactual diplomacy

The short answer, I think, is yes, at least theoretically, but the drama is constructed precisely to show us why, at every potential turning point, the conditions for a different outcome were never quite in place simultaneously. It is a tragedy in the classical sense, which means it does not hinge on one catastrophic mistake but on a long chain of structural forces that gradually close off every exit.

The earliest and most decisive missed opportunity?

The moment that haunts the entire series is, in my view, not in the military chapters at all but during Nares' time as a hostage in Hongsawadi. Nares understands the fundamentality of losing freedom and what it means to be a citizen of a vassal state, whilst Mingyi Swa's journey runs parallel to his, going from a carefree child to becoming a prisoner of his own circumstances, unable to make any moves or decisions of his own free will. What is notable is that both men, from very early on, understood each other's position with unusual clarity. Mingyi Swa grasped that Ayutthaya's desire for independence was legitimate; Nares grasped that Mingyi Swa was not his enemy by disposition. The tragedy is that this mutual understanding was never translated into any institutional form during the years it could have been.

Had Bayinnaung been willing, during his own reign, to convert the vassal relationship into something more like a formal alliance on negotiated terms, there might have been a foundation for later peace talks. There is a scene between Mingyi Swa and Bayinnaung where they discuss how trade and diplomacy will one day outweigh military power, and this is where the drama's most poignant counterfactual lives. Bayinnaung understood it intellectually yet continued to govern through conquest and hostage diplomacy. Had he formalised that intellectual position into treaty commitments before his death, Nanda Bayin would have inherited binding precedents rather than purely military ones.

The independence crisis of 1584

The Ava rebellion proved to be the opportunity Siamese leadership were willing to exploit. Naresuan's army, rather than marching to Ava as ordered, hovered around Pegu, and declared independence on 3 May 1584. This is the hinge event of the whole conflict, and within the drama's logic, it represents a second window that was permanently shut by Nanda Bayin's temperament. A ruler less driven by wounded pride might have negotiated Ayutthaya's independence in exchange for a defined tributary relationship, continued trade access through Tenasserim, and a mutual non-aggression commitment. Ayutthaya's independence was, by this point, probably inevitable; the question was whether it could be achieved through negotiation rather than a decade of bloody war.

The drama makes clear that Mingyi Swa, given any meaningful authority, would likely have favoured exactly this course. The series' central premise is that Mingyi Swa does not actually want to fight Nares but is torn between his duty as crown prince and his bond as a sworn blood brother. The structural problem is that Nanda Bayin was the one who held the authority, and though he could never raise more than a third of his father's troop levels, Nanda could not come to terms with a smaller empire. Between 1584 and 1593, he launched five disastrous invasions of Siam, which increasingly weakened his hold everywhere else. Every failed invasion made diplomatic settlement harder, because each one added grievances, casualties, and mutual humiliation to the ledger.

The post-1586 stalemate as a diplomatic opening

By 1587, after the catastrophic failure of the two-pronged siege of Ayutthaya, both sides had demonstrated to each other something important. The armies were not ready for a long-term siege of the heavily fortified capital. The troops began dying in thousands from want and exposure by February 1587, and by March, the siege began to falter. This is the clearest moment in the military record where exhaustion on both sides created the objective conditions for a mediated settlement. A negotiated recognition of Ayutthayan independence in exchange for assurances on trade routes and the Tenasserim ports would have been achievable at this point, because Hongsawadi's military credibility was already visibly declining. The political obstacle, again, was Nanda Bayin's refusal to accept a reduced empire as the legitimate inheritance of his father's conquests.

In the drama's terms, this is also the period when Mingyi Swa's strategic credibility was being damaged by failed campaigns, and his ability to argue for restraint at court was therefore at its weakest. Mingyi Swa faces humiliation after military setbacks, while internal chaos grows around the throne. This is one of the drama's more devastating ironies: the man most inclined towards peace was being systematically discredited by the failures of a war he had never fully believed in.

Could Mingyi Swa and Nares themselves have acted differently?

Within the drama's own logic, both men were operating under structural constraints so severe that individual agency was largely confined to the manner of their choices rather than the choices themselves. Nares could not have accepted a continued vassal status; his people's freedom demanded independence. Mingyi Swa could not have publicly defied his father and sued for a unilateral peace without being read as treasonous. There is, however, one narrow possibility the drama gestures towards but does not fully resolve: a direct, back-channel communication between the two of them, at some point after 1586, in which they agreed on terms they would each then advocate to their respective courts from a position of strength. This would have required extraordinary trust, secrecy, and timing. It is the kind of thing the drama implies they both wanted and neither could quite bring themselves to make concrete before the military logic overtook them entirely.

Girl From Nowhere built its reputation on a distinctive mix of moral allegory, supernatural ambiguity, and sharp social commentary. Much of that appeal came from the character of Nanno, played by Kitty Chicha, whose unpredictable nature and cryptic motives made her one of the most memorable figures in Thai television. With Girl From Nowhere: Reset, the creators seem keen to take the story in a new direction with a new lead and something of a clean slate. However, the first episode already raises a lingering question: has the series lost some of the qualities that once made it so unique?

In the earlier seasons, Nanno functioned almost like a mythic embodiment of karma. She was clearly not human, yet she was never fully explained either. She would appear in different schools without warning, quietly inserting herself into situations and letting human flaws reveal themselves. Her presence was subtle and unsettling, and the characters around her never quite understood who or what she was.

By contrast, the new portrayal of Nanno in Reset, played by Rebecca, feels much more direct. In the first episode, the victim Sky already knows about Nanno and even prays for her to appear. This immediately changes the dynamic that defined the earlier seasons. Instead of an unknowable supernatural force who arrives unexpectedly, Nanno begins to feel more like an urban legend that circulates online. The sense of mystery is inevitably reduced when at least one character is already aware of her existence and actively calls for her help.

This also raises questions about how the show’s moral logic works. If Nanno appears because someone explicitly asks for her, then the system of justice starts to feel selective. Why would some pleas be answered while others go unheard? The earlier seasons avoided this issue by presenting Nanno as something closer to an omnipresent observer who appeared without warning. Events unfolded in ways that felt both inevitable and unsettling. Once that unpredictability disappears, some of the character’s magic disappears with it.

To be fair, the episode does try to suggest that Nanno is not simply a revenge service. Her delayed arrival implies that Sky’s suffering continues even after he calls for her, which reinforces the idea that she does not exist simply to grant instant justice. However, the episode later complicates this idea. When Nanno eventually appears, she becomes actively involved in helping Sky bring about Jom’s downfall. At that point, her role starts to feel less like an impartial agent of karma and more like someone directly intervening on behalf of the victim.

In that sense, this version of Nanno occasionally reminds me of Yuri from Season 2. Instead of manipulating events from the sidelines, she adopts a far more confrontational approach and directly pushes back against the antagonist. There is something entertaining about this more mischievous and assertive version of the character, but it also shifts the philosophical tone of the series. Earlier episodes often allowed human cruelty to unravel on its own. Here, Nanno seems much more willing to step in and shape the outcome herself.

Interestingly, the episode also hints at a more human side to Nanno. In the closing moments she remarks that she expected Jom to cry in a different way. It is a small line, but it suggests that she may have expectations or reactions of her own. Rather than being a purely detached force, she seems almost curious about human behaviour, as though she is observing people and occasionally taking risks simply to see what will happen.

Another weakness of the premiere is its pacing. The episode feels quite short, which leaves very little room to properly explore the backgrounds of either Sky or Jom. As a result, the central conflict develops rather quickly and relies on a familiar narrative idea: a perpetrator who is also the victim of abuse. It is an interesting theme, but the way it is presented here feels somewhat conventional.

This is particularly noticeable when compared with earlier seasons of Girl From Nowhere, which often grounded their stories in very specific Thai social and cultural contexts. Episodes drew inspiration from real issues and institutional practices, such as the SOTUS system. Those elements gave the series a sense of place and made its moral allegories feel rooted in reality. By contrast, the story in Episode 1 feels far more generic and could easily take place in almost any setting.

Jom’s background highlights this problem. The episode reveals that he comes from a deeply toxic household where his father abuses him and his sister treats him with little respect. This environment clearly contributes to the anger and violence he later directs at others. While this adds some moral complexity, it also raises an uncomfortable question. If Jom himself is a victim of abuse, why does the narrative focus solely on punishing him while leaving his father untouched? The lack of accountability for the father weakens the broader theme of karmic justice that the series usually explores.

The nature of Jom’s punishment also feels somewhat strange. Scenes involving the rubber mallet, the toilet seat, and the note with faeces drawn on it are grotesque in a way that feels slightly off. In some ways these punishments mirror the humiliations Jom experienced from his father in the basement, which may be intentional. Even so, the symbolism feels muddled, and the moral message becomes less clear than it was in many earlier episodes.

None of this excuses Jom’s actions. The episode makes it clear that his cruelty causes real harm and deserves consequences. However, the way those consequences are delivered lacks the sharp moral irony that once defined the show’s approach to justice.

TL;DR: The premiere of Girl From Nowhere: Reset introduces an interesting new interpretation of Nanno, but it also highlights the difficulty of reinventing a series that relied so heavily on mystery and symbolic justice. By making Nanno more visible, more active, and perhaps more human, the show risks losing some of the unsettling ambiguity that once made her so compelling. Whether the series can balance this new direction with the depth and atmosphere of its earlier seasons remains to be seen.