Blended family bonding time!!
Mar. 25th, 2026 07:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shallownessButterfly - 1.3 Busan
This episode was all awkward family drama interspersed by spy shenanigans and bouts of violence. David engineered an escape off the train before they reached the station and Caddis agents. The Korean state apparatus had cut Caddis off from some intel because of the public scenes they’d caused. David’s wife helped get them on a truck to Busan, and a safehouse he had there. He moved up the time when he’d get the new fake passports from his contact/friend.
All the while, I was worried about his injuries, but he toughed it out by carrying around his youngest daughter, who we learned was called Minhee and (fortunately) bilingual, because the use of English and Korean on this show still baffles internal logic. What he really wanted was for his new blended family to get along, but Rebecca was badly hurt to suddenly learn that her father had remarried and had another daughter while she thought he was dead. Which her new stepmother got, but Rebecca’s way of acting out was to show little Minhee how to play with guns, which to anyone who isn’t a member of the NRA is way out of line. Although Rebecca claimed that he father had done just that when she was a little kid.
What was clear was that little Minhee had imprinted strongly on this cool new big sister with an attitude. Juno would later claim that Rebecaa was a psychopath, but she’s obviously not, even if she takes pleasure in violence and has dreadful coping mechanisms, she is absolutely brim-full of feelings. I get where she’s coming from, but objectively, her stepmother is in the right (apart from maybe saying ‘sure you can call me mom if you want’ in the first half hour that they’ve known each other.)
Oh, and we found out that the show is named after the game that David used to play with Rebecca when she was about Minhee’s age, basically throwing her up in the air (to fly like a butterfly?) and catching her.
Gun (aka the tattooed assassin) was on the hunt. He SOMEHOW found David’s contact, who had some fighting skills, but clearly hadn’t kept them up. He died, loyally refusing to give David up, except, of course, he’d scrawled the details of their meet on a Post-It note.
Juno’s old spy boss the Senator met up with her with a picture of Oliver with a young Korean man (not like that, they were just talking in the same bar) who was both the son of a wealthy property family and a CIA asset, and it had something to do with the Russian hit at the start of the series. It was something Oliver had messed up on. But he pressed his mother to let him in on finding Rebecca, because he knew how she thought, or something.
There seemed to be a lot of ‘You think more highly of your surrogate daughter than your actual son’ going on, barely under the surface. Juno would eventually pick a side, letting Oliver go on the mission, even if Gun was supposed to protect him, and whereas the Senator had wanted to talk to Oliver, she handed him the file on Rebecca, naming her as the Russian’s killer, and spinning what had happened subsequently as something a renegade psychopath might do.
David realised his friend wasn’t there at the market meeting place, called his noodle place, learned something was up and escaped. But instead of joining in with Minhee’s birthday celebrations (Rebecca has a point about bringing another kid into this life, although David brought all this attention upon himself by trying to reunite with Rebecca), David said they had to leave the safehouse immediately. With no passports, the new plan was to hitch a ride with a fisherman to a nearby island.
Of course, there was no time, and they had to stand their ground in the little harbour. Mother and daughter hid deep inside the boat. Rebecca got to distract via gunfire, while David set up some explosives that did for a henchman. David and Gun fought in a badly lit scene. Guess who won?
Rebecca was clearly outclassing Oliver as an operative, and would have killed him if David hadn’t stopped her for intel. Confusingly – because I think we’re meant to take this at face value – Oliver blabbed that Juno had been behind David’s betrayal nine years ago. That didn’t seem to help him, as David called Juno, challenging her about all this, and made it seem like he was going to execute her son in vengeance for all that she’d done to him and his family. As we only heard the gunshot and didn’t see it, I wouldn’t be surprised if that was a fakeout and that Oliver survives. For one thing, there did seem to be a little more to explore in the Rebecca-Oliver dynamic. He seemed to be very quick to sell out the mother he’d been trying to reingratiate himself with. She’s a piece of work, but the show is not quite as clever as it ought to be.
In other news, I was saddened to learn that Nicholas Brendon had passed away (so soon after James Van Der Beek, who became famous around the same time, a time when I was becoming an adult along with the characters that they played, and after Michelle Trachtenberg also passed.)
This episode was all awkward family drama interspersed by spy shenanigans and bouts of violence. David engineered an escape off the train before they reached the station and Caddis agents. The Korean state apparatus had cut Caddis off from some intel because of the public scenes they’d caused. David’s wife helped get them on a truck to Busan, and a safehouse he had there. He moved up the time when he’d get the new fake passports from his contact/friend.
All the while, I was worried about his injuries, but he toughed it out by carrying around his youngest daughter, who we learned was called Minhee and (fortunately) bilingual, because the use of English and Korean on this show still baffles internal logic. What he really wanted was for his new blended family to get along, but Rebecca was badly hurt to suddenly learn that her father had remarried and had another daughter while she thought he was dead. Which her new stepmother got, but Rebecca’s way of acting out was to show little Minhee how to play with guns, which to anyone who isn’t a member of the NRA is way out of line. Although Rebecca claimed that he father had done just that when she was a little kid.
What was clear was that little Minhee had imprinted strongly on this cool new big sister with an attitude. Juno would later claim that Rebecaa was a psychopath, but she’s obviously not, even if she takes pleasure in violence and has dreadful coping mechanisms, she is absolutely brim-full of feelings. I get where she’s coming from, but objectively, her stepmother is in the right (apart from maybe saying ‘sure you can call me mom if you want’ in the first half hour that they’ve known each other.)
Oh, and we found out that the show is named after the game that David used to play with Rebecca when she was about Minhee’s age, basically throwing her up in the air (to fly like a butterfly?) and catching her.
Gun (aka the tattooed assassin) was on the hunt. He SOMEHOW found David’s contact, who had some fighting skills, but clearly hadn’t kept them up. He died, loyally refusing to give David up, except, of course, he’d scrawled the details of their meet on a Post-It note.
Juno’s old spy boss the Senator met up with her with a picture of Oliver with a young Korean man (not like that, they were just talking in the same bar) who was both the son of a wealthy property family and a CIA asset, and it had something to do with the Russian hit at the start of the series. It was something Oliver had messed up on. But he pressed his mother to let him in on finding Rebecca, because he knew how she thought, or something.
There seemed to be a lot of ‘You think more highly of your surrogate daughter than your actual son’ going on, barely under the surface. Juno would eventually pick a side, letting Oliver go on the mission, even if Gun was supposed to protect him, and whereas the Senator had wanted to talk to Oliver, she handed him the file on Rebecca, naming her as the Russian’s killer, and spinning what had happened subsequently as something a renegade psychopath might do.
David realised his friend wasn’t there at the market meeting place, called his noodle place, learned something was up and escaped. But instead of joining in with Minhee’s birthday celebrations (Rebecca has a point about bringing another kid into this life, although David brought all this attention upon himself by trying to reunite with Rebecca), David said they had to leave the safehouse immediately. With no passports, the new plan was to hitch a ride with a fisherman to a nearby island.
Of course, there was no time, and they had to stand their ground in the little harbour. Mother and daughter hid deep inside the boat. Rebecca got to distract via gunfire, while David set up some explosives that did for a henchman. David and Gun fought in a badly lit scene. Guess who won?
Rebecca was clearly outclassing Oliver as an operative, and would have killed him if David hadn’t stopped her for intel. Confusingly – because I think we’re meant to take this at face value – Oliver blabbed that Juno had been behind David’s betrayal nine years ago. That didn’t seem to help him, as David called Juno, challenging her about all this, and made it seem like he was going to execute her son in vengeance for all that she’d done to him and his family. As we only heard the gunshot and didn’t see it, I wouldn’t be surprised if that was a fakeout and that Oliver survives. For one thing, there did seem to be a little more to explore in the Rebecca-Oliver dynamic. He seemed to be very quick to sell out the mother he’d been trying to reingratiate himself with. She’s a piece of work, but the show is not quite as clever as it ought to be.
In other news, I was saddened to learn that Nicholas Brendon had passed away (so soon after James Van Der Beek, who became famous around the same time, a time when I was becoming an adult along with the characters that they played, and after Michelle Trachtenberg also passed.)
