‘Butterfly’ Episode 4 Recap: “Pohang”

The big showdown on the docks in Butterfly Episode 3 (“Busan”) has really shuffled this show’s deck. For one thing, teaming to protect Eunju and Minhee and taking Oliver hostage in the process has galvanized Jung and Rebecca’s relationship in a way all of their arguing about faked deaths and those left behind could never. Add to this Oliver’s gun-to-his-head babbling – it was Juno who burned Jung to those terrorists nine years ago, in a play to fully take Caddis as her own – and Rebecca and her dad have more cause than ever to unite against the Caddis boss.

At the outset of Butterfly Episode 4 (“Pohang”), Juno is fishing Gun out of the sea (told you he wasn’t dead; shot twice but he’s barely limping) and searching for Jung & co, which involves a lot of the grandstanding this show still can’t seem to make convincing. She’s yelling at her Caddis HQ computer jockeys, demanding answers from lackeys, and even getting in Gun’s face with questions about Oliver’s whereabouts. That last one seems risky, considering the killer is an independent contractor. But neither Gun nor anyone else will find Jung and his fam, because they are safe and sound at a secure warehouse facility in Pohang owned by Eunju’s father. And check this out: he’s an underworld smuggler. Deck, meet shuffle.

Well, at least the chicken soup looks delicious. At the warehouse, the lunch Jung, Eunju, Minhee and Rebecca share with Eunju’s parents is full of forced pleasantries and slights, like Eunju’s mom criticizing Jung’s attempts to speak Korean without his American accent. Rebecca looks on with amusement, and can’t help herself – she uses her own limited Korean to chide Eunju’s dad about his smuggling operations. It’s a good scene, further uniting the newly-blended Jung family in solidarity, and later, when Rebecca gets a laugh out of Jung – “Your in-laws seem chill” – it’s like her “selfish fucking dick” speech from last episode/yesterday couldn’t be further in the rearview.

Reina Hardesty just keeps doing the little things to make Rebecca real and Butterfly better. While Oliver sweats in their custody, and Jung tries to make him talk, it’s Rebecca who eventually does by further playing on his oedipal tendencies. With a single line delivery, Hardesty illustrates her character’s painful past as an orphan raised by Juno inside the Caddis intelligence apparatus. How it hardened her, and how she’s made her work as an assassin central to her being. “I bit through my tongue that day,” she says, and describes with a single instance more than Oliver has ever had to endure as a Caddis nepo baby.

Also: “That bitch destroyed my life.” Whatever Rebecca has done for Juno and Caddis – and according to Oliver, she’s killed for them hundreds of times – does not rate anymore. In other words, her professional life has been fully re-framed. Jung, correctly, notices. “What you do – you like it, don’t you?” He means this by way of thanking her for helping him. But it also means he sees how they are wired the same. This whole plan he had, however it was supposed to end, has become something better, more tangible. He finally sees that he’s not saving his daughter from anything she hadn’t already decided to do herself. And now Rebecca is fully in agreement with Jung. “We have to bring her down.” 

Charles Parnell’s gravitas also gets a workout in this episode, because Senator George Dawson is officially throwing the full weight of his office behind investigating Juno. The misdirect she tried, burning Rebecca to him for the Karpov assassination, failed. It made Dawson even more convinced his former CIA protogé ordered the Russian’s murder to tie up loose ends that could tail back to her. Thanks to Oliver’s further singing in custody, Jung and Rebecca also know about the heat Dawson is bringing. And leaving Eunju and Minhee with her smuggler parents, they head back to Seoul to intercept the Senator. 

This is a fun sequence, and the second time Episode 4 of Butterfly made us hungry. At Anyang Central Market in Seoul, the stalls and alleys are packed with mung bean pancake sellers, tiny noodle shops, and sizzling skewers of Hanwoo beef. So packed it’s hard for a senator to navigate. Working together, Rebecca and Jung separate Dawson from his security long enough for Jung to sit him down. If he wants the realest dirt on Juno, proof she’s playing her own interests against the US, he’s got it. But Jung demands immunity. Not just for himself but for Rebecca, too. Yes, she is an assassin, and she killed Karpov. “But we both know Juno’s the bigger catch here.” 

We really thought Jung’s proof was gonna be Oliver himself. Dump his ass on Dawson’s doorstep and demand he spills every Caddis secret. Instead, Jung just lets the kid walk free. Even gives him his phone. And as we see Oliver return to Juno, it’s with Jung’s last line to him resonating. “She’ll know about those things you told me.” He’s banking on Juno interrogating her own son, perhaps even with the ruthlessness we know a selfish megalomaniac like her is capable of. So the plan seems to hinge on Oliver’s feelings of inadequacy, and his jealousies. Before he left their clutches, Jung and Rebecca played him a doctored version of Juno’s last voicemail. Basically, they cut out the part where she asked for him back. While they work with Dawson to strengthen his investigation, they’re also planting discontent inside Caddis through the presence of Oliver as a damaged goods son. “All these years I questioned myself as an agent, as a father,” Jung tells Rebecca. “Now it’s Juno’s turn.” 

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.