The Scandal Episode 4 Recap: Ending Explained
Drama: The Scandal (스캔들)
Network: N/A (Netflix Original)
Streaming: Netflix (International)
Air Date: September 18, 2026 (all 8 episodes released simultaneously)
Cast: Son Ye-jin (Lady Cho / Cho Yun), Ji Chang-wook (Cho Won), Nana (Ahn Hui-yeon), Han Sun-hwa (Bun-hui), Kang Ji-eun (Lady Jeong-kyeong), Kim Ji-an (Eun-sil), Kwon Do-gyun (Chilseong)
“Tonight, we will meet in a dream.” — Cho Won, Episode 4
Episode 4 of The Scandal is about mail: the writer, the reader, and the hands it passes through on the way. Won writes to a widow who answers by rote. Hui-yeon, it turns out, has been answering in secret. Bun-hui’s letter surfaces where it can do the most damage, and the maid carrying it walks into the wrong woman.
Netflix lists the hour at 48 minutes, the shortest of the first four. The series itself holds near the top of the non-English chart. Netflix’s figures for September 21 to 27, as Cineplay reported them, put it third with 2.8 million views. The chart for September 28 to October 4 had not been published when this recap went up.
The hour ends on a gift being wrapped for the one reader nobody planned for.
A Rake’s Morning After
The episode opens on Won among courtesans, and Netflix’s own description frames the scene as concealment: nights spent hiding his longing for Yun, with the emptiness still there afterward. Three recaps open on the exposure. Two call it heavy for the series, and the third, who knows the 2003 film, finds the film’s dialogue franker than anything shown here. One of the first two finds the scenes unnecessary and says they pull focus from the story, adding that such scenes recur in director Jung Ji-woo’s films.
The detail that matters for the plot arrives in the same stretch. One recap says Won still dreams of Yun’s wedding. Another says the hour is the first to make him look pitiable. That is the ferry landing from Episode 2 paying out. The man who held a stranger and called her by the wrong face keeps repeating the habit, and the series now treats it as a wound instead of a hobby.
The Reader Who Never Reads
Les Liaisons dangereuses, the French novel behind the series, is told mostly through letters, and Episode 4 is the first hour of The Scandal to take that form literally. Won gets his correspondence by holding the handkerchief Hui-yeon dropped on the road. Two recaps say it serves as the price, and one adds a guess that she agrees out of fear of how the neighbors would read the exchange.
The replies that follow are all the same. Hui-yeon sends the rules a wife must keep, and one recap likens them to the Naehun, the 1475 conduct manual Queen Sohye compiled for women. A wife does not marry twice, says a letter in another recap. Won sends a blank sheet, out of boredom by one recap’s guess, and gets the same sermon back. He concludes she is not reading, confronts her, and she walks away.
The servants carry all of it. Two recaps note that Chilseong and Eun-sil use the errands to slip off for mountain dates, and a third says Chilseong explains his name by the seven masters he has served. The messengers have the best time in the house, which is a fair summary of how the bet looks from below.
The Answers in the Margins
Won is wrong, and the proof sits in her room. Four recaps agree that Hui-yeon read every letter and wrote real answers she kept hidden. While she is away, Won slips in and finds them. One recap puts her at the rite that ends her mourning. He marks the pages as read, and two recaps say one reply asks him to appear in her dreams.
The timing carries weight. In Episode 2, one recap reported that the neighbors expected her to die once mourning closed. Joseon’s three-year mourning usually ran 27 to 28 months in practice, according to the Seoul Shinmun, so the end of mourning arrives as a date on the calendar and not as a feeling. The hour treats that date as the point where her two lives meet. Outwardly she keeps the manual. Privately she writes the opposite, and nobody in her household has the chance to notice.
A Dagger Borrowed From the Movies
That night, with the servants asleep from drink in one recap’s telling, Won walks into her room and Hui-yeon draws a silver dagger. The recaps differ on the standoff. In one she warns him that if he leaves now, nothing happened. In another he tells her to kill him instead and promises to find her in the next life. One has her lower it, and one has him leave smiling.
Whether he means any of it is the question. Two recaps call the speech an act, and a third reads his smile on the way out as a man who thinks he has won. A fourth reports it as a confession while noting that his mind is still on Yun. The series wants both readings, and this recap keeps both.
The dagger itself is screen shorthand. A Kyunghyang Shinmun column on what it calls the eunjangdo myth argues that Joseon records give the image of a woman defending her chastity with a silver blade little support. The column suggests the image entered Korean storytelling through early twentieth-century fiction. The series borrows a prop viewers already know, and Won turns it into a negotiation: her refusal becomes his offer, and in one recap’s telling she puts the blade down.
Two Letters, One Box
Won reports to Yun that the widow fell into his arms, per two recaps. The dagger scene as the recaps describe it shows no embrace, so how literal the boast is stays unclear. Yun answers with a letter to read aloud: Bun-hui’s, hidden in the tobacco-shop box that closed Episode 3. One recap notes that the heated talk of the moment was Bun-hui’s text, and Yun pushes Won’s hand away and hands over the page.
The letter asks him to come back to her. One recap reads it as proof that Won is still involved with Bun-hui. Episode 2 only hinted at that. Won tosses it to Yun with a jab that she can use it to teach her concubine. Three recaps agree on that moment. Four agree on what comes next: Yun orders the letter sent to Hui-yeon, and one calls it a threat. Recaps split on his reaction. One has him affecting calm, another has him visibly rattled as he leaves, and a third has him say he will see it through.
The logic is sound, as one recap spells out. A letter that exposes him to Hui-yeon undermines the sincerity of every letter he has sent, and those letters are the one asset he has built so far. It also changes who holds the pen. Yun began the series with a letter of her own to Won. Now she wields someone else’s.
The Letter Finds the Wrong Reader
Gyehwa, Yun’s maid, carries the package to the Left State Councilor’s house. Recaps list the contents differently. One says a second notebook of Hui-yeon’s late husband, another says a gift, and a third says the box itself. All agree that Lady Jeong-kyeong, the Left State Councilor’s wife, catches her and takes it. One recap says she assumes the gift is for her.
Misdelivery is a staple of letter plots, because it turns the sender’s weapon into somebody else’s problem. Yun’s tool was meant to shake Hui-yeon’s trust. It now sits with a woman who can shake the whole household. What Lady Jeong-kyeong knows is unclear, since the recap that has her taking the gift for her own never says she read anything.
Gyehwa confesses, and Yun tells her she has never punished her. She instead orders something prepared for the lady. One recap has Yun cross paths with Won and pass him as if nothing happened, while he, still thinking the letter reached Hui-yeon, looks anxious. Another says he does not yet know. The bet is no longer the largest thing at risk.
The Scandal Episode 4 Ending Explained
The hour closes with Yun planning a gift for Lady Jeong-kyeong, per two recaps, with a visit to the Left State Councilor’s house set for the next day in one. Her scheme failed, and she appears to be improvising around the failure. Won does not know the letter was intercepted. Hui-yeon does not know the letter exists.
Three questions stay open: what Lady Jeong-kyeong made of the letter, what Yun intends to give her, and what Won will do when he learns the truth.
What Episode 5 Might Bring
Netflix’s own description of Episode 5 says Yun exploits So-ok’s secret feelings for another man, while Won’s feelings for Hui-yeon deepen and overwhelm him. If the show’s pattern holds, expect the letter’s fallout to shadow both threads, and expect the household’s quiet to break before the bet does.
Verdict
Episode 4 is where the bet becomes a correspondence, and the correspondence turns out to be the story. Nana plays the widow shrunken and wary of the neighbors’ eyes, and one recap singles out how she folds her tall frame in. Another recap admits it missed her hidden feelings and half-jokes that the acting is suspect. That counts as the compliment, since her reserve is the cover. Son Ye-jin gets a recap’s praise for the look and tone of her scenes, and a second for Yun’s blank pass by Won. That second recap also wants a little less smoothness from Ji Chang-wook.
Korean recaps split on the heroine. One blogger finds the psychological three-way among Yun, Won and Hui-yeon the best part of the hour. Another says Hui-yeon’s behavior is hard to follow. The hidden replies answer that complaint. She obeys the manual in public and writes something else in private, and the episode’s whole subject is that gap.
Where to Watch: Netflix (International)
Total Episodes: 8 | Released: September 18, 2026 (Netflix Original, all episodes at once)
Our Verdict: ✉️🗡️ — The bet now rides on who reads which letter.
Previous Episode: The Scandal Episode 3 Recap & Ending Explained
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