‘Butterfly’ Episode 5 Recap: “Seoul”

In an alternate Butterfly timeline, where Juno never sold Jung out and he didn’t remove himself from Rebecca’s life for nine years, it might look something like Episode 5 (“Seoul”). Side by side in a rooftop observation post, they gab lightly about their plan. Rebecca even affectionately refers to Jung as “Dad.” You can imagine more of them in such a timeline, the superagent pops and his talented legacy daughter, operating together on jobs across the globe. They have each other’s six as they infiltrate a downtown Seoul condo building, seamlessly access its surveillance hub, gain entry to a luxury apartment, and plant a listening device in there, all in a matter of seconds. And when it’s time to go, they hook up matching grappling cables and descend to the street below. It’s as if their family business is spycraft, and business is good. 

Maybe that’s where they’ll be by Butterfly’s Episode 6 finale. But for now, Jung and Rebecca’s play to make Juno paranoid of Oliver and turn Oliver against his mom is working like a charm. The bug Jung plants at Oliver’s is professionally placed, but just obvious enough that he’ll see it, and thereby suspect Caddis looking over his shoulder. And after their descent, Jung slips into Senator Dawson’s spa day with a directive. The senator should publish a memo about a key witness against Caddis, thereby ensuring Juno’s mole in Dawson’s office will see that. Everybody, especially Juno, will suspect the recently-abducted Oliver. “If you want him to turn, this is how you do it,” Rebecca tells her father. And Rebecca being Rebecca, she can’t resist a dig. “Oliver is a coward – that’s why he’s not in the field like me.”

While father and daughter continue to enjoy working closely with their hands – now they’re fashioning explosive charges from random junk and cell phones; maybe in an even further distant timeline, they’d run a bake shop together – Juno, seeing the writing on the wall, tries to send her son back to England. She assures him it’s for his own safety while her tone suggests she’d agree with Rebecca’s diagnosis of cowardice. 

Angry at her, angry with himself, Oliver takes to his flame red Porsche Panamera. Which of course is all part of the Jung-Rebecca plan. They tail him. They box him in. He freaks out. Makes a series of weird turns. And then they cut the hybrid vehicle’s power. Oliver steps from the Porsche just in time as Rebecca uses her IED to transform his flame red Panamera into just flames. Sufficiently freaked, Oliver turns himself in. He spills all on Caddis and Juno, then demands immunity from Dawson. And maybe he’ll even get it. Like Jung said, Juno is the bigger fish here.

Working closely together and enjoying it has given Jung and Rebecca time to truly consider what comes next. Jung admits that even before he did something so extreme as to fake his death, he felt lost inside intelligence work. Felt his humanity slipping away, especially after seeing the same feeling exacerbated in Juno, his former partner. “That’s why I came back for you. You can’t keep living this life, Rebecca – it starts to break you.” The spark they sense in this partnership is not just from that spy life. It’s because they love each other and are using the immediacy of their situation to express it. “So now that we’re in good with Dawson, you thinking you want to go back to the States? I don’t know, it could be nice.” 

Jung stopped looking at his family as a vulnerability, and it changed his whole professional viewpoint. But for Rebecca, what change looks like is still an open question. From the second Butterfly began, she was clearly in love with dirty work. (That little smile! Those effortless killings!) Assuming Dawson’s investigation and Oliver’s flip brings Juno down and dismantles Caddis Private Intelligence, it’s not like Rebecca can just source a new gig on LinkedIn for Assassins. She was born into this, graduated to the professional ranks under emotional circumstances, and took to the work as both an escape and a challenge. Now she’s 23, and staring at the pure possibility of the rest of her life. “What am I supposed to do?” she asks her father. “I’m good at it – I like it.”  

The question hangs in the air like it’s on its own grappling hook, because before long they’re running again. As they were prematurely celebrating, we caught a shot of Mr. Gun, no worse for wear from taking shots on the dock, flipping his custom curved blade while closing on Jung’s position. Quick, to the rooftops! With a clutch of Caddis goons coming at them from one direction, and Gun lurking somewhere in the vicinity, Jung and Rebecca split up and make for the Han River at speed. If they get out of this latest scrape, maybe she could use some of her college eligibility to run track. Rebecca is really fast!

But they won’t get out of it. Their celebration really was premature, because a wild card like Gun was always gonna keep on coming. They’re 50 yards apart, separated by a highway that runs along the riverside, and Jung can only watch as Gun roars up in an SUV and flattens Rebecca with its open door. Their plan to make Oliver sell out Juno was splendid, and operating together was like a dream for the healing emotions of this reunited duo. But to find out what’s next for his family, Jung will have to finish this job on his own. Gun has taken Rebecca. 

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.