‘Butterfly’ Episode 2 Recap: “Daegu”

“You know, up until about an hour ago I would’ve given anything to know my Dad was still alive.” So far, David Jung’s big plan – come back from the dead, reunite with his daughter, and then… – well, let’s just say we don’t know what he thought was gonna happen once his very alive self revealed his nine-year lie, because it’s been chaos ever since. In Jung’s SUV, during the drive from Andong to Busan, the silence is deafening whenever Rebecca isn’t lobbing cutting digs like the one above. She’s enjoying needling Jung as much as she seemed to enjoy assassinating that Russian diplomat 24 hours before. When they make a roadside pit stop, she climbs out the window of the bathroom just to make him squirm. In Butterfly, maybe we’re supposed to be rooting for Jung. But it’s Rebecca’s steely attitude we like the most. 

In Episode 1, Rebecca saw what Juno texted Atwood (Josh Plasse), her fellow operative/friend with benefits (KILL JUNG). She knows the Caddis Private Intelligence boss is playing some kind of bigger game, knows she can’t fully trust her. But she calls her on a burner anyway. Oh, there’s “always a place” for her at Caddis? Juno wouldn’t hesitate to snuff out Rebecca along with her dad? At Caddis HQ, Piper Perabo emphasizes a nurturing tone in Juno. But of course it’s a lie. The call ends and Juno turns to Oliver (Louis Landau), her son and right hand. “We need to take him off the board.” As in: the kill order for Jung stands. And if Rebecca gets in the way, that’s the cost of doing business in their private intelligence world. 

While Rebecca and Jung get hung up at a police roadblock – they gotta shoot their way out; somehow no one is hit; it all feels very perfunctory – Juno is phoning a friend. And here’s where Butterfly gets interesting again. Kim Ji-hoon is a South Korea-based contract killer known only as Gun, and he’s in the midst of some dirty business when Juno calls to send him after Jung. “I like a challenge” is one of his few lines. But Kim, with his long hair and heavily brooding presence, plays Gun as one of these action movie-style characters where you know he’ll just keep advancing at a steady, psychopathic pace. Jung is highly skilled. For that matter, so is Rebecca. In calling in a guy like Gun, Juno is basically acknowledging that any of her off-the-shelf Caddis goons aren’t necessarily gonna cut it.

Jung also receives a visitor. Since his inspiring turn Top Gun: Maverick, Charles Parnell has made a nice niche playing military/government types with gravitas, and he’s doing that in Butterfly as Senator Charles Dawson. Dawson arrives unannounced at Juno’s office in Seoul, and invites his old intelligence community colleague out for bowls of budae-jjigae. The mood is friendly. (“How’s Oliver?”) But these people are clearly feeling each other out. Dawson mentions Karpov, the Russian. He was in Seoul to meet with him – until he was killed, that is. The senator and Intelligence Committee member doesn’t say his old friend had a hand in the assassination. But the look he gives Juno over his bowl of stew is one of informed suspicion.  

Speaking of suspicion, drugging your own daughter isn’t gonna help redeem a decade-long disappearing act. But Jung decided it was the only way to figure out if Rebecca had contacted Juno, which of course she did. When she wakes up, the tension is high in the Daegu makgeolli bar/safehouse where they’ve landed, and their talk turns to the raw emotions left in their separation. Rebecca fires another arrow. Does Jung think this “fucked up like daddy-daughter adventure” they’re on is gonna make everything OK? It’s just gonna paper over how he let her believe he was dead and gone? Again, we’re on Rebecca’s side in this. Especially because Jung’s response – “It was the only way I could keep you safe” – is just more of the stock dialogue we’ve been calling out since Butterfly began. They throw a few blows until it turns to frustration and tears. 

For Rebecca, this on-the-run reunion will just get more aggrieved, because now Eunju is calling Jung. You know, the woman he didn’t tell her his supposedly-dead ass is now married to. At Caddis, Juno and Oliver have triangulated Eunju’s position at Dongdaegu Station. This sets up a cat-and-mouse situation inside the station’s large glass atrium – Caddis goons advancing from one direction, Jung’s impending first with Gun from another – that has some exciting moments, but mostly feels like a static riff on the classic Waterloo Station sequence in The Bourne Ultimatum. Especially because, like that film’s cuts to the screens and techs at a CIA substation, Butterfly keeps switching to Juno and Oliver being frantic in the Caddis operations center. They’re like a two-headed version of David Strathairn as the Bourne films’ Noah Vosen.      

We do get some threat-trading, however, once Jung invades Caddis comms. He says he’ll destroy Juno if she goes after his family. (If?) She says she built the agency into an empire while he played dead. And so their game continues. And just when it looks like one of Juno’s people is gonna make the grab, Rebecca shows up to slice that guy’s Achilles tendon. Nice! Jung, disrespecting his daughter’s professional skill set: “I told you to stay at the bar.” Rebecca, with that impish smile we like so much: “I wanted to meet your wife.”

The train to Busan is leaving, with Eunju on it. A final confrontation with Gun on the platform, who hacks a gash into Jung’s belly before Rebecca joins the fray and pushes the killer off. (Check out Kim Ji-hoon’s own sly grin as Gun watches them go; he will meet them again.) And a final revelation as this family reunion just gets more chaotic. Jung and Rebecca meet Eunju on the train…and an adorable little girl, worried for her daddy. The irony is colder than the look in Rebecca’s eyes. “You have a daughter?”

Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.