Butterfly Ending Explained: What Happens to Rebecca?

Prime Video’s ‘Butterfly‘ is an action spy thriller series that begins with a highly trained ex-secret agent named David, who comes out of hiding after nine years to go after another secret operative, named Rebecca. It turns out that David faked his death back then and left behind Rebecca, his daughter, who is now working as an assassin for Caddis, an organization that David co-founded with Juno Lund. Things got so entangled back then that David had no choice but to leave without letting his daughter know anything. Now, his sudden return causes such a storm that Rebecca’s life is derailed, and it also brings out long-hidden secrets. SPOILERS AHEAD.

Butterfly Season 1 Recap

The show begins with Rebecca on a mission in Seoul. She poses as a pregnant woman and uses the cover to kill Karpov, a Russian high-level officer. Things go comparatively smoothly for her, but when the time comes for extraction, she discovers that her team has been compromised. It doesn’t take much for her to realise that she was the target, but she has no idea who has come after her. Eventually, she finds a clue that leads her and her team to a house. While all the others are killed, Rebecca is the only one left alive, and that’s because the man after her is her father, David. It turns out that nine years ago, he faked his death, and now that Rebecca is working for Caddis, he wants to take her back.

Rebecca’s first instinct is to question her father and trust Juno, the leader of Caddis, who also took care of Rebecca after David’s supposed death. However, it soon turns out that Juno doesn’t want David to live, and she is also the one who created the circumstances that led David to go into hiding. Meanwhile, it is also revealed that Juno is the target of American intelligence agencies because they believe that she and Caddis have been selling state secrets. When it becomes clear that they have no option but to get Juno out of their way, David and Rebecca collaborate with the FBI to bring down Caddis for good.

What Happens to Juno? Why doesn’t Rebecca Want Her to Die?

Initially, David’s plan was to get Rebecca and go back into hiding. However, it becomes clear soon that Juno will never let them be. However, to get her out of the way, they need a major witness or incontrovertible evidence against her. For this, they manipulate Juno’s son, Oliver. They use the mother-son’s fraught relationship to make Juno think that Oliver has ratted against her, and they make Oliver think that because he told on his mother, she wants to have him killed. Their manipulation works and Oliver runs straight to the FBI. In the meantime, Juno keeps up her efforts to find David, and she eventually succeeds. This leads the family on the run, and events transpire such that Rebecca is captured.

Juno plans to use Rebecca to get to David, but then, she discovers that the FBI is at her office, which prompts her to flee. She also extends an offer to Rebecca to join her in her future plans, stating that David has his new family now, and while he could have come back at any time in the past nine years, he chose not to. Rebecca hugs Juno, and it seems for a minute that she is ready to go back to her employer. But in the meantime, David uses his father-in-law’s resources to put together a team to corner Juno’s squad. When she sees her father, Rebecca too fights back and kills everyone in the car, except Juno. David fights to the death with Gun, where the latter is killed, and then moves towards Juno with the intent to kill her. He points a gun at her, having convinced himself that Juno needs to die for his family to be safe.

Rebecca, however, asks her father to spare Juno. It seems that despite all the ways Juno has betrayed David and Rebecca and torn them apart for nine years, Rebecca cannot forget the fact that Juno did take care of her for nine years like her own daughter. Before David came back, Juno was the only one who really cared about Rebecca. In fact, Juno’s own son, Oliver, believed that his mother loved Rebecca more than him. Despite all the bad things she has done, Juno is still someone that Rebecca cares about, and she cannot let her die.

This also shows a measure of Rebecca’s unpredictability. While they are on their way back, David tries to debrief Rebecca. He wants to know what Juno said to her, and Rebecca can see that her own father is suspicious of her. She assures him that she never talked to Juno, which makes the whole thing even more suspicious because we know that Rebecca and Juno had a whole conversation about the former coming back to work for her new venture. This shows that perhaps Rebecca is keeping Juno around for her own selfish reasons, which may or may not have anything to do with whether or not she really loves or cares about Juno.

Is Eunju Dead? Did Rebecca Kill Her?

After leaving Juno to her own devices, David and Rebecca go back to David’s wife, Eunju, and his daughter, Minhee. Now that David has no reason to hide anymore, the whole world has been opened up for him and his family. He and Rebecca start to consider their next course of action, and she even thinks about whether to go to college. He assures her that she is only 23 and can do whatever she wants. Reunited with his wife and younger daughter, he is happy that all of the people he loves are finally with him. They all go to a restaurant for dinner, and he puts the idea of moving to America on the table. Eunju seems to be agreeable to it, and Minhee is excited about going to Hawaii. Eunju decides to go to the washroom, and Rebecca accompanies her. Despite their initial dislike for each other, it now seems that the women are getting along, and David is happy to see it.

Slowly, the restaurant gets empty, and a silence pervades the environment. As Minhee falls asleep in his arms, David starts to wonder where his wife and daughter have gone. He stands outside the ladies’ room and calls out to Eunju, but when she doesn’t respond, he breaks in and finds her stabbed in the chest, covered in her own blood, while Rebecca is nowhere to be found. As David desperately tries to save his wife, he asks her who did this to her, but she has lost so much blood that she is not able to speak anymore. The last scene has David desperately and helplessly trying to save her, but it is clear that she is beyond saving. Eunju’s fate hangs in the balance, and while there is a good chance that she will die, some miracle might help her survive.

Meanwhile, the more pertinent question is the identity of the person who attacked her. One possibility is that someone from David’s past found him and attacked Eunju and took away Rebecca. However, considering how skilled a fighter Rebecca is, it seems unlikely that she would have gone down without a fight. There would have been noise, and David would most certainly have heard it. This leaves only one other option. Rebecca is the one who killed Eunju and then fled the premises. It makes one wonder why she would do such a thing when she had a safer and brighter future ahead of her. However, one must consider the fact that life with Caddis is what she has always known and is good at. Even when her father tried to convince her to leave that life behind, Rebecca knew that she couldn’t do it. It wasn’t just that this was the only job she knew, but she was also good at it and enjoyed it immensely.

This issue had been previously discussed between Eunju and David, where she wondered whether he is still looking at Rebecca as his teenage daughter he left behind. Nine years is a very long time and can change people considerably. Eunju wanted David to consider the fact that not only is Rebecca a very different person now, but also that while he wants her to leave Caddis, she might not want the same thing for herself. In the end, it seems that Eunju was right. Apart from Rebecca’s desire to stay in the same line of work, which is also why she may have let Juno go, there is also the part about her not liking the fact that her father got himself a new family in the nine years he stayed away from her, because he wanted to protect her. She had this resentment towards him since the beginning, and she never seemed to like Eunju either, which was a mutual feeling. So, before leaving, which she could have done rather quietly, she decided to inflict damage on her father to make him feel the pain she felt for nine years. This is why she killed Eunju.

What Happens to Oliver? Do He and Juno Reconcile?

While Juno was left to her own devices by David and Rebecca, it seemed that with the FBI raiding Caddis, Juno would be arrested and sent to prison. However, before the cops could arrive to get her, she found a way to quietly slip away. This means she is on the run, but this has done nothing to dampen her enthusiasm to continue her work. While Caddis might be gone, she is ready to build something new, something more powerful, which will completely rewrite the mess up that happened with Caddis. Meanwhile, Oliver has been taken into witness protection. While he has agreed to testify against his mother, it doesn’t mean that he doesn’t care about her anymore.

When he finds out that the FBI has raided the Caddis HQ, he reaches out to her and apologizes to her. She eagerly forgives him and even asks for his forgiveness. By now, she has realised that she was the one who pushed Oliver to seek her validation, which led her to doubt her love for him. She tells him that she loves him and will continue to love him no matter how he betrays her. The last part goes unheard as her plane flies away, and the phone connection worsens. Still, it is clear that Juno is in no mood to let David come between her and Oliver, and when she builds her new empire, she will not only use it to make herself invincible, but she will also make sure that no one touches her family ever again.

Read More: Butterfly: Is Caddis Based on a Real Private Intelligence Organisation?