When Sunja (Yuh-jung Youn) confronts a new friend (Jun Kunimura) about dark secrets she’s dug up from his past, he reacts with the resignation of someone who’s long since come to terms with them. He does not act out in shock or denial. He offers explanations that are not quite excuses. He accepts that she’s right that his history cannot be changed. But, he asks, “What are we supposed to do then? Spend the rest of our lives chained to it?”
Sunja does not provide an answer, and neither does her series. Down to its very format, which cuts between two timelines, Apple TV+’s Pachinko presents itself as a reflection on the impossibility of finding one. Seeds planted years or decades or generations earlier have a way of shooting up at unexpected times, in unexpected ways. And as she did in the series’ breathtaking first chapter, creator Soo Hugh (adapting Min Jin Lee’s novel) harvests them for emotional truths whose bittersweetness lingers long after the end credits have rolled.
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Pachinko
The second season picks up with both halves of the story right where they left off. In 1945, a 30something Sunja (Minha Kim) and her family are whisked away to wait out World War II in the relative safety of the Japanese countryside — thanks to the orchestrations of Koh Hansu (Lee Minho), Sunja’s shady former lover and the biological father of her eldest son, Noa. Meanwhile, in 1989, Sunja’s grandson Solomon (Jin Ha) plots his revenge against Abe (Yoshio Maki), the businessman he blames for tanking his career.
Though the vast fields of Sunja’s wartime journey are a world removed from the glittering high-rises that contain Solomon’s, Pachinko draws much of its impact from the way their stories echo or contradict or layer on top of one other. Frequently, slow fades leave an image or a sound from one scene lingering onscreen into the start of the next, so that it’s impossible to say precisely where young Sunja’s family dinner ends and Solomon’s solo ramen supper begins.
Some of the hardships faced by the Baek family, we in 2024 can see coming from miles away. You don’t have to remember the Japanese financial crisis of 1990 in detail to see reflections of the 2008 crash in Solomon’s disingenuous real estate pitches. Where the Japanese occupation of Korea might have felt like untold history to most American viewers (unless, perhaps, you too grew up in a Korean American household listening to elders bitterly lament Japanese oppression), the months leading up to V-J Day will be more recognizable ground. The moment Kyunghee (Eunchae Jung), Sunja’s sister-in-law, mentions that her husband, Yoseb (Junwoo Han), has been sent away to work at a munitions factory in Nagasaki — well, we know what that means. The ten-minute sequence leading up to that bomb is this volume’s showstopper, captured by director Arvin Chen in the grainy black-and-white and boxy aspect ratio of an old newsreel, and accompanied by the ominous tick of a countdown clock.
As ever, however, Pachinko’s truest gift is its observant eye. Nothing escapes its attention: Not the shabbiness of a shirt collar; not the tenderness with which a mother packs a son’s suitcase; not the casual way an adolescent Noa (Kang Hoon Kim) and his younger brother, Mozasu (Eunseong Kwon), slip Japanese words into Korean-language conversations, nor the discomfort that clouds the faces of older Korean relatives who hear it. Each detail adds to the texture of its reality, until they cumulatively take on the weight of entire lifetimes of experience. Even as the family lives through watershed historical events, these comparatively mundane memories are what keep us anchored in this world on the ground level.
But if Pachinko excels in those little moments, it sometimes struggles to balance the intimacy of its storytelling against the ambition of its scope. Where season one followed Sunja toward new feelings, new shores and new family, season two sees the Baeks turning inward. Koh orbits the family like a jealous moon, bending the tides of their fortunes and trying to insulate them from outside influence. New characters (like Sungkyu Kim as Koh’s anguished henchman) and upgraded supporting characters (like Solomon’s love interest Naomi, played by Shogun‘s Anna Sawai) register as temporary distractions rather than life-changing relationships. The latest eight-hour run misses the wide-open possibility of earlier chapters — though a second-half shift in focus toward the now college-aged Noa (Tae Ju Kang) suggests fresh horizons to come in season three.
Also lacking is a certain sense of ambiguity. As easy as every version of Sunja is to love, the younger one comes off as possibly too noble — Minha Kim has a gift for conveying an entire rainbow of emotions with a single guileless look, and I’d have liked to see what she might do with a few darker shades added to her palette. Her 1940s loved ones are painted in a similarly idealized light. A bittersweet love triangle somehow leaves all three corners on the moral high ground, while a years-long trauma reaction seems to dissipate with a single stern talking-to.
In that regard, Solomon serves as a blast of cold air cutting through the sentimentality. He’s a less straightforward protagonist, closer in temperament to the prickly Koh than to his kindly grandmother. But he also feels less knowable than she does, and his plot is by far the less compelling of the two, resting as it does on a dry and slow-moving financial scheme.
If neither side registers as complete on its own, however, in combination they turn into something more complicated, less predictable and altogether richer. They tell a story of a dream, not just a life. In the middle of the 20th century, Sunja struggles in hopes that her descendants might someday see a brighter future. At the tail end of it, Solomon both benefits from these sacrifices and chafes against them. In a moment of desperate candor, he unloads on a Korean woman (Hye Jin Park) about Sunja’s age. “I’ve lived a pathetically easy life,” he admits. “When I look at the way you look at me, the way my grandmother looks at me, how can you not ask yourself, Did I really live through all that for this?”
This time, the show offers the kindness of an answer. “I have no regrets about how I lived. It was a life lived well,” she tells him. The Baeks’ stories may or may not turn out as they had hoped; the Sunja of 1989, for her part, seems downright befuddled at times by what the world around her has become. Regardless of the outcome, Pachinko makes the case that every step of the way there might be worth savoring for itself.
