Vincenzo Episode 04 Recap: Cha-young Chooses Revenge
Vincenzo, Season 1, Episode 04 tvN / Netflix · Written by Park Jae-bum · 2021
Cha-young leaves Wusang, Vincenzo stops pretending he can stay neutral, and Babel learns what a mafia warning looks like.
Vincenzo Episode 04 is the hour where grief stops sitting still. Hong Yu-chan is dead, Babel is laundering his name on the news, and RDU-90 is being sold to the public as a miracle drug while the people who tried to expose it are either dead or frightened into silence. That should make this a mourning episode. Instead, it becomes the first clean strike back.
Cha-young closes Jipuragi and finds her father’s grief waiting for her
Hong Cha-young (Jeon Yeo-been) begins Episode 04 in the ugly afterglow of her father’s death. The news has already turned Hong Yu-chan (Yoo Jae-myung) into a crook. Babel Pharmaceuticals gets to push RDU-90 as a safe painkiller. The victims who trusted Yu-chan have to watch his name get poisoned before the funeral flowers fade.
Cha-young walks through Jipuragi Law Firm and finds the life she refused to understand while he was alive.
The notes left for Yu-chan are simple and brutal. People thank him for saving their families, giving them hope, feeding them when they had nothing, and being the one person they could still grab onto. These are not abstract clients. They are the proof Cha-young did not want to look at when she worked for Wusang.
Then she finds the older photos and records her father kept: her first fishing trip, her school milestones, the graduation ceremonies he watched with pride. He loved her in the stubborn, slightly embarrassing way she spent years dodging.
That is why Vincenzo Cassano (Song Joong-ki) waking up hurts before it helps. Cha-young has been waiting for his story because she needs a place to put her suspicion. He gives her the truth Yu-chan left with him, including the relinquishment document Yu-chan carried as a wake-up call. He also gives her the thing she least wants in that moment: judgment.
He tells her she should have joined her father sooner.
It is cruel. It is also not random cruelty. Vincenzo has already heard Yu-chan say Cha-young could become an unstoppable lawyer if she learned what mattered and stopped thinking old-fashioned decency could beat corruption alone. He is repeating the wound because she is trying to turn guilt into action without yet deciding what kind of action she can live with.
Cha-young is not ready to hear it.
Good. Episode 04 needs her angry before it can let her choose.
The Geumga Plaza tenants lose faith before Vincenzo snaps back
The Geumga Plaza tenants are scared, and the hour lets them be scared without turning them into background noise.
Yu-chan was their legal shield. Vincenzo promised to buy them another building, but he has been unconscious for more than nine days. The tenants have heard too many promises from people with more power than them, so faith does not come easily. When Vincenzo returns, they press him for a clear answer, and the conversation curdles fast.
He wants trust. They want proof.
Both sides are right enough to make the fight sting. Vincenzo did help the monks. He did protect people in ways the tenants do not fully know. He is also hiding the gold beneath their building and solving his own problem under the language of generosity. Their suspicion lands because Geumga Plaza has already been betrayed by men who talk like rescuers while counting demolition money.
That is when Babel’s real estate thugs arrive and enjoy the fracture. They expect a frightened plaza and find one, but Vincenzo cannot resist turning the temperature. He insults them, steps into their threats, and promises burial before they can pour cement.
The scene is funny because the tenants are still arguing one second and watching this sharply dressed Italian-Korean lawyer threaten local goons the next. But it also marks a small change in the room. Vincenzo has not earned their faith yet. He has given them a reason to wonder whether his kind of violence might finally be pointed at the right people.
Cha-young makes the cleaner public move.
She walks into Wusang, resigns, and asks the question that matters: were Yu Min-chul and her father both killed as part of the same cover-up? Choi Myung-hee (Kim Yeo-jin) answers with contempt, and Han Seung-hyuk (Jo Han-chul) tries to keep the room polite because cowardice is his native language. Jang Joon-woo (Ok Taec-yeon) panics in his puppy act, but even that panic has a strange edge once the hour puts more pieces on the board.
Cha-young leaves Wusang with her car and apartment on the way out the door. Then she reopens Jipuragi under her own name.
She makes the speech her father would have wanted to hear, only less pure and much more dangerous. She tells the tenants she will continue his lawsuit and fight corruption. She means it. She has no idea yet how lonely that choice is about to become.
Vincenzo and Cha-young make a revenge pact
Wusang frames Cha-young almost immediately.
After Vincenzo sneaks into Babel’s chairman’s home and leaves syringes in his pillow as a warning, Myung-hee and Seung-hyuk hand Babel a suspect with motive: Yu-chan’s grieving daughter. It is nasty because it is plausible enough for police paperwork. Cha-young hated Babel. She blamed them for her father. She had just quit Wusang.
She also did not do it.
The police station sequence is where the new partnership begins to show its rhythm. Cha-young is furious and sharp, Joon-woo barges in trying to play savior, and Vincenzo arrives with the convenience-store CCTV that proves her alibi. He does not dramatize the rescue. He simply places the proof on the table and lets incompetence collapse around it.
Outside, Cha-young corners him over the syringe stunt. Vincenzo gives her the short version: “An eye for an eye.”
That line is not moral philosophy from him. It is habit.
Cha-young calls him Hammurabi because she still thinks in legal references even when rage is eating her alive. Vincenzo warns her to shut down the firm, stay away from Wusang and Babel, and let the war go. His reasoning is cold but not stupid. Wusang and Babel are protected by money, police pressure, courts, media, and fear. Cha-young cannot beat them by simply wanting justice hard enough.
Then the phone calls prove his point. The people Cha-young helped vanish behind excuses. Nobody wants to be seen helping a lawyer who crossed Choi Myung-hee. The network she thought she had is gone the second helping her has a cost.
So she goes back to Vincenzo with a trade. She has real estate cases Wusang never knew about. She can help him take back Geumga Plaza. She knows he needs that building badly, and she guesses he is the real owner.
He asks why she is offering.
Because she has anger.
Cha-young does not arrive purified by grief. She arrives with guilt, skill, pride, and a need to avenge her father. She is not becoming Yu-chan. She is becoming someone who can continue his fight with tools he never wanted to use.
When she clinks office supplies with Vincenzo and asks if he is ready to turn the tables, the energy changes. Episode 04 stops being about two lawyers circling each other and becomes a two-person problem for Babel.
Myung-hee gets a threat and Babel’s warehouse burns
The driver who killed Yu-chan gives up a name before he dies: Mr. Pyo. Vincenzo and Cha-young get there fast enough to pull information from him, and Mr. Nam brings a surprise resume line nobody saw coming. He used to be a special effects makeup artist, which means the blood, gun, and fake execution can turn a small room into a noir trap.
This is the hour’s purest Vincenzo swing: ridiculous, theatrical, useful, and frightening enough to work.
Pyo believes he is about to watch a man die. Cha-young panics because she and Vincenzo had promised they would not get anyone killed. Vincenzo lets the panic feed the performance, pushes the fake gunshot, and forces the truth into the open. Myung-hee ordered the hits on Yu Min-chul and Hong Yu-chan.
Then he calls her from a laundromat with bloody clothes spinning nearby.
“Someone to be afraid of.”
That is how he introduces himself, and Myung-hee knows enough to be scared before she is willing to admit it. He demands that she restore the reputations she ruined: Yu-chan’s and the dead test subjects’. She tells him to kill her instead, which is exactly why Myung-hee works as an antagonist. She is not a trembling functionary. She is mean, proud, disciplined, and vicious enough to prefer danger over obedience.
Vincenzo’s answer is sharper than a death threat. Their memory matters more to him than her life.
The next move hits Babel where its RDU-90 future lives. Vincenzo’s team infiltrates the Babel Pharmaceuticals warehouse during a fake disinfection call, tampers with the raw materials storage, and sets the place burning. The fire is not treated like a prank. It is a mafia message written in smoke, money, and fear.
Cha-young watches the evidence of RDU-90’s danger and says she wants to burn it all down even if prison is the price. Vincenzo answers with opera: “I will win.”
By the final stretch, Babel is no longer dealing with a public-interest lawyer filing clean motions. Han-seok, still hiding behind the Joon-woo mask, senses the shift and starts looking directly at Vincenzo as the problem. Myung-hee chooses a new approach through court and law. Vincenzo tells Cha-young he is going to make her a real monster.
She pushes back because she still has one line: they fight, but they do not get people killed.
That line matters. Vincenzo knows how to win dirty. Cha-young knows why the win cannot become the only thing left.
What works
Episode 04 gives Cha-young the hard pivot she needed. Her resignation from Wusang, her failed calls for help, and her decision to trade real estate expertise for a seat beside Vincenzo all come from the same wound. She does not become noble overnight. She becomes useful to the fight because grief finally strips away the comfort of pretending Babel is just another client.
Vincenzo’s menace lands because it keeps colliding with absurdity. The man who worries about overcooked pasta is also the man who can make a laundromat phone call feel like a death sentence. That combination is the drama’s special flavor: polished manners, petty comedy, and genuine danger in the same breath.
Myung-hee also gets stronger here. Her cruelty is specific: smear the dead, frame the daughter, protect the drug, let the law carry the knife. She is terrifying because she does not need to raise her voice to ruin someone.
The tenants’ material helps too. Their fear of broken promises gives Geumga Plaza a pulse beyond comic relief. These people are funny, but they are also tired, boxed in, and used to losing.
What stumbles
The police-station detour with Joon-woo runs a little broad. His goofy desperation has a purpose, especially because the drama is hiding a much colder man under that performance, but the yelling nearly smothers the cleaner pleasure of Vincenzo arriving with the CCTV.
The warehouse operation also jumps quickly from interrogation to sabotage. The opera needle drop gives it swagger, but the disinfection entry and fire setup move so fast that the plan can feel like victory montage before the danger has fully settled.
Still, the emotional math is clear. Babel killed people, ruined Yu-chan’s name, and expected everyone else to stay polite.
Vincenzo refuses politeness.
What this sets up for Episode 05
Episode 05 now has a real war on its hands. Cha-young is no longer a Wusang defector making a speech in her father’s office; she is Vincenzo’s partner, and she has already seen how quickly revenge can produce another corpse. Her promise not to get anyone killed will be tested against Vincenzo’s comfort with fear.
Babel also has to adjust. The warehouse fire proves their enemies can reach protected assets, and Han-seok has begun separating Vincenzo from the usual legal noise around Geumga Plaza. Myung-hee will not forgive the laundromat humiliation. Seung-hyuk will keep selling cowardice as strategy. The tenants may still distrust Vincenzo, but they have now seen Babel bleed.
That is enough to change the room.
Rating: 8.6/10
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Reviewed by Mira Vance · QuizFandom Editor & Lead Reviewer. Every rating is an honest per-watch assessment from the desk that also writes the quizzes — not a press release rehash.