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.
The phrase 닭 쫓던 개 신세 (literally 'a dog that chased a chicken') describes someone who put in all that effort only to end up with nothing to show for it — the chicken flew up to the roof and the dog is left staring up helplessly. It's a classic idiom for being outsmarted at the last moment.
모란봉 (Moranbong) is a famous hill and park in Pyongyang, often used as a place name with patriotic associations in the North. Here it functions as a radio callsign or destination code, which was a common tradecraft convention for DPRK agents operating in the South.
In the early 1990s setting of Snowdrop, all South Korean broadcasters were required to sign off at 1 a.m. under government-mandated 'broadcast curfew' rules — a legacy of military-era media control. Slipping an unauthorized report onto the airwaves just before shutdown, as the characters do here, was one of the only windows where censors might be caught off guard.
안기부 (Angibu) stands for 국가안전기획부, the Agency for National Security Planning. It was South Korea's powerful domestic and foreign intelligence agency from 1981 until it was reformed into the NIS in 1999. During the authoritarian era it was feared for surveillance, interrogation, and the suppression of political dissent — which is exactly the backdrop the show uses.
In early-1990s Korea, imported Western brands like Ray-Ban (라이방 is the Korean pronunciation) were luxury goods that carried real cachet. Asking for his 'Raybans' in the middle of a crisis is a darkly comic character beat — it signals that this man's priorities are his image and his privileges, even as everything collapses around him.
송편 are half-moon-shaped rice cakes stuffed with sesame, red beans, or chestnuts, most famously eaten at Chuseok (추석), the autumn harvest holiday. For응철, spotting a crescent moon and thinking of his mother's 송편 is a universal Korean shorthand for homesickness — Chuseok is the holiday you go home for, and he is very far from home.
응철's dying wish for 'South Korean fried chicken' (남조선 닭튀김) is both funny and poignant. Korean fried chicken — double-fried for extra crunch — became a cultural phenomenon from the 1980s onward and is still one of the foods most associated with South Korea's economic boom. For a North Korean agent, tasting it represents the whole forbidden world of the South.
웅담주 is a traditional tonic liquor made by steeping bear gallbladder (웅담) in alcohol, long prized in Korean folk medicine for treating digestive and liver ailments. North Korea exported it as a premium product. The saam's remarkable memory of that distinctive bitter smell — even after eleven years — is what finally cracks the spy's cover.
The dorm mother says she once fell for 막스 (Marx) — a reference to the wave of Marxist and socialist study circles that swept Korean universities in the 1970s and 80s as students resisted authoritarian rule. Reading Marx was itself a criminal act under the National Security Law, so her confession doubles as an admission of how dangerous that era was for ordinary young people.
남태일 boasts of having 'crossed the Han River in a tank to save the nation' — a direct echo of the rhetoric surrounding the May 16, 1961 military coup and later the December 1979 coup, when generals presented armored advances into Seoul as heroic acts of national salvation. Invoking this mythology in front of cameras is deliberate: it positions him as a strongman in a tradition Korean audiences would immediately recognize as both glorified and deeply contested.
The M48 Patton was the backbone of the South Korean army's armored force from the 1960s through the 1990s, supplied by the United States. Seeing one rolling toward a women's university dormitory on the evening news would have been a stunning, unmistakable image of state power turned against civilians — which is precisely why the show puts it on screen.
A 당선 축하연 is a formal celebration dinner thrown by a party's support groups after a presidential win. The show places this banquet — with 8,000 guests in Gangnam — right after the bloodshed at the dormitory, a deliberate juxtaposition: the political machine celebrates while the human cost is still fresh. Gangnam's convention halls hosting elite political events was already a recognizable image by the early 1990s.
다방 (dabang) were small, dimly lit coffee-and-tea rooms ubiquitous in Korean cities from the 1960s through the 1990s — intimate spaces for conversation, dates, and clandestine meetings, very different from today's franchise cafés. 수호 recalling their first meeting at 'Roma Dabang' frames the whole romance in this distinctly period setting: a place ordinary young Koreans went to feel a little European and a little free.