New (cancelled) show
Feb. 25th, 2026 08:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shallownessButterfly - 1.1 - Pilot
Yes, I know it’s been cancelled. No, I don’t know if this series ends on a cliffhanger. Have started watching it anyway.
I quite liked it. Before seeing it, my understanding was that the show was ‘Korean spydaddy!’ And yeah, it’s spy shenanigans with deft enough set-pieces (well, the stuff where David had sort-of booby-trapped the house he’d lured Rebecca and team into was a bit too long and poorly lit). Really strong opening, with Rebecca on a mission to assassinate some bad dude, starting off as a ‘pregnant’ lady with a blonde wig, ending up disappearing into the city’s streets in a red bomber jacket that matched her lipstick. In between, things had gone wrong so she’d had to kill a lot of henchmen and noticed that things were also wrong with her exfiltration team. And all the while, we knew why things were wrong with said team, because of a lone operative who was trying to get her out of the grips of Caddis, a private intelligence company.
They doled out info drip by drip. Turned out He! was David, who had faked his own death nine years ago (played by Daniel Dae Kim, who is 'him off Lost' in my head), and She! was Rebecca, his daughter, who had got into the family business, because he’d set up Caddis, didn’t like what it had turned into, under Juno (who had this weird thing where only one half of her lips could form a smile, sorry if the actress genuinely had Bell’s palsy or something.) And when you think about it, what father wants his little girl to grow up to be an assassin? So, he was running around South Korea trying to get her back, and even though he’d told his wife (not Rebecca’s mother? Probably younger than him, I note) it would be a one-shot effort and then he’d walked, he stayed there, threatening the secrecy of his cover, because he’d seen his now grown daughter, and felt he had to try again.
There was a nice mirroring of Daniel and Rebecca’s relationship in that Caddis boss Juno worked with her son (who had an English accent), even if she didn’t think much of him and yet gave him a lot of info and work of the admin variety. The South Korean setting added a lot of interest to my western gaze, although I quickly got exasperated with all these conversations that Daniel would start in Korean and then switch to English in. So tokenistic! People don’t act like that, either you’re terrible and say one sentence in your weakest language and then switch (but we always had longer exchanges) or you stick to that one language you speak unless if someone else joins the conversation who can’t speak that language. The lead sounded comfortable enough, even if a Korean made a point of mocking his presumably Americanised accent, so I presume it’s western audience pandering. And yeah, this isn’t a realistic drama for the Walter Presents crowd, but it bugged me. After all, Caddis’s lingua franca seems to be English, so there was plenty of English. Oh, and their Korean offices are ridiculously swish.
At first, because she was more dynamic, I was more interested in Rebecca. Then as we learned what David’s mission was, and saw Juno threatening a mole and seeming like a terrible person, while Rebecca seemed a bit callous, sympathy turned to him. Of course, when he finally made contact, she was overwhelmed that the father she’d thought dead had lied to her (and we knew she had abandonment issues), so of course she chose a third way to the two he’d offered her. Because she has agency! And in fact, knocking him out was what he’d done to an operative instead of killing him when he didn’t want to. Crying, she called Juno and revealed that David was still alive, but later learned, when her colleague with benefits tried to kill her father on Juno’s orders, that that was a mistake. So she was probably going to go with her spydaddy, and I’m going to keep watching.
Yes, I know it’s been cancelled. No, I don’t know if this series ends on a cliffhanger. Have started watching it anyway.
I quite liked it. Before seeing it, my understanding was that the show was ‘Korean spydaddy!’ And yeah, it’s spy shenanigans with deft enough set-pieces (well, the stuff where David had sort-of booby-trapped the house he’d lured Rebecca and team into was a bit too long and poorly lit). Really strong opening, with Rebecca on a mission to assassinate some bad dude, starting off as a ‘pregnant’ lady with a blonde wig, ending up disappearing into the city’s streets in a red bomber jacket that matched her lipstick. In between, things had gone wrong so she’d had to kill a lot of henchmen and noticed that things were also wrong with her exfiltration team. And all the while, we knew why things were wrong with said team, because of a lone operative who was trying to get her out of the grips of Caddis, a private intelligence company.
They doled out info drip by drip. Turned out He! was David, who had faked his own death nine years ago (played by Daniel Dae Kim, who is 'him off Lost' in my head), and She! was Rebecca, his daughter, who had got into the family business, because he’d set up Caddis, didn’t like what it had turned into, under Juno (who had this weird thing where only one half of her lips could form a smile, sorry if the actress genuinely had Bell’s palsy or something.) And when you think about it, what father wants his little girl to grow up to be an assassin? So, he was running around South Korea trying to get her back, and even though he’d told his wife (not Rebecca’s mother? Probably younger than him, I note) it would be a one-shot effort and then he’d walked, he stayed there, threatening the secrecy of his cover, because he’d seen his now grown daughter, and felt he had to try again.
There was a nice mirroring of Daniel and Rebecca’s relationship in that Caddis boss Juno worked with her son (who had an English accent), even if she didn’t think much of him and yet gave him a lot of info and work of the admin variety. The South Korean setting added a lot of interest to my western gaze, although I quickly got exasperated with all these conversations that Daniel would start in Korean and then switch to English in. So tokenistic! People don’t act like that, either you’re terrible and say one sentence in your weakest language and then switch (but we always had longer exchanges) or you stick to that one language you speak unless if someone else joins the conversation who can’t speak that language. The lead sounded comfortable enough, even if a Korean made a point of mocking his presumably Americanised accent, so I presume it’s western audience pandering. And yeah, this isn’t a realistic drama for the Walter Presents crowd, but it bugged me. After all, Caddis’s lingua franca seems to be English, so there was plenty of English. Oh, and their Korean offices are ridiculously swish.
At first, because she was more dynamic, I was more interested in Rebecca. Then as we learned what David’s mission was, and saw Juno threatening a mole and seeming like a terrible person, while Rebecca seemed a bit callous, sympathy turned to him. Of course, when he finally made contact, she was overwhelmed that the father she’d thought dead had lied to her (and we knew she had abandonment issues), so of course she chose a third way to the two he’d offered her. Because she has agency! And in fact, knocking him out was what he’d done to an operative instead of killing him when he didn’t want to. Crying, she called Juno and revealed that David was still alive, but later learned, when her colleague with benefits tried to kill her father on Juno’s orders, that that was a mistake. So she was probably going to go with her spydaddy, and I’m going to keep watching.
