6 timestamped notes explaining the Korean cultural context in this episode — customs, idioms, food, honorifics, and history, at the moment each appears on screen. These notes discuss events across the whole episode. To see them revealed scene-by-scene as you watch, use the episode page to find an airing.
Interpol is the international police organisation that issues Red Notices — alerts to member countries to locate a wanted person. Izrael is joking that because he kept showing up wherever someone was dying, investigators connected him to the deaths and flagged him globally. It is a darkly comic way of showing how long he has been doing this work.
The scene captures a well-known dynamic in Korean rural communities (시골): tight-knit neighbours track each other's comings and goings closely and are quick to draw conclusions when something feels off. The fact that an outsider is sleeping in a local grandmother's room, and that the grandmother is suddenly unreachable, is more than enough fuel for the rumour mill.
Irem describes being born from the smoke of a water pipe — 물 담배 (mul-dambae) — exhaled by the angel Izrael. Hookah-style water pipes have a long history across the Middle East and Central Asia, the cultural world this angel inhabits. The image fits Islamic-adjacent mythology, where certain spirits are said to be created from smoke or fire rather than clay.
The track playing here is 'GAME' by 소연 (Soyeon of (G)I-DLE) and 우기 (Yuqi of (G)I-DLE), two members of one of the biggest fourth-generation K-pop girl groups. Using a recognisable idol track as background music during a lighter scene is a standard K-drama technique for signalling a playful, energetic mood shift.
The merchants cry out '이블리스다! 샤이탄이다!' — both names for the devil in Islamic tradition. Iblis is the personal name of the fallen being who refused to bow to Adam; Shaytan (شيطان) is the broader term for a tempter or demon, equivalent to 'Satan'. The drama draws directly on this mythology for its villain rather than using a generic Western devil figure.
The episode closes with 'LOVER' by 하현상 (Ha Hyun-sang), a Korean singer-songwriter known for his breathy, melancholic ballads. OST ballads in K-dramas do a lot of emotional heavy lifting — they arrive precisely when the drama wants the audience to sit with a feeling rather than move on, and lyrics like 'after a thousand years' mirror the show's mythology directly.