Prime Video’s espionage thriller Butterfly, based on the BOOM! Studios graphic novel series created by Arash Amel and Marguerite Bennett, is a family affair as much as an action romp. It’s also a neat fusion of American and Korean storytelling and storytellers, with Daniel Dae Kim topping the bill of a thriller set in the bowels of global espionage. Since neither parenting nor international spycraft is known for being simplistic, I’ve handily compiled a detailed breakdown of all six episodes so you can keep track of all the private intelligence firms, current and former agents, double-crosses, fistfights, and shootouts in Season 1.
Should you choose to accept it, obviously. Oh, and what about that ending?
Episode 1, “Pilot”
The pilot episode is, as ever, all about establishing the essentials. In a very stylish opening action stretch that flits between two perspectives, neither of them especially clear to begin with, we get the general idea. On the one hand, we have Rebecca, an assassin for the secretive Caddis Private Intelligence, and on the other, we have David, a seemingly independent agent with a very particular set of skills who is trying to track Rebecca down for initially mysterious reasons.
Not long after David hijacks Rebecca’s extraction vehicle, sending her on the run, we learn the truth of the matter. Rebecca is David’s daughter, and he has spent the last nine years in hiding after founding Caddis alongside its current boss, Juno. David was forced to fake his own death and disappear, and for the intervening nine years, Juno has moulded Rebecca into a borderline sociopathic pet assassin while building an empire by selling intelligence secrets to the highest bidder.
Now, though, David has had enough and leads Rebecca on a merry chase throughout the premiere episode of Butterfly until he can eventually reveal himself to her. The tense cat-and-mouse chase is just building to the show’s underlying hook, which is David and Rebecca trying to rekindle their relationship against the backdrop of deadly international espionage. Rebecca isn’t pleased to see her father — she knocks him out and calls Juno the second he turns his back — but the revelation that he’s alive does unavoidably affect her, especially when Juno immediately betrays her trust by sending Atwood, another Caddis agent whom Rebecca had a semi-intimate relationship with, to kill them.
Episode 1 of Butterfly ends with David and Rebecca reluctantly going on the run together, trying to stay one step ahead of their pursuers while working on their own rather complex father-daughter relationship.
Episode 2, “Daegu”
David has a plan in Episode 2 of Butterfly, but it’s an admittedly vague one. He has a house in Vietnam, which is crucially a non-extradition country, and hiding out there seems feasible. But it’s easier said than done, given Rebecca’s lingering anger with and mistrust of her presumed dead father. One of the first things she does is call Juno, then lie about having done it, which doesn’t exactly engender much rapport, especially since Juno is clearly the Big Bad in all this.
This doesn’t successfully pull the wool over David’s eyes, either — he later drugs Rebecca so he can look through her phone and confirm his suspicions that she did indeed rat him out. But some relationship ground is definitely made here in Episode 2. When he finally gets a minute after a fraught border crossing and that drug-induced nap, David explains why he was forced to disappear in the first place. He and his team were sent after the terrorist cell of one Hugo Maldonado, but walked right into an ambush. David’s team was killed, and he became aware that Maldonado was targeting Rebecca to get to him. Disappearing was the only way to protect her.
If this doesn’t necessarily satisfy as an explanation, Rebecca’s familiarity with the dirty tricks of the trade means she’s willing to accept it — sort of, anyway. And the newfound “trust” is immediately tested, since David is forced to rescue his wife, Eunju, from Caddis agents, and wants Rebecca to await his return. She doesn’t, following him instead, which allows for the episode’s obligatory big action set-piece but also another revelation that knocks Rebecca again — David and Eunju have a daughter.
Butterfly remains a family affair. Oliver is Juno’s son, meaning there’s a parental bond defining both halves of the narrative. Episode 2 also introduces Gun, a Korean hitman introduced strangling a housewife to death. Juno hires him to kill David, which should dispel any notions that she’s anything other than a villain, and he comes perilously close to succeeding at the train station.
Episode 3, “Busan”
After a close brush with Gun, David finds himself injured and on a rapidly accelerated timeline in Episode 3 of Butterfly. He needs his emergency fake IDs from Yong-shik posthaste, and to make matters worse in the meantime, Rebecca is really not taking the news of David having another daughter well. She spends the entire train journey intimidating and upsetting Eunju and the child, Minhee, until they’re forced to make an emergency stop and slip into a truck — with the help of a bloody handprint as a distraction — to avoid the ambush set up for them by Juno.
Once they make it back to David’s safehouse, it’s time for some family bonding. For Rebecca, this involves showing Minhee how to load, cock, and fire a gun, much to the horror of Eunju. But her antagonism is clearly rooted in deep-seated jealousy and resentment about her parental situation. This colours all the scenes of pseudo-domesticity, including baking a cake, the cute bond that’s forming between Rebecca and Minhee, and David and Rebecca wistfully recalling the name of the game they used to play when she was a kid (it’s Butterfly, geddit?), and it adds a lot, even if David is quickly pulled away from trying to deal with his personal issues to instead focus on his passport ones.
David doesn’t get to meet Yong-shik, though, as Gun turned up earlier and killed him. He fought back valiantly and refused to give David up, but the outcome was the same in the end, as Gun was able to acquire the information he needed. Juno sends a team, including Oliver, to link up with Gun and take David down — and Rebecca too, if she gets in the way. David realizes something is wrong and gets his family out of the safehouse, but they’re cornered at the docks.
During a shootout and fight scene, David goes one-on-one with Gun, seemingly killing him — although clearly not really — while Rebecca stalks Oliver and Eunju protects Minhee belowdecks. David eventually helps Rebecca corner Oliver, who reveals that it was Juno who sold David’s team out to Maldonado and gave him information about Rebecca. Armed with this information, David calls Juno and seems to execute Oliver on the line, but we’ll see about that.
Daniel Dae Kim and Reina Hardesty in Butterfly | Image via Prime Video
Episode 4, “Pohang”
Episode 4 of Butterfly, which is a comparatively chilled-out chapter compared to some of the others, reveals immediately that both Gun and Oliver survived the standoff at the docks. Gun is retrieved by Juno, while Oliver is being held captive by David. Juno pretends to be willing to trade Oliver’s life for the safety of David’s family, but it’s clear she doesn’t mean it.
David uses her voicemail to trick Oliver into believing that Juno wouldn’t trade for his safety, which compels him to spill what he knows about Karpov. This is the guy Rebecca killed in the premiere, who Juno was using to feed intelligence to the Russians. Apparently, this intelligence was incredibly detrimental to Ukraine. The CIA found out and sent an asset to befriend Oliver, and when Oliver found him snooping through his laptop, he killed him. Senator Dawson, who’s heading a congressional investigation into Caddis, has basically figured all this out but lacks any evidence to prove it, so David and Rebecca realize they can take Caddis down through him.
The revelation that Juno was behind everything — we get a brief flashback at the top of the episode showcasing the Maldonado hit going wrong — seems to have allowed Rebecca to put most of her issues with David to bed, so they return to Seoul together while Eunju and Minhee stay with Eunju’s ill-tempered but successful parents. They’re quickly able to make contact with Dawson, with whom David pushes for immunity — which will be easier for David than for Rebecca, since she was the one who killed Karpov — and David lets Oliver go, secure in the knowledge that Juno will know he gave up crucial intelligence.
Caddis aren’t beaten yet — they’ve turned one of Dawson’s staff, Vicky Linwood, who has apparently been sleeping with young waiters — but for the first time, it seems like David and Rebecca are getting the upper hand.
Episode 5, “Seoul”
There’s a divide-and-conquer vibe in a surprisingly tame penultimate episode of Butterfly, which revolves primarily around Oliver. Oli is, after all, pretty central to everything that’s going on, since it’s his murder of a CIA asset that Senator Dawson is investigating and that Juno has been trying to cover up. With Oliver having ratted to David, and David having subsequently released Oliver without much explanation, it’s a two-pronged race — David and Rebecca try to convince Oliver to turn on Juno before Juno decides to take him off the board entirely.
Most of the dramatic impetus here comes from the potential of Juno killing Oliver. Each step of the process seems to lean in that direction, with Oliver confessing to her that he told David she set him up in the first place, to him being “officially debriefed” with a lot of questions angling towards potentially conspiring with Dawson. It’s obvious that Oliver is emerging as a potential mole inside Caddis, a suspicion only exacerbated when David pushes Dawson to publicise his acquisition of a witness to flush out the potential mole in his camp.
The result is that David and Rebecca, who spend a little more time cooking and bonding, have to protect David to ensure he gets away from Juno and hands himself in to Dawson. That’s the main suspense stretch of the episode, at least until the end, when David and Rebecca are forced back on the run by a raid on their safehouse. Briefly separated, Gun is able to snatch Rebecca, with David powerless to intervene as he drives away.
The stage for the finale is capably set, but this episode kind of paid the price with its pace.
Episode 6, “Annyeong”
Any hopes of a happy ending are thoroughly dispelled by Butterfly‘s season finale, which provides a chilling coda to what would have otherwise been a fairly standard sticking of the landing. The unexpected last-minute development recontextualizes a lot of what we’ve seen and provides some bigger questions that are much harder to answer, so naturally, I wrote about it all in much more depth.
But here’s the summarized version. After being snatched by Gun at the end of the previous episode, Rebecca remains a captive of Juno, while David has to grovel to his father-in-law in order to drum up the men and equipment he needs to stage a rescue (so much for the legitimacy of his import/export business). All he asks for in return is a favour which isn’t returned to in this finale, so it seems like a Season 2 setup more than anything.
Anyway, David naturally moves on the Caddis motorcade, while Rebecca falls for — or seems to, anyway — Juno’s pitch of them running away and starting a new life together, since she loves her like a daughter and David is just trying to change her. Rebecca is later visibly smug when David arrives and even mounts her own escape attempt, which suggests she was just playing along to buy time, but later developments throw some doubt on this.
Nevertheless, David finally gets his fatal showdown with Gun, killing him, and almost gets his revenge on Juno until Rebecca talks him out of it. Apparently, Juno is a part of her, and she doesn’t want her dead, and since neither she nor David is like Juno, it shouldn’t matter that Juno wouldn’t grant them the same courtesy. It would be a nice growth moment except, as mentioned, later developments undermine this idea.
Thanks to Rebecca’s mercy, Juno lives on to fight another day, catching a private flight to Tangiers where she plans to rebuild a version of Caddis that isn’t confined by American law. She also finally tells Oliver how she really feels about him, although to be fair, he can’t hear her since the plane is taking off. But it’s the thought that counts.
Since David ends up reunited with his entire family, this would almost constitute a happy ending. But he still isn’t totally sure about Rebecca’s motivations or allegiance to Juno, and when she recounts what happened while she was Juno’s prisoner, she lies through her teeth about it. But she otherwise seems fine. At a family dinner, she’s sweet with Minhee, and even nice to Eunju. But she’s also visibly shifty, so when she follows Eunju into the bathroom, alarm bells start ringing. Predictably, they don’t return, and David marches into the bathroom to discover Eunju with her throat cut, Rebecca presumably having done it.
