11 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.
When the young reporter tells the teenage Seon-u he will personally 'raise' him if he passes the entry exam, he is invoking a deeply Korean workplace tradition: the 선배-후배 (seonbae-hubae) system of senior-junior bonds. A senior who sponsors your career takes real responsibility for your development — and the grown-up Seon-u referencing this promise decades later shows how seriously such pledges are taken.
Both the adult and teenage Seon-u record their messages on an answering machine — the era's equivalent of a voicemail. In 1993 Korea, home answering machines used cassette tapes, and pressing a button to erase was permanent. The ritual of leaving, then deleting, messages adds a deliberate finality: whatever was said is now gone, with no digital backup.
Korean companies traditionally hold a 회식 (hoesik), a mandatory group dinner, to welcome new employees. These gatherings often involve heavy drinking, karaoke, and performance games — exactly what we see with the noisy singing and antics. Skipping a 회식, especially the 신입 (new hire) welcome edition, is considered a serious breach of team loyalty, which is why the boss threatens 'permanent expulsion' just for missing it.
Seon-u warns Min-yeong not to do 여자 짓거리 — literally 'woman-behavior' — meaning flirting or playing up femininity in the office. This reflects a real pressure female journalists in Korea have historically faced: being seen as using gender to get ahead was considered unprofessional and could mark a woman as not being taken seriously. Min-yeong's cheerful defiance of this norm is part of what makes her character stand out.
Min-yeong calling from overseas and demanding a 딥 키스 (deep kiss) as a 'New Yorker-style welcome' is a comic nod to how Koreans in that era imagined Western greeting culture as dramatically more physically expressive than Korean norms. Public displays of affection were still quite uncommon in Korea in the early 2000s, so framing a kiss as a foreign custom lets her make a bold romantic demand while hiding behind the joke.
Korean mountaineering has a passionate national following, and expeditions to Nepal's Annapurna range — one of the world's deadliest peaks — were major news events. Broadcasting crews regularly embedded with Korean climbing teams for dramatic documentary coverage. Sending a field reporter and camera crew to cover such an expedition was a prestigious but genuinely dangerous assignment, which gives the colleagues' grumbling about '개고생' (brutal hardship) real weight.
Min-yeong mentions she emigrated in 1993, placing her family in a large wave of Koreans who left for the United States and Canada during that era seeking educational opportunities and a more stable life. For many children who left then, the departure was abrupt and emotionally jarring — exactly the note of urgency and grief we see in the opening flashback, where a young girl is being pulled away from something she witnessed.
Seon-u's question about what Min-yeong will do 'if he dies' directly references the brain tumor diagnosis that has shadowed the whole series. In Korean medical dramas, 뇌종양 (brain tumor) is a culturally loaded device — it creates a ticking-clock urgency and forces characters to confront what they would sacrifice for love. His raising it now, while she is on a plane and cannot pursue the conversation, shows he is beginning to take his own mortality seriously.
Seon-u buys a watch with a dual-time (듀얼 타임) function — one that displays two time zones simultaneously. In the context of this show, where the nine incense sticks each allowed travel exactly 20 years into the past, tracking two different temporal coordinates is loaded with meaning. A dual-time watch is his practical tool for staying anchored to both his present and the 1993 timeline he can no longer reach.
Seon-u's closing narration takes the form of a formal 메시지 (message) addressed to his past self — mirroring the answering-machine exchanges from earlier in the episode. This epistolary device, a letter written from one version of yourself to another, is a beloved storytelling convention in Korean melodrama. It allows characters to articulate feelings they could never say aloud to another person, and here it serves as the show's philosophical summary of the time-travel paradox.
Seon-u's final conclusion — that when logic runs out, you simply choose to believe the outcome you hope for and love the person you love — echoes a Korean cultural value sometimes called 정 (jeong), an emotional bond that persists beyond rational calculation. 정 is less romantic infatuation and more a deep, stubborn attachment that accumulates over shared time; his decision to act on it despite a potentially fatal future is the drama's core emotional argument.