#spare me your mercy spoilers
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blue-grama · 2 months ago
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Late-breaking take, the end of Spare Me Your Mercy was quite good! Spoilers ahead, of course. Somehow this show spurred a lot of Tumblr discourse, though not the Tumblr discourse I expected for a series about euthanasia, a famously ethically fraught issue. No prognostication points for me! Anyway, I mention this because it feels hard to write an opinion without referencing all that, but I'm trying, because I just want to react to what was onscreen, in my opinion alone. There were a lot of things this show did really well. First and foremost, covering the whole spectrum of responses to euthanasia, from Boss' ableist take to Kan's autonomy-forward attitude. I really loved that they went out of their way to show a good death without euthansia in the Buddhist monk. It was an important counterbalance and drove home the point about autonomy over all else. I ultimately even liked the weird, ambiguous relationship between Kan and Tew -- though I think it could have benefited from a little more emotional focus, just to raise the stakes. Tew was a very stoic, inward character, but there are ways to show a undemonstrative character's emotions subtly. E.g. I'm watching Train to Busan at the moment and Gong Yoo pulling off his tie with a litte too much force when his mom talks about his estranged wife just tells us everything we need to know in a span of a couple seconds. SMYM wasn't quite as deft and it sometimes came off as confusing. For a few episodes, I wasn't totally sure if we were supposed to infer that Kan and Tew were intimate offscreen or if they were just in a weird hazy 'talking' phase. It turned out to be the latter. I think their relationship should have been weird and hazy, I just think we could have gotten a little more clarity as the audience in the middle of the show. That said (and now I'm skating dangerously close to the Discourse), I thought it was really important there was queer romance in this show. It was powerful to have Kan, a gay man, talking about the heartlessness of the law and importance of bodily autonomy, especially in the context the show had set up - rural, traditional, obviously homophobic. It was interesting to have Tew, the closeted character returning to his rural hometown, sticking to the letter of the law, while Kan, who seemed to have grown up elsewhere and come to the town as a student or adult, felt the need to work outside the lines. Another thing that became clearer in the final episode was that Tew was not out to his mom, but that she knew why he'd left his hometown and that she wanted him to have that big-city, less constrained life. This set up death and queerness as Things We Don't Talk About, To Our Detriment -- imagine if the two of them had felt they could say these things to each other in life? The final image, of the hydrangea, representing forgiveness, but wilted and brown, was one that stood out. There's a window for understanding there - for the law to catch up with compassion - but it's not certain. I don't have a good wrap-up here, just wanted to share thoughts for others who might have liked the show. It was solid and sometimes truly moving, and I'd love to see more shows like it.
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epikhightechnology · 2 months ago
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All these policemen are useless 🤦🤦 "ah yes our only witness who's seen the murderer's face is in the hospital where all the suspects work! Lets just leave him there unguarded surely nothing bad will happen" 🤡🤡🤡
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vegaseatsass · 2 months ago
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(Spare Me Your Mercy Finale Spoilers)
Thinking more about the end of Spare Me Your Mercy, about Kan agreeing to confess "only if that's your wish" as Kan-assisted euthanasia of their relationship, complete with Kan first pointing out Tew doesn't have the ability to end this on his own ("you have no evidence without my confession"), and Tew giving Kan the dead flower he placed in his mother's hair.
Tew in the car driving a cuffed Kan to prison has found peace: he's grieving, something has ended, but he has closure and a quiet catharsis after agony, confusion, questioning, and that is what Kan was willing to give him if Tew really saw no other way forward for them through the pain he knew he'd caused him.
I'm just very hung up on Kan always prioritizing the end-of-life wishes of his patients, and the end-of-relationship wishes of Tew, without taking himself or his own needs into account. I think a lot in the euthanasia debate about the family (Tew, Rin, etc) feeling impacted by a dying parent's choice, the "you wanted to leave early but what about me, who loved you and wanted more time with you?" of it all, or on the flipside caretakers who think their aging relative is a burden they'd be better off without regardless of whether that person has plenty of life left to live - and how studiously Kan rejects all of that, champions the individual patient's autonomy and rights against ageist, ableist pressures to prioritize their loved ones and caretakers.
But in my opinion, he has also been pushing aside some of his own grief and pain, how much Kan hurts every time he says goodbye to a patient, or the vicarious agony that drives him from witnessing their suffering before they make that choice. I really think so much of Kan -> Tew is Kan's sympathetic grief over Tew's mother, how much he loved Tew's mother, how much he didn't have the means to fully grieve her on his own because it's not like she was HIS mother. And unlike a person's choice for what to do with their life and body, in the case of a relationship dying, both parties should have autonomy. Not usually in making the choice, but certainly in how they get to walk back to their life once it's over. But in this "death", Tew gets peace and the ability to "move on", but Kan gets imprisonment, an end to everything he's worked for, a stuckness in place and in hurt, potentially forever. A relationship is not about one person's wishes. Two people are involved. But 1. Kan has been taking away Tew's autonomy from the start (imo in his own insane not-processing-his-own-grief way, by trying to honor Tew's mother's wishes to give Tew a perfect significant other over all other considerations) by deceiving him and manipulating him. So he feels this debt of pain inflicted that he has to relieve by doing ANYTHING Tew asks, the way he would relieve a patient's suffering with morphine even if it hurts him to lose them 2. Kan is, imo, not great at looking at or taking care of his own needs, which is why he's so crazy in how he deals with his unexpectedly active desire to be with Tew, his uncharacteristically strong need to make it work with Tew, in the face of their fundamental incompability and values misalignment (shoots Boss to hide a secret, euthanizes Boss against his value system to hide a secret, lies and lies and lies and lies).
So of course so it's easier to default to the system he uses with his patients: if it's what you want, I'll do it. My feelings are beside the point. My beliefs are beside the point. My future is beside the point. All that matters is your autonomy and consent. Not mine.
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everythingiguess · 3 months ago
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I have a big question for anybody who reads this and wants to answer, and of course has read the Spare Me Your Mercy books because my question has a major spoiler in it.
Does Wasan ever find out the truth? I've read the first book.
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toastofthetrashfire · 2 months ago
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Ah! Thank you for the detailed response. It's interesting to know that the show is giving more weight to the topic and generally elevating it from a plot device. I think that's really important context for engaging with the show, and I can respect them trying to take the topic seriously, even if there have been issues in the process. I do think they stepped into territory in episode 7 in terms of disability that they weren't adequately prepared to give the space and nuance it properly deserved. However, you make a really great point about giving a raw look at how one's relationship with care giving, disability, and illness gets complicated in rural and/or under-supported communities. I wish there had been time to deepen that exploration and fully contextualize it in a larger conversation. @pinkkop also made similar points in this post which I think points to how the show has a lot it wants to say and show, but simply hasn't had the time to get to those nuances in a way that does those hints at rawness justice. Still it's interesting to know that while Sammon's novel avoids the disability quagmire, that it comes down to a lack of deep engagement with the topic of euthanasia in general. This is truly where adaptations can get messy but truly interesting!
edit: wanted to add an addition @pinkkop made to their original post cause it adds even more good discussion!
Hi! I saw that you've read Euthanasia, and I had a question after watching episode 7 of Spare Me Your Mercy. I'm curious about the framing of Boss' death and what space the novel gives to tease out the complexities of euthanasia and disability? As a disabled watcher, I come to discussions of euthanasia outside terminal illness quite wary. Though I'm certainly coming from a Western context where euthanasia and disability is a very sensitive topic and the conversation might look pretty different in Thailand. The framing in the show felt at the very least rushed in terms of building any nuance into the conversation so far, so I'm curious if and how the novel explores the complexities of this.
Hi Shane 💖
To be honest I think that the series is doing far better in terms of show the complexities than the books in terms of euthanasia (i know, unbelievable but bare with me for a second here friend).
So.... the biggest difference the series has made so far is changing the roles between Somsak and Boss. In the book, Somsak was the main culprit and Boss was his accomplice in the way that Boss/Boze also idolises Kan and his ideals -> Somsak convinced Boss to join him in his quest to euthanise patients.
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And if you ask what Doctor Somsak's motivation is? There isn't more to it as much as he believes in the same thing as Kan and Kan coming to the hospital is now a future scapegoat for him.
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In the novel, Kan also deliberately euthanised/murdered Dr. Somsak when he was in the hospital after they were both injured in their gun fight (similar to what happened to Boss) (pinging @waitmyturtles who may be interested to know that novel!Kan wasn't just a morally grey ass, he really did fuck up there and genuinely did not deserve to end up with Wasan where they left them in the first novel).
But there wasn't a dramatic conversation between them like how Boss asked Kan to do kill him. No, like novel!Kan straight up murdered Somsak to keep him from telling everyone his secret (granted it was his only murder and he did go to prison for it but yeah still novel!Kan was... something else).
So in this sense I think the series has already done much better with the topic of euthanasia, opening up more sides to the debates whereas the novel only touches upon euthanasia in a very surface level way to move forward with its the murder mystery plot.
It's doing it very clumsily for sure but for instance I like that Boss's background story represented how his mother got caregiver burnout and in a country where public healthcare is not as developed and there aren't much welfare or support schemes for people living in rural areas, it's not uncommon to see this seemingly selfish thinking from people around terminally ill/permanently disabled people. It's selfish and inherently discriminatory but it's a raw representation of the painfully ugly mindset people may harbour but will never say it out loud in public.
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I'm in no way defending this series by the way, I'm simply saying that if you're looking for more nuances and complexities on the topic of euthanasia in the novels, they're definitely not going to offer that. I would say that the novels offer more complexities in the development of the relationship between Kan and Wasan because it's constructed in a way that's much more believable for reader audience.
The series... I think EP.7 tried a little too much with incorporating assisted suicide into euthanasia which is only going to make it much more controversial.
I hope these little novel spoilers help and answer some of your questions. I really can't offer anything from the novels in terms of disability because it wasn't even mentioned once ಥ_ಥ
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thisautistic · 3 months ago
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kan (tor i guess??) is left-handed. that's gonna come back somehow obviously
i love a chekov's lefty
didn't realize that tor (or i forgot) is a fellow.
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incandescentflower · 2 months ago
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Boy did JJ and Tor do everything in their power with the material they were given, but that was so messy and had so many short cuts in the wrong places, imo.
At first I thought they really lost their moral grounding with Kan by what happened with Boss, but they really truly could have adjusted the narrative to have that clear tragic through line that they seemed to be going for and just didn't hit.
Ideally, we would have felt that tragedy acutely in their love scene, perhaps already having processed what happened with Tew's mother. If Tew had come to support Kan's ethical practice of euthanasia, but held him accountable for what he did to Boss, it could have been pointed out as a desperate reaction to a situation created by a system that does not support the practice.
If what Kan was doing was legal, so much of what happened could have been avoided - Tew's mother wouldn't have wanted to do this without his knowledge (she clearly knew her son would be compromised by the conflict between her wishes and the law), Boss' activities wouldn't have been conflated with what Kan was doing - in theory there wouldn't have been deaths with different MOs confusing the investigation, and obviously Boss couldn't use Kan's activities to blackmail Kan into becoming an actual murderer.
Tor and JJ gave their scene conflict so much emotion, but it couldn't fix the illogical beats of their relationship and the lack of character development on either of their parts. Neither of them saw anything differently. Tew didn't change how he saw euthanasia and Kan didn't seem to think what he did to Boss was wrong. If he did, they didn't hit on that at all. An ends justify the means mentality is the opposite of what you would argue in an ethical practice of euthanasia. It's the means that matter, which is why what Boss was doing wasn't euthanasia, even if he seemed to think so.
The messaging could be that one person (or two with On) can't move independently and navigate these issues on their own. This mess is the consequence of society not willing to face that there are some situations where this is the best treatment available to people. Ignoring that does nothing, and there are more extensive possible repercussions to doing so.
All in all, at least JJ and Tor kiss pretty. I would have probably been really annoyed to have watched 8 eps where they billed it as a BL and not gotten a kiss, but damn it, they were good at it and if I had real feelings about those characters as a couple I think I could have really gotten hooked up on the tragedy of circumstances these characters were caught up in and actually rooted for them.
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crows-of-buckets · 2 months ago
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I think, as a crow, Illario would firmly have the mindset of "death isnt the worst thing that can happen to you"
Which has to make Lucanis' return so much more upsetting. You wanted your cousin dead (he was going to get himself killed anyways. Now, a year, ten, what does it matter, this job will kill him) and for a whole year you think you've succeeded.
And then you find out that no, you couldn't even grant your cousin (your brother) the grace of a quick clean death. He was tortured and twisted into a demon, and the man who walks through the door is a husk, puppeted by the (quite literal) spirit of your mistake.
How do you even cope with that. You deal with death, it's your life, it's his, and yet somehow what was supposed to be a quick kill was dragged out into something twisted and awful. Does it eat at him? If he's redeemed, does it keep him up at night? If locked away, does he pace the length of his cage and think that he too locked his cousin to such a fate? I need to study this man like a bug he fascinates me
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pigglepiephi · 5 months ago
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Maybe if they had had an Inception-style end to the last ep of 4 Minutes, where you didn’t know for sure if Tyme & Great were still in the ‘4 minutes experience’ or not, then maybe, just maybe, some part of that last episode would have made sense…
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blue-grama · 3 months ago
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A good death in Spare Me Your Mercy Ep 3
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End-of-life decisions are really interesting to me; I used to volunteer for a hospice organization, and it's something I hope to get back to in the future, too. So I'm preordained to be into Spare Me Your Mercy, but I really want to recommend it just as a (so far) thoughtful look at death and palliative care. We saw the series' view of a 'good' death in episode 3 - surrounded by family and tradition, rich in meaning, happening at a time and place of the person's choosing. (I almost wrote 'patient,' but the point here is that the person isn't in the patient role. They're dying how so many of us wish to and how so few of us will be allowed to, at home and in control and having reached the inevitable end of a full life.) If you're a sucker for northern Thailand, this series is a winner. Based on the clothing, I believe this is supposed to be the Lahu Hill Tribe, and the glimpse into their funeral rites and view of death is so interesting, especially contrasted with Thiu's Buddhist upbringing (he mentions the possibility of being reborn into hell as opposed to the more gentle moving-between-worlds vision of the afterlife of the Lahu). I hope we get enough time in this series to really work through Thiu's feelings about his mom's passing - right now, I'm wondering why she didn't wait, if Kan will be able to convey her reasons to Thiu, and if they're reasons he can live with. You never know with mysteries, but right now this one has me in suspense*. Kan is sus as hell, but we've been given no reason to think he'd kill one of this patients as brutally as the lung cancer patient died. I like the ambiguity around Kan and Thiu's relationship right now, too. Kan absolutely started flirting to try to play Thiu, but I think Thiu's vulnerability around his mom's death is getting to Kan. Thiu's a little harder to read - his view of Kan clearly shifted over the course of watching Kan work in the villages, but I can't tell how much he's going along with dating Kan in order to keep him close versus out of genuine interest. I imagine the pickings are slim out in the country, so might as well date the sketchy doctor who might have killed your mom?? HE'S GASLIGHTING YOU ABOUT THE POTASSIUM CHLORIDE, THIU!!! Still, Thiu's mom died like 3 weeks ago, so I'm willing to write a lot of his life choices off as "hot mess." 🤣 They feel very early Tan/Bunn to me, and Sammon loves her a gray-character romance, so it'll be very interesting to see where this is going. *Haven't read the book, don't want to know
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epikhightechnology · 2 months ago
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These bitches watching a movie while on's tied up in a wardrobe i cant
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vegaseatsass · 2 months ago
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Spare Me Your Mercy thoughts!! (series spoilers)
I finished SMYM this morning and I wanted to share some very quick rushed thoughts. I'm nervous because since I watched asynchronously with Tumblr and have existed in my own little bubble, I don't have ongoing fandom discussion informing my own thoughts, so yeah just know none of this is in response to anything but the series itself lol
Before the finale I had a post planned in my head that was gonna say: I'm very sorry to my beloved JJ, but Kan/Boss is a much more interesting ship to me than Kan/Tew. Boss is just <3 dearest darlingest fucked up little guy, and I really wanted him and Kan to get into a codependent situationship of some sort. Then I really REALLY wanted Kan to fight Boss harder on his internalized ableist suicidality, for On and Kan to, like, take care of him together in a coercive house arrest-y situation where he is prisoner as much as patient until they can convince him not to do murders, but Boss really does want to learn from Kan on one level, even as he resents him for trapping him in this body and refusing to let him go on another level... that is what I wanted
HOWEVER. AFTER THE FINALE.
Let me try to do bullet points for all of this because there is a lot
Kanboss is still full of delicious possibilities (never mind KanBossSom ooooo), and I will still ship it, and anyone who wants to join me in shipping this + BoonDome (Taygun) from Midnight Museum, defs hmu (Do you see JJ! I'm equal opportunity to you and Tor in my unfair anti-canon shipping!)
But the implication, for ME, that Kan went so hard on courting Tew not ONLY because he needed to throw him off the scent, not ONLY because he was instantly attracted to him, BUT ALSO as some kind of desperate attempt to fulfill Tew's mother's dying wish, because Kan loved Tew's mother with the deranged intensity of a motherless child who never stopped looking for a proxy mom, and really was trying to be a good doctorson to her, and if that meant seducing her son and promising to never make him sad so she could smile down on them from heaven then that is what he was gonna do, even if the son was a cop whose beliefs are fundamentally incompatible with Kan's, Kan will make it work, FOR THE MOTHER THEY BOTH LOST
listen it's so messy and delicious and it also clarifies so much of the early energy where Kan was going SO HARD and Tew was just like :? :|
I get that some of this was always that Tew is repressed and inhibited, which I love as a characterization choice ("it's not easy for me to fall for someone" finally some representivity), whereas Kan is wide open to whatever the universe has to offer in all ways. I love that on paper, but in practice the early chemistry was just weird to me, it felt like Kan was pushing to make things happen far before he had a specific cop-deceiving reason to. I just honestly didn't believe he was as into Tew as he was insisting he was, and I love both actors and was confused why the chemistry felt so off.
So that weird frenetic premature "I gotta date this guy" energy that Kan was putting out actually being about Tew's mother, Tew's mother that Tew was always going to see Kan as the murderer of, when Kan was doing everything he could to honor her agency and wishes in lieu of being able to do the same for his own mother, and one of those wishes included romantically pursuing TEW, a COP who was always going to see Kan as his beloved patientmom's MURDERER, aghhhhhh I love it
I love Kan as a whole, I love how crazy he got by the end, I love that he shot Boss in the neck because he was afraid he was going to expose him to Tew, I love that he medically assisted Boss's suicide in trade for not exposing him to Tew, I love that he believes the law is wrong and believes he's doing the right thing and does not believe anything righteous is happening when Tew puts the cuffs on him but he's in so deep with this relationship now that he can't not give Tew what he wants. Like Tew doesn't convince Kan on anyyy level that he's wrong and should go to jail. But Kan wants to give Tew what Tew needs even when it hurts Kan and all the people he could be helping. Kan, honorer of life and autonomy at all costs, would and did ACTUALLY kill for Tew. So so quickly, his fear changed from "this cop may catch me and stop my important work" to "this cop is gonna break up with me if he thinks I killed his mom (which I didn't btw, I loved his mom) and I can't bear it" Not a single hinge in sight <3
I loved the ending. My ideal ending for cop characters is to question everything they've ever believed and like, quit their job Dan Not Me style or at least have some kind of spiral into madness, and there was an instant where I was hoping Tew was going to get that, but instead the story swung in the other direction and idk it hit that much harder for being not what I wanted but what I could entirely, with my whole self, believe. Tew tells Kan he loves him and to me, he appeared so content in that moment, catharsis achieved, romantic fulfillment unlocked, because Kan is letting him lock him away and not have to seriously question the wrong, broken laws he has committed his life to following. "I have answers, closure, true love, and a proud mom watching my career bloom like she wanted", while Kan just appears lowkey dead inside. They're not in the same place at ALL. I'm not sure they were ever in the same place for the entire series, but you really really feel it in the unsettling dissonance of that final scene. "Here's a dead flower you can't even hold with your cuffed hands as a token of my affections. (like the one you gave my mother <3 BITCH)" And I love that it ends there!! There's room to breathe and to speculate on our own about what happens next, to interpret it all a million different ways
There's just something about death and Kan insisting on his patients' autonomy always if that is what they choose, and then Kan choosing his own sort of death - death of the work that matters most to him, death of freedom, death of what he believed this relationship could be, the list goes on - with his eyes wide open and full agency, for Tew's sake. Like if the terminal patients in the show want Kan's help because they're in such unbearable pain they can't take it anymore, I think you can see the way he feels about this relationship - has been trying not to see, to shoot guys in the neck to not have to see - as akin to that level of physical suffering. Everything he does to try to make this impossible relationship work, to prevent Tew from knowing the inevitable, obvious truth which would destroy both Kan and their relationship, only puts him in more agony. So in the end he chooses death instead of trying to hang on to this declining relationship, for whatever few months he had left with Tew to struggle through in deceit and agony. Yeowch. Damn. Great shit.
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babyangelsky · 3 months ago
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So does the director already suspect Kan? The nurse was very sus too when the cops came around. Does everyone suspect? Do some already know?
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thisautistic · 3 months ago
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coincidence? i think NOT.
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incandescentflower · 2 months ago
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I don't understand the reasons people made most of the decisions on this episode of Spare Me Your Mercy. The story is simply having their reasons be "plot" and then not trying at all to convince the audience there's a motivation for any of them to do such stupid things.
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doyou000me · 3 months ago
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Now that this has had time to brew a bit (and after reading some comments and theories), I have two working theories:
A) Due to the time constraint, they want to get the mystery of who the killer is out of the way and are letting it be apparent that it's Dr Kan in order to free up time to focus the rest of the series on the moral question of euthanasia/mercy killing.
or
B) The focus of the story will be the murder mystery, and Dr Kan is in some way a red herring (or possibly one of two killers as per @pinkkop's theory). Considering the sloppiness of the easily found syringe in the last case, it almost seems like someone is deliberately trying to fram Dr Kan.
Seeing as this series is only going to be 8 episodes (?!?!?!!), my assumption at this point is that they're going to go with one of these two routes, but I'll be very impressed if they manage to weave both of them together in a satisfying manner.
Then again, it's only been 1 episode so far. What do I know? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Either this show wants us to know that Dr Kan is the killer, or it's a very big red herring and they're deliberately making it seem like Dr Kan is the killer.
Either way, they sure are creating some very tasty tension between our two main leads.
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