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.
The grandmother is distinguishing two related flowers: 천사의 나팔꽃 (Angel's Trumpet, Brugmansia) hangs its blooms downward toward the earth, while 악마의 나팔꽃 (Devil's Trumpet, Datura) points its blooms upward toward the sky — cheekily toward God. Both plants are highly toxic, and the drama places this distinction right at the start as a quiet signal about things that appear beautiful but cause harm.
The police chief says he'll handle the matter with 훈방 (informal dismissal without charges), which in Korea is a common low-level resolution where officers choose not to file formal charges and simply send everyone home with a warning. It reflects how much informal authority individual officers had — and here it is being used to protect the well-connected students.
고데기 is the everyday Korean word for a hair-curling or straightening iron. What the bullies are asking Dong-eun to do is test whether the iron is at the right temperature — by pressing it against her own skin. Using a 고데기 to burn a victim was a documented method in real Korean school-violence cases that inspired this drama.
달방 literally means 'monthly room' — a room in a 여인숙 (cheap inn or boarding house) rented by the month rather than the night, typically used by people with nowhere permanent to live. It sits at the bottom of Korea's housing ladder, far below even a gosiwon (tiny study room). Sara mocking Dong-eun for living in one signals just how precarious Dong-eun's home life is.
When a student withdraws from a Korean school, a 자퇴서 (withdrawal form) lists the reason. Dong-eun has written 학교폭력 (school violence) and named each perpetrator — including her homeroom teacher as a 방관자 (bystander/enabler). Filing this directly with the vice-principal rather than the homeroom teacher is a deliberate act of escalation that bypasses the teacher's ability to suppress it.
부적응 means 'failure to adjust' or 'maladjustment' and is the catch-all term schools used on Korean withdrawal forms when they wanted to avoid recording bullying. By having Dong-eun's mother write this word, the school erases the entire paper trail. For victims, this one word meant their abuse was officially reclassified as their own personal problem.
Dong-eun says she calculated that the Han River (한강) was a 20-minute walk away. The Han River running through Seoul has a painful association in Korea as a place people go when they feel there is no way out — a fact widely understood by Korean viewers the moment she names the distance. The scene makes explicit that she was considering ending her life.
새벽 예배 is an early-morning worship service, often held around 5–6 a.m., that is a distinctive feature of Korean Protestant Christianity. Attendance is considered a mark of deep devotion. Sara's father is a pastor who runs these services, and the gap between his public piety — quoting the Sermon on the Mount — and his daughter's cruelty is a deliberate irony the drama keeps returning to.
싸이월드 (Cyworld) was South Korea's dominant social network from roughly 2001 to 2010, roughly equivalent to MySpace for Korean teens. Users decorated personal mini-homepages called 미니홈피 and posted diary entries, photos, and personal details like their dreams and goals — which is how Yeon-jin's group knows Dong-eun listed '현모양처' (good wife and wise mother) as her dream.
까치발 literally means 'magpie feet' and describes standing on one's tiptoes. Dong-eun thanks her younger co-worker for this small, wordless act of kindness — presumably standing on tiptoe at the machine to cover for Dong-eun or signal something to her. In a drama full of cruelty, the show pauses to honor this tiny, private gesture of human solidarity.
The verse Dong-eun quietly recites is from Leviticus 24 in the Old Testament, known in Korean as 레위기. The phrase 눈에는 눈, 이에는 이 ('an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth') is familiar to Korean viewers both from the Bible and from everyday speech. She is framing her revenge not as personal rage but as a kind of cosmic, proportional justice — the same moral logic Sara's pastor father preaches from the pulpit.