Summary
“Yuri” weighs the cost of friendship as Nanno attempts to help someone who may not need the aid after all.
This recap of Girl From Nowhere season 2, episode 4, “Yuri”, contains spoilers.
Following on from the introduction of Yuri in the previous episode, her namesake episode immediately introduces her as a meek student taken in by Nana (Thasorn Klinnium) and Tuptim (Apichaya Phanichtrakool), two Mean Girls-style queen bees who are obviously using her as a kind of lackey who buys their lunch and pays them needless lip service. The dynamic is complicated, though, when Nanno ingratiates herself among the group.
As ever, Nanno doesn’t have to suck up to claim membership of the group — they’re almost impressed that she doesn’t fear them. Yuri, on the other hand, sacrifices more and more just to be involved, including bullying another student named Meen who supposedly flirted with Nana’s boyfriend. Nanno’s intervention looks as if it’s to protect Yuri, at least at first, but Girl From Nowhere season 2, episode 4 quickly reveals that the dynamic is more complicated than that.
Yuri, it turns out, is well-aware of how she’s being exploited, but she’s playing up to the role in order to scam more money out of Nana and Tuptim in order to spoil her mother. She’s from a very poor family and knows that rich people treat them like charity cases to make themselves feel generous. The vein of classism runs very obviously through “Yuri”, who fantasizes to Nanno about how she’d treat the girls if she were also rich. But Yuri’s self-awareness gives her a different quality to most of the “victims” that Nanno helps out. What she needs Nanno for is the motivation to actually do the things she’s merely fantasizing about — as Nanno explains, money isn’t the only form of currency, and Tuptim and Nana undoubtedly have secrets they’d prefer to keep hidden.
Those secrets include a video file of Meen being raped — Girl From Nowhere season 2, episode 4 includes a warning about the sexual violence — which Nanno finds on their computer, much to her delight. But uncharacteristically, Nanno is jumped from behind and chloroformed, and when she comes to, she’s bound in a makeshift studio. Yuri has betrayed her — this was the plan all along. Nanno plays the scared victim for a while, but as soon as the girls refer to Yuri as a “loyal lapdog”, she’s back to her old tricks, laughing and joking. She reveals that she has already uploaded the evidence from the laptop to the cloud, not just the videos of girls being raped but evidence of transactions including all their names. Nanno continues to antagonize them until the girls brutally beat her to death with a nearby candleholder — all of which is captured on camera. Yuri takes the opportunity to blackmail them with this evidence, confessing her own long con. The power dynamics immediately reverse. Yuri laughingly sics the rapists on the pair of them, as they once did to her.
While the men rape Nana and Tuptim, Yuri talks to Nanno’s corpse, which has been dumped in a bathtub. She thanks her for her help, even though she didn’t need it. Her whole game was to steal their business for herself, which she’s remarkably smug about. But as she turns to leave, the men drown her in the bathtub where Nanno’s corpse is. They take the camera and the laptop and leave. When they’re gone, Nanno opens her eyes and sits up. “If you weren’t so stupid,” she says to Yuri, “it could have been much more interesting.” As she leaves, though, Yuri’s own eyes open under the water, ending Girl From Nowhere season 2, episode 4 with an intriguing twist.
