12 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.
김신 calls the king '폐하' (pyeha), the highest honorific used exclusively for an emperor or sovereign — equivalent to 'Your Majesty.' The drama is set in the Goryeo dynasty (918–1392), when Korea's rulers sometimes used the imperial title, a detail the show deliberately highlights to give Kim Shin's era a grander, more tragic weight.
'어명' (eomyeong) means a direct command issued by the king — literally 'the royal word.' In Joseon and Goryeo law it was absolute and unquestionable; defying it was treason punishable by death for the offender and their entire family. Kim Shin's anguish here is that the slaughter of everyone he loved was technically legal, carried out under one such decree.
써니 references a folk idea, woven into the drama's mythology, that a soul lives four lives before it is finished. This isn't a fixed doctrine of any one Korean religion; it blends Buddhist ideas of reincarnation (윤회, yunhoe) with a storytelling device the show uses to explain why its characters keep crossing paths across centuries.
The junior 저승사자 (jeoseungsaja — Grim Reaper) complains about splitting utility bills with a neighbour he didn't invite. The show plays the Reapers as salaried civil servants of the afterlife who must live like ordinary Korean renters — paying 전세 (jeonse) lump-sum deposit leases and splitting 수도 요금 (water bills) — which is a running source of deadpan comedy throughout the series.
'김선' (Kim Seon) was the name of the Goblin's younger sister in the Goryeo era. Discovering that 써니 is her reincarnation ties the present cast back to the founding tragedy of the story. In Korean naming convention the family name comes first, so '김선' marks her as a member of the Kim clan — the same family as the Goblin, 김신.
The audit team reveals that every 저승사자 (Grim Reaper) was once a human who committed grave sins, then chose to wipe their own memory after centuries in a spiritual purgatory. This is a world-building rule unique to this drama — Korean folk tradition does feature stern underworld officials (차사, chasa), but the 'willing amnesia as punishment' mechanic is the show's own invention layered on top of that tradition.
'탕약' (tangyak) is a traditional herbal medicine broth prescribed by a royal physician and delivered to the king daily. 박중헌 has been using this trusted ritual — something the king is supposed to receive as care — as the vehicle for slow poisoning. 왕여 asking for more, knowing what it contains, is a royal command for his own death by the one thing that was meant to heal him.
The audit official states that the Reaper's gravest offence — heavier even than ordering mass executions — is recorded as taking his own life. In Goryeo-era Confucian ethics, the ruler's body was considered a gift from Heaven and his ancestors; destroying it was a cosmic violation. The drama uses this framing to explain why 왕여's soul was condemned to the longest purgatory and the deepest amnesia.
The former emperor's final message — 'I cared for you by not caring for you' — echoes a concept in Korean and broader East Asian statecraft: a ruler or father sometimes protects a beloved subordinate by publicly distancing himself, so that enemies have no target to exploit. Kim Shin spent 900 years believing he was abandoned; this moment reveals the deliberate, painful love hidden inside that silence.
메밀꽃 (memilkkot), the white buckwheat blossom, is deeply associated with melancholy beauty in Korean literary tradition — most famously through Lee Hyo-seok's 1936 short story 《메밀꽃 필 무렵》 ('When Buckwheat Flowers Bloom'). 김신's single-word answer, '연인' (lover), gives the flower a sweeter meaning here, but the field of white blossoms also signals something fleeting and bittersweet, quietly foreshadowing the episode's ending.
'상' (sang, 賞) means a prize or blessing bestowed as recognition — stronger than just 'gift.' By saying his life became a '상' because of 은탁, Kim Shin frames her not as something he earned but as grace he was given, the opposite of the punishment his immortal existence had always felt like. It is also his deliberate echo of the word the Deity used when it first explained the Goblin's fate to him.
Kim Shin promises to return as rain and as 첫눈 (first snow). In Korean shamanistic belief (무속, musok), natural phenomena — rain, wind, snow — can carry the presence of the dead or of spirits. By promising to become weather, he is not offering a metaphor but a literal spiritual vow: he will inhabit those moments so she can feel him even when she cannot see him.