8 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.
Father Yoon recites a prayer to 성미카엘 대천사 (Saint Michael the Archangel), which is standard in Catholic rite-of-exorcism liturgy worldwide. Korean Catholic priests conducting a 구마 의식 (guma uisik, exorcism rite) use the same Latin-origin prayers translated into Korean. The show depicts the rite as requiring a specially authorised 구마 사제 (exorcist priest).
Yukgwang grumbles about '쌍팔년도' (ssangpallyeondo), a Korean colloquial shorthand for 1988 and, by extension, the whole authoritarian era of the 1980s. It evokes military dictatorship, student pro-democracy movements, and heavy-handed policing — so his comparison of today's pressure to that era is both comic and pointed.
Detective Kang explains that Bak Il-do's family built its wealth during 일제 강점기 (Ilje Gangjeomgi), Japan's colonial rule of Korea from 1910 to 1945. Families who accumulated wealth and political influence during this period are a sensitive topic in Korean society; collaboration with colonial authorities is still historically contested and carries moral stigma.
Bak Il-do reportedly said he would offer his own family as 제물 (jemul), a sacrificial offering, to become a great ghost. The word comes from shamanistic and ancestral-rite vocabulary, where 제물 are food, objects, or — in darker folk tales — lives offered to a spirit in exchange for power. The drama uses this to explain how a human deliberately transforms himself into a malevolent entity.
Bak Il-do entered the 동해 (Donghae, East Sea) after stabbing out his own eye — and witnesses say he floated for days without dying. In Korean folk belief, the sea, especially the wild East Sea coast, is a boundary between the world of the living and the spirit realm. Characters throughout this drama treat that coastal town, 계양진, as a place where the supernatural bleeds into the ordinary.
Hong-ju's ailing father reveals that Bak Il-do is her 작은할아버지 (jageun harabeoji), literally 'small/younger grandfather' — meaning her grandfather's younger brother, or in Western terms a great-uncle. Korean kinship titles specify which side of the family and relative age precisely; this one confirms a direct bloodline link between the monstrous ghost and the powerful politician.
The grandfather's deathbed admission that he ordered his own son to harm young Hwapyeong echoes the Confucian weight of 가장 (gajang), the male head of household whose word was absolute family law. His 20 years of bus tickets — secretly checking every unknown phone number hoping it was his estranged son — show how that authority curdled into private, unspoken guilt he could never voice openly.
When the possessed father urges Hwapyeong to run and then stabs himself, it follows a recurring internal rule the show borrows from Korean exorcism lore: a 빙의된 사람 (possessed person) who retains a fragment of their own will can sometimes resist by harming the host body, forcing the spirit to flee before it kills its target. This is distinct from a full Catholic exorcism rite.