The Scarecrow Episode 4 Recap: Ending Explained
Drama: The Scarecrow (허수아비)
Network: ENA
Streaming: Viu & Viki (International)
Air Date: April 28, 2026
Cast: Park Hae-soo (Kang Tae-joo), Lee Hee-joon (Cha Si-young), Kwak Sun-young (Seo Ji-won), Seo Ji-hye (Kang Soon-young), Song Geon-hee (Lee Gi-beom), Jung Moon-sung (Lee Gi-hwan), Kang Jeong-woo (Jeon Gyeong-ho), Kim Hwan-hee (Kim Min-ji), Ryu Hae-joon (Park Dae-ho)
“It was the bad side. I lost everything.” — Kang Tae-joo, 2019
There are partnerships born from trust, and partnerships born from necessity — the kind where two people who would rather do almost anything else end up on the same side of a line because the alternative is watching the wrong things keep winning. Episode 4 is about that second kind. It’s also about a caramel, a handkerchief, and thirty years of a misunderstanding so complete it shaped two entire lives and never let go.
Nielsen Korea clocked this one at 5.2 percent nationwide, with a same-day minute-peak of 6.2 in the Seoul metro area — a fourth straight win for the Monday-Tuesday slot. The episode mostly earns that.
The Evidence That Turns a Gift Into a Trap
Cold-case dramas often use an object tied to a victim to mark the moment an investigation stops being abstract. The convention exists to collapse distance between the audience and a death that might otherwise stay procedural.
The autopsy findings do exactly that here, and then go one step further. Investigators recover a caramel from the body — the same kind Min-ji had carried, the same kind she pressed into Tae-joo’s hand hours before she died. In Korean investigative logic, evidence that mirrors a victim’s personal belongings signals something specific and unsettling: not a random target, but a killer who knew her well enough to fold a piece of her own life into his ritual. The gift that passed between a frightened teenager and the detective she trusted has become the killer’s calling card, and the show doesn’t need to underline how that changes what the caramel means to Tae-joo going forward.
Asking the Man You Hate for Help
The reluctant-alliance convention usually plays as relief — two rivals finally on the same side, tension released. The Scarecrow plays the moment as cost instead.
Tae-joo goes to Si-young and asks, plainly, to work the case together. In Korean social dynamics, asking for help carries an implicit debt — you’re admitting you can’t do this alone, and placing yourself in the other person’s obligation. Tae-joo is choosing to owe that debt to the one man he despises most. Si-young accepts and brokers his reinstatement without ceremony. When a colleague later asks how it feels to be back, Tae-joo’s answer is characteristically compressed — a handful of words carrying thirty years of context, the kind of understatement that trusts the listener to fill in everything left unsaid. That’s the specific economy of Korean nunchi: saying the minimum necessary and letting the weight do the rest.
The Handkerchief Everyone Has Been Waiting For
Planting physical evidence early and letting the audience forget about it is a standard long-game move in this genre — the reveal lands harder for having been visible the whole time.
Reinstated, Tae-joo returns to the blurry sting-operation photograph and finally sees past the obscured face to the handkerchief the killer is holding — an embroidery pattern Tae-joo recognizes not from a case file but from his own home. Kang Soon-young made that handkerchief herself, and the only person outside the family she’d have given it to is Lee Gi-beom. The investigation pivots hard toward the man the show has been quietly underlining since the premiere. Lee Gi-hwan, Gi-beom’s older brother, confirms the last known movements: Min-ji came to the bookstore for her art case, left without an umbrella into a sudden summer downpour, and Gi-beom followed her out with one. He was the last person seen with her. Before Tae-joo can process the implication, detectives arrive with a warrant for an unrelated assault charge, and Gi-beom is already a wanted man with Soon-young hiding him.
The Wound Beneath the Wound
Villain backstories in this genre often arrive as justification, softening a character right when the plot needs him at his most dangerous. The Scarecrow’s timing is different: it hands Si-young’s origin to us in the middle of his cruelest maneuvering, not after it.
A confrontation over who leaked the rumor about the Kang siblings’ mother cracks open thirty years at once. A flashback shows a young Si-young arriving uninvited at Tae-joo’s home and witnessing his own father with Tae-joo’s mother, in a way an adolescent mind could only read one way: that Tae-joo must be his father’s secret son, a half-brother built on a lie lived inside Tae-joo’s own house. The bullying that followed wasn’t calculated cruelty. It was a child’s grief with nowhere else to go. Neither boy ever learned what the other had seen that day, or what conclusion it had left him carrying. In Korean, there’s a word for the kind of grief this leaves behind — han, a sorrow that accumulates across decades and becomes part of someone’s identity without their choosing it. Both men have been carrying their own version of it for thirty years, and neither has said so out loud until now.
A Fear Neither of Them Can Afford
The wrongful-conviction fear driving a loved one to run is a familiar engine in stories about corrupted investigations, usually treated as a mistake the plot needs to correct.
Soon-young talks Gi-beom into fleeing not because she believes he’s guilty of anything, but because she has watched this exact system manufacture a conviction once already and doesn’t trust it with the person she loves. The fear has a name — a deep, historically grounded distrust of investigations that settle on whoever is most convenient to blame. Gi-beom wants to turn himself in and let her convince him otherwise; then, for reasons the show doesn’t yet explain, he slips away from her alone. She chases him into the dark, into the fields, and finds a scarecrow standing motionless at the edge of the road.
A Detail Reportedly Drawn From the Real Case
While Soon-young and Si-young are in the fields, the killer doesn’t stop moving. He breaks into a separate house that same night, working through the dark interior with practiced patience — and at one point presses a finger through a changho, the traditional paper screen door still common in older Korean homes, to look through at whoever is sleeping inside before going any further.
The detail is cited elsewhere as drawn from the real case this show is based on, where investigators reportedly described a similar method of puncturing paper screen doors to observe sleeping victims before entering. That attribution isn’t independently confirmed here, but if it holds, it reframes the scene as a citation of documented history rather than an invented piece of genre texture.
The Scarecrow Episode 4 Ending Explained
Si-young finds Soon-young’s bag and shoes abandoned on the road and searches without backup, without hesitation. He reaches her too late to prevent the attack entirely but in time to take the blade meant for her. Tae-joo arrives to find his rival bleeding, holding his sister, having just done the one thing Tae-joo never expected from him. Losing consciousness, Si-young finally says what thirty years never let him say: that he assumed Tae-joo was his father’s other son, that he could never stand the idea of a brother, but that a friend might have been something he could have kept.
The present-day frame closes on the cost of all of it. Sitting across from Lee Yong-woo, Tae-joo is asked what the partnership did to him, in the end. His answer is short: the bad side, everything. Whatever the alliance bought him in progress toward the truth, it cost him nearly everything he had outside the case, and the show lets that trade sit there unresolved rather than tallying it up as worth it.
What Episode 5 Might Bring
If the setup here is any indication, expect Gi-beom’s custody to feel less like a resolution than a fresh trap, given how loudly the show has been pointing at him since the beginning. Si-young’s survival and his unfinished confession are likely to reshape whatever alliance he and Tae-joo have left, and Lee Gi-hwan’s quiet proximity to every major scene so far suggests his role in this story is far from finished.
Verdict
Four episodes in, The Scarecrow has done something few crime dramas manage: made the audience truly uncertain about its own antagonist. Si-young isn’t operating from simple ambition anymore — he’s a man whose adolescent logic misread one moment and never recovered, which doesn’t excuse what he did but makes him land as a person rather than a function, and makes the next stretch of the season considerably harder to predict.
The handkerchief evidence is the episode’s most elegant trap, for the audience as much as for Gi-beom. We’ve been suspicious of him since the premiere, and the show is finally handing over the payoff — except the feeling isn’t relief, it’s unease, because this drama has taught its audience by now that the obvious answer usually isn’t the right one. The rating’s steady climb toward the mid-5s suggests viewers are staying for exactly that kind of patience.
Where to Watch: Viu & Viki (International)
Total Episodes: 12 | Airs: Monday & Tuesday at 10PM KST on ENA
Our Verdict: 🌾🤝 — Four episodes in and this show is operating at a level most dramas never reach at all.
Next up: Episode 5 — Gi-beom is in custody and the evidence points one way, but the killer is still out there, and someone close to the truth is about to make a dangerous mistake.
