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.
선우 (Seon-u) is referring to the magical Himalayan incense sticks that are the show's central device — each stick burns for exactly 30 minutes in the past, and when the smoke runs out he snaps back to the present. Every mission he undertakes in 1992 is a countdown race against that half-hour clock.
명세 병원 (Myeongse Hospital) is the arson-and-murder case that drives the whole story. A suspicious fire killed the hospital's director, and the truth was buried by a powerful figure — making it the kind of cold case that Korean dramas often use to explore how wealth and connections can derail justice.
Seon-u is telling the young Jeong-u directly that he killed his own father — a crime called 존속살인 (jonsok salin), harming one's own parent, which Korean law has historically treated as especially grave and socially shameful. Saying it out loud to the person who did it, rather than to police, is Seon-u's way of forcing a moment of conscience.
The evidence Seon-u mentions is a 비디오테이프 (bidio teipu) — a VHS cassette. The episode is set in 1992, when video cameras were bulky and recordings were physical objects you could hand over, hide in a car, or destroy. It was the era's most credible form of visual proof, which is why having it on tape carries so much weight.
The 9 o'clock evening news — 9시 뉴스 (ahop-si nyuseu) — is the prestige broadcast on Korean terrestrial TV, equivalent to a flagship network bulletin in the West. The main anchor is a nationally recognised face, so Seon-u being stabbed just before airtime is treated as a scandal that will instantly dominate public conversation.
Korean makeup and dressing rooms (분장실, bunjang-sil) at TV stations are traditionally off-limits to cameras to protect performers' privacy — a norm the killer deliberately exploited. Investigators noting there is no CCTV footage there reflects a real structural gap in broadcast-building security that has been publicly debated in South Korea.
The hitman calls what happened to Seon-u '자살 (jasal)' — suicide — even though Seon-u jumped into the river to escape being killed. In Korean criminal and social contexts, labelling a suspicious death as self-inflicted is a classic way powerful figures close cases and avoid investigation, a pattern that appears repeatedly in real Korean legal history.
정우 (Jeong-u) calls himself 등신 (deungsin), a blunt word meaning an idiot or a hopeless fool. Directing an insult inward rather than at another person is a way Korean characters in dramas signal overwhelming guilt or self-disgust — he is condemning his own years of cowardice, not attacking anyone around him.
The secretary warns that news of the stabbing is already spreading on SNS (에스엔에스), the Korean term for social media platforms. Korean public opinion can shift extremely fast online, and in dramas set in the present day a company's stock price, political standing, and court-of-public-opinion verdict can all change within hours of a trending story — exactly what 최진철 (Choe Jin-cheol) fears here.
Jeong-u turning himself in to the detective is called 자수 (jasu) — voluntary surrender. Under Korean law, giving yourself up before being caught is treated as a mitigating factor at sentencing. More important culturally, self-surrender is seen as an act of moral restoration: you are reclaiming your own humanity after years of hiding behind lies.
민영 (Min-yeong) quietly hums 'I Will Always Love You' — Whitney Houston's 1992 version was an enormous global hit that became embedded in Korean pop culture. Using it here as a private moment between the couple nods to the show's 1992 time-travel setting and doubles as an unspoken declaration of love that bypasses words.
삼촌 (samchon) means 'uncle' — the title Min-yeong has always used for Seon-u because, in the altered timeline, he grew up as her father's younger brother rather than as her lover. For him, that one word captures every sacrifice the time-travel has cost him: a romance quietly reclassified as a family relationship he never wanted.