13 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.
In 1980s South Korea, major news outlets — both print and broadcast — were tightly controlled by the government. Sneaking information to multiple newspapers and TV stations at once was a high-risk move because state security agents were routinely embedded inside newsrooms to suppress exactly this kind of leak.
The 통일전선부 (통전부, United Front Department) was North Korea's agency responsible for covert operations targeting South Korea — propaganda, espionage, and cultivating sleeper agents. Holding the rank of 부장 (department chief) there made Im Ji-rok one of the most powerful figures in the North Korean apparatus.
A 사당 (祠堂, ancestral shrine) is a small, traditionally built structure where a family or community honours its ancestors. On a university campus it would be a quiet, tucked-away spot — which is exactly why the characters choose it as a covert meeting place away from guards' sightlines.
비자금 (秘資金) literally means 'secret funds' — money kept off the books, typically used for bribery or political operations. In South Korea's authoritarian era, powerful figures routinely maintained these hidden accounts. The enormous sum being discussed here — 3억 달러, three hundred million US dollars — signals how high the stakes of the election scheme are.
프락치 comes from the Russian word 'fraktsiya' and entered Korean during the colonial and Cold War periods. It means a secret informant or mole deliberately placed inside a group to report back to an intelligence organisation. Being called a 프락치 is a serious accusation — it implies deliberate, ongoing betrayal of the people around you.
발인 (發靷) is the formal departure of a coffin from the home or funeral hall on the day of burial — effectively the moment a family formally releases their dead. Arriving somewhere the very morning of a son's 발인 is considered shocking and cold-hearted, which is exactly the pointed insult being levelled at the character who shows up.
The 도사 (道士) here is a fortune-teller operating in the tradition of Korean folk spirituality. Drawing lots (제비뽑기) to receive a divine answer, and giving 공수 — an oracle spoken as though the spirits are talking directly through the practitioner — are standard features of Korean shamanistic consultation. Wealthy clients seeking guidance before major decisions were a staple of this world.
The 1988 Seoul Olympics were a massive source of national pride but also intense political anxiety. The ruling regime presented the Games as proof of South Korea's legitimacy on the world stage, and any domestic scandal — especially one linking the government to North Korean operatives — threatened to humiliate the country in front of a global audience. This is why the characters keep invoking the Olympics as both a shield and a weapon.
북수백산 refers to a remote, mountainous training ground used in the flashback. North Korean special-operations recruits underwent brutal selection courses in isolated mountain terrain, where instructors could — and in dramatised accounts, did — order trainees to eliminate each other to prove ideological loyalty. Surviving such a course bound the survivors together with a loyalty that went deeper than any party order.
난수 방송 (亂數放送) were real shortwave radio broadcasts in which a reader — often a woman with a flat, calm voice — read out strings of random-seeming numbers. North Korea used them to transmit encrypted orders to agents in the South. Because the broadcasts were public radio, they were almost impossible to intercept and decode without the matching cipher. Su-ho's demand that Su-hee read each broadcast live is a clever counter-move: pre-recording would be useless if the final digits change daily.
6.25 is the Korean shorthand for June 25, 1950 — the day the Korean War began — and the word alone carries enormous emotional weight for older Koreans. 쌕쌕이 is the colloquial wartime word for jet fighter planes (from the screaming sound of their engines). Civilians who survived aerial bombing of refugee columns carried lifelong trauma; the detail that Deok-sim collapses at aircraft noise is a realistic portrait of what would now be called PTSD.
청야 uses the term 외상 후 스트레스 장애 (post-traumatic stress disorder) — notably in a clinical, almost skeptical tone. In 1987 South Korea, this diagnosis barely existed in public discourse; trauma from the Korean War was more often called '화병' (suppressed emotional illness) or simply not named at all. Her framing the concept in modern psychiatric language marks her as someone trained in a very different ideological and medical vocabulary.
The TV anchor's framing — describing the wounded agency director as a victim of 'armed spies' — illustrates how the 안기부 (국가안전기획부, Korean Central Intelligence Agency) routinely shaped broadcast news in the 1980s. State-aligned broadcasters were expected to reframe any government embarrassment as a security threat, turning perpetrators into heroes and victims into aggressors.