9 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.
독살 (毒殺, *doksal*) means death by poison — literally 'poison killing.' In the Joseon court, poisoning was a feared and plausible way to eliminate rivals because it could be disguised as sudden illness. A blackened mouth or dark-stained rice were the signs physicians and witnesses looked for to detect it.
The on-screen title card defines 진살 (盡殺) as 'killing everyone without exception.' Issuing such an order against civilians — including women and children — to contain a plague was an extreme and deeply controversial measure even by Joseon standards, where quarantine usually meant sealing off a village, not massacring it.
세자 책봉 (*seja chaekbong*) is the formal ceremony in which the king designates his heir. The 동궁 (東宮, 'East Palace') — the crown prince's residence — being empty was considered a crisis for dynastic stability, so pressure to fill the position quickly was immense. Here the king proposes adopting a nephew as his legal son to solve the succession problem.
Korea uses a 12-year animal zodiac cycle just like China's. A person's 띠 (*tti*) is the animal year they were born in, and it carries spiritual significance throughout their life. Writing the character for that animal upside-down on a protective charm (액막이, *aengmagi*) is a shamanistic trick to trap or bar a spirit connected to that person from entering a space.
Korean shamans (무당, *mudang*) are believed to be chosen and empowered by a 몸주신 (*momju-sin*), a personal guardian deity that 'inhabits' their body and grants them the ability to see and communicate with spirits. Without this deity a shaman loses all spiritual power — which is why losing one's 몸주신 is described here as being no different from death.
옹주 (*ongju*) is the title for a king's daughter born of a concubine, one rank below 공주 (*gongju*), who is born of the queen. Being expelled from the palace as a child — which the character references bitterly — was a real consequence for concubines who fell from favour, and their children often lost status along with them.
내의원 (內醫院) was the Joseon royal medical bureau, and an 어의 (*eoui*) was a physician authorised to treat the royal family. Because they examined bodies and wrote cause-of-death reports, a court doctor who witnessed suspicious royal deaths would have been a critical — and very dangerous — witness to silence.
다과함 (*dagwa-ham*) are lacquered boxes used to present tea snacks and sweets to guests of high rank. In elite Joseon households each household or palace office would commission boxes with a distinctive pattern, making the lotus-flower design here act like a fingerprint linking the princess and the poisoning to the same source.
In Korean royal symbolism the king is the 용 (龍, dragon) and his children are 'dragon's offspring.' A snake shedding its skin (허물, *heomul*) is a loaded image: the word 허물 also means 'fault' or 'sin,' so the phrase carries a double meaning — a sin disguised as something harmless killed the royal children. Ghosts in Korean folklore often speak in exactly this kind of riddle.