No one’s life is entirely their own in Pachinko, the multigenerational, decades-spanning Apple TV+ series that is both sharply intimate and slightly unwieldy in its second season. There’s some irony here, given that pachinko itself is a mechanical gambling game, the kind of thing where all one can really control is the decision of whether to play or not. But in Pachinko’s larger worldview, there are so many factors getting in the way of its characters’ true independence — family, history, war, culture, capitalism, nationalism, debt, love, faith — that the only way to endure is to understand how small we might be in the face of all that largeness. Winning, losing — who cares? What, Pachinko asks delicately but insistently in a season that is at its best when comparing individual identities to kaleidoscopic refractions of myriad pressures, does that have to do with living?
Creator and showrunner Soo Hugh’s adaptation of Min Jin Lee’s 2017 novel is a television show that revels — luxuriates, even — in conveying the passage of time, and takes the care to craft, through cinematography and production design, illuminating details that help us understand how the world changes around us. Pachinko has never settled for being just the story of a Korean family living in Japan, and the generational and ideological gaps between steely matriarch Kim Sunja (played by Yuh-jung Youn in the 1989 story line and Minha Kim in the 1930s and now 1940s) and her Yale-educated grandson Solomon (Jin Ha). In its first season, Hugh and her collaborators explained the Japanese occupation of Korea through Sunja, the rising economic power of Japan through Solomon, and the continued impact of colonialism through their rocky relationship, and then broke the fourth wall with a season-concluding mini-documentary in which actual members of the Korean Zainichi community in Japan spoke about their experiences. That desire to contextualize and reframe continues in Pachinko’s second season, making for eight episodes that practically glow with sympathy for their characters and the ways in which they’re buffeted around by grand forces. That’s an admirable pursuit, and it often makes Pachinko feel achingly open-hearted. But toward whom Pachinko extends that commiseration this season makes the whole thing feel a little unbalanced, too.
Like last season, Pachinko splits its attention between the more-recent and less-recent pasts. In the 1989 former, only a few months have passed since Solomon was fired for having a change of heart on his last big assignment: convincing an older Korean woman to sell her now-valuable land so one of his company’s clients could build a hotel. Solomon’s reputation was ruined once he took that woman’s side, and no one wants to provide financing for his new investment fund because of the high-level enemies he’s made. He’s floundering at his diminished status, an emotional state Pachinko tidily communicates through the character’s uncharacteristic stubble, a pot of noodles he lets nearly boil over, and a meltdown in a grocery store over racist treatment. And when his father, Mozasu (Soji Arai), and grandmother Sunja offer to invest, he sees it as a sign of his own (perceived) failure at assimilation and at success.
Meanwhile, in the flashback story line, seven years have passed. It’s now 1945, and Japan is firmly entrenched in World War II, with radio broadcasts parroting imperialist propaganda and the yakuza — like Koh Hansu (Lee Minho), Sunja’s former lover and the secret father of her elder son Noa — growing ever richer and more powerful from their grip on the black markets. For lower-class Korean residents like Sunja, her sons, Noa (as a young teen, Kang Hoon Kim; as an older teen, Tae Ju Kang) and Mozasu (as a child, Eunseong Kwon; as a teen, Mansaku Takada), and her sister-in-law Kyunghee (Eunchae Jung), the war’s impact is material. With Sunja’s husband, Isak (Steve Sanghyun Noh), still imprisoned for unpatriotic activities and Kyunghee’s husband Yoseb (Junwoo Han) conscripted to work in a munitions factory in Nagasaki, the family of women and boys are on their own to face less food, more desperate people, and the potential of American invasion — until Hansu re-enters their lives. Sunja is terrified of the ostracization she and her sons would face if the truth of Noa’s parentage came out, but what other choice does she have?
Pachinko’s second season is full of such negotiations — people staring down impossible situations and attempting to retain some amount of dignity — and the series maintains a sense of narrative intimacy by grounding major historical moments in these bargains. Solomon’s increasingly tense competition with his coworker Naomi (Anna Sawai) reflects Japan’s inflating economic bubble; the secret affection Hansu’s enforcer, Changho Kim (Sungkyu Kim), has for Kyunghee represents his longing for their original home, a yearning he considers acting on when war breaks out between North and South Korea. (A scene where Kyunghee lies in bed, listening to Kim eat an Asian pear she left for him, is shockingly erotic.) Somewhat disappointing is how this season gives more of that complicated interiority to its men; a clear pattern links the self-destructive ambitions of Hansu, Noa, and Solomon, while Sunja and Kyunghee are mostly left to perform domestic labor and worry. Still, the series’s most thoughtfully rendered, revealing dynamic is between Sunja and Hansu, who Pachinko suggests represent the traditional versus the modern, the sentimental against the practical — oppositional ideas that Kim and Lee play with perfect subtlety and naturalness.
Despite Lee being perhaps the only man to consistently look sexy in turtlenecks, this isn’t necessarily a shippable relationship; Hansu’s control-freak qualities, though lessened from the novel, are still present. But the two actors convey such familiarity between their characters that every discussion, whether it’s an argument or an admission of feeling, is magnetic, as impossible to look away from as the season’s exceptional imagery: a train’s headlight glowing red in the pitch-black night, a group of women planting rice in a parallel line, and a devastating black-and-white short film set in the factory where Yoseb works. Pachinko uses every inch of its frame to ground us in a place, and then through its transitions and editing emphasizes how fluid all this is, how malleable our memories.
Less successful is how this season tiptoes into manipulation, over-relying a bit on montage sequences and musical cues to ensure our emotions follow the creators’ intent. It’s an unnecessary flourish for a show that through its writing, acting, and framing gets us there anyway — makes us feel the scalding destruction of an American bomb attack, the enduring pain a parent feels for a lost child, the satisfying smugness of watching an enemy brought low, and the sickening shame of knowing one’s own guilt in causing that downfall. Pachinko doesn’t need to rig the game when its strengths already give it such an edge.