‘Pachinko’ Creator Explains How That Heated Finale Confrontation Was Two Seasons in the Making
[This story contains major spoilers from the season two finale of Pachinko, “Chapter Sixteen.”]
For two seasons of Pachinko, Apple TV+’s series adaptation of Min Jin Lee’s novel about four generations of a Korean family living during and after Japanese rule, protagonist Sunja (Minha Kim) has wrestled with a devastating secret: The man who fathered her first child, Noa (Tae Ju Kang), is not Isak (Steve Sanghyun Noh), the sickly, late pastor whom she married shortly after becoming pregnant — but, rather, Hansu (Lee Minho), her wealthy first love who has ties to organized crime.
More from The Hollywood Reporter
“Sunja, in some ways, can come off as such a fairytale character. It seems like she’s always good, like she always makes the right decision,” creator and showrunner Soo Hugh tells The Hollywood Reporter. “And yet, when you actually drill down into what she does in this show, she doesn’t always make the right decisions. For example, was it right of her not to tell Noa who his father was? Why did she let Hansu back into their lives? I think there’s no easy answer.”
In Friday’s season finale of the time-hopping historical drama, a teenage Noa, now a student at the prestigious Waseda University, discovers his true paternity. While having dinner one evening with Hansu, whom he had simply regarded as a generous family friend, Noa gets an unexpected visitor: his girlfriend, Akiko (Kilala Inori), who crashes their meal with the intention of learning about Hansu. Akiko is quickly able to deduce what the audience has known all along. But when Akiko attempts to confront her boyfriend with the truth later that evening, Noa becomes indignant.
“What’s interesting is when Akiko tells him what we’ve known for so long, Noa’s reaction is actually very violent and visceral, and it’s that very thing that really unnerved him when he saw Hansu beating up that man on the rice farm many years ago,” Hugh says, referring to a flashback earlier in the season. The fact that Noa’s first reaction would be to resort to violence “terrifies him” and makes him “desperate for Hansu to say, ‘No, I’m not your father’” when he goes back to confront him at home, but Hansu refuses to lie to him any longer.
Hugh reveals that the heated confrontation scene, which has effectively been two seasons in the making, was rewritten multiple times, with Lee and Kang both offering their own thoughts on the pivotal moment. “We had to stop a few times, because actors are not robots and can’t just turn it back on, and I think that’s what you see in that scene. So much of it just feels so real and lived-in,” she says.
Early on in the season, Lee says, Hugh gave him the freedom to choose how to play out the little moments when Hansu is considering breaking his promise to Sunja and telling Noa about his paternity. When Hansu and Noa came face-to-face toward the end of World War II, Lee says Hansu had already thought about how he wanted to broach that difficult topic — but Hansu does not handle the conversation particularly well.
“What I feel is sort of a pity about Hansu is that when he loves someone, the way he loves someone is not about understanding and embracing them fully. But rather he goes [for] the deepest, weakest part of them and stirs them all up,” Lee tells THR through a Korean interpreter. “From season one, when he was approaching Sunja, he touched on her very weak spot in her mind to get her love and earn her as a person.
“I think for season two as well,” Lee continues, “when we have this revelation moment in episode eight, that was a very important point in time for Noa. That was a moment of truth for him. But instead of supporting him emotionally, Hansu just wanted to force his idea on Noa, and I think he’s just waiting for that moment to tell Noa that he is his biological dad. So when Noa showed up for him, all drenched in rain, [Hansu] probably knew that, ‘Today is the day that I’m going to tell Noa that I’m his dad.’ Instead of trying to understand Noa’s emotions and feelings more, he just said very clearly what he thinks and what he feels to him.”
After Noa accuses Hansu of preying upon a young Sunja and calls him a “foul,” “venal” and “selfish” man, Hansu reminds him that, as his biological father, his blood also runs through him. A stunned Noa then decides to travel home to Osaka in the middle of the night to briefly see his mother, whom he reassures that nothing is wrong. But unbeknownst to Sunja, Noa, ashamed of his heritage, is planning to drop out of school and run away, and his unannounced (and short-lived) return home is actually his way of bidding her farewell.
“In the edit room, we had a decision to make: At what point exactly does Noa realize he’s going to run away? Is it in the scene with Hansu, or is it in the scene with Sunja? And we edited it quite a few different ways because [there’s a different effect] depending on when you push in or what closeup you use,” Hugh reveals. “We thought the most powerful version was the one at the end of the Hansu scene, when you see Noa, all of a sudden, go very calm. That is the moment where Noa, in his head, is like, ‘I’m done. I’m gone. I have to be out of here.’ So we knew when he went into the Sunja scene that really he’s saying goodbye to her.”
“When Sunja Doesn’t Know What to Do, You’re Worried”
While she can tell something is wrong with her son, Sunja doesn’t put two-and-two together until Noa leaves for good — at which point, it is too late for her and Hansu’s men to find him. For Kim, who delivers a heart-wrenching performance in the final act of the episode, Noa discovering his true parentage was always going to be Sunja’s worst nightmare — worse than any war or conflict that the family has been forced to endure thus far.
“She did everything for Noa to not know that his father is Hansu. But right after she realized that Noa knows, every hope that she built for 15 years has just collapsed. That’s why she lies down and she closes her eyes,” Kim explains of Sunja’s final scene, in which she wordlessly returns home after failing to track down Noa. “Finally, after all this time, she felt exhausted. She never felt tired or anything, but right after she lost [Noa], she felt so tired and she felt all the lights and hopes just disappear. She can’t feel anything, she’s gone numb, and she blames herself.”
Fighting for survival has remained a major theme in Pachinko, and Sunja (her older version is played by Yuh-Jung Youn) has embodied that fight more than any other character. Throughout the second season, Sunja chose to sacrifice her own dreams of opening up a restaurant to raise her family, particularly following the devastating passing of her husband Isak. But Kim does not necessarily see Sunja’s actions as a sacrifice. “Sunja herself didn’t think that she sacrificed herself because the dreams that she had for several years surely exist. But I think for her, the real dream for Sunja was her kids and her family,” she says. “I think it [gave] her joy for Noa to go to the university and to save the members of the families.”
But losing Noa due to her well-intentioned but ultimately misguided actions is a blow from which Sunja may never truly recover. “Season one ends with Sunja getting up and saying, ‘I know what to do [to support my family]. I’m going to sell kimchi.’ Season two ends with almost the exact opposite trajectory,” Hugh notes. “For the first time, you realize our heroine, Sunja, who’s such an anchor of our show, doesn’t know what to do. I find that to be the saddest, scariest thing in our show. When Sunja doesn’t know what to do, you’re worried. And if we’re lucky to get a season three, I think the question is, how do you pick up the pieces after that?”
Hansu’s House of Cards Have Fallen
In a chat with THR earlier this season, Lee said he believed Hansu’s love for Sunja “has evolved into some sort of love for family, love for his bloodline and his son,” and that his “life’s goal” would be “to embrace Noa and Sunja completely as his own.”
As Hugh, who jokes that Hansu would benefit from a lot of therapy, points out, “He says several times in the show: ‘Don’t be sentimental. You’re being emotional about this.’ And yet, oddly enough, in some ways, he is the most sentimental character in this show.”
But it’s precisely Hansu’s obsession with Sunja and Noa that has led to their undoing, Hugh notes. “When Noa tells him, ‘Tell me it’s not true,’ the camera lingers on Hansu for a beat. He has a choice to make. He could have said, ‘No, I’m not your father. That’s ridiculous.’ I think he understands if he did, Noa would’ve been happier. But instead, he claimed his fatherhood, like, ‘No, you are mine.’”
Lee knows that, at first glance, Hansu’s decisions have always been, to put it lightly, morally questionable. But as the actor was tasked with getting into his headspace, Lee says he “was able to relate to him completely” and “see why he’s making those decisions and where he’s coming from” — both personally and professionally.
For instance, in the penultimate episode of the season, Hansu informs his father-in-law, who runs their crime syndicate, about a man named Yoshii Isamu, who is taking over some of their black market sales. His father-in-law is not only indifferent to Yoshii’s presence, but he also informs Hansu that he is not invited to his own daughter’s wedding. After Sunja encourages Hansu to “cut out the rot” in his life, Hansu, believing that he has been discriminated against due to his Korean heritage, orders Yoshii himself to assassinate his father-in-law.
“He thinks that he killed his father-in-law out of survival, and the justification he has in his head is, ‘It’s [either] me or him. It’s survival of the fittest,’” Hugh explains. “But in reality, we know that this was the father figure that he replaced the father that he lost. I think there is such a sense of disappointment that Hansu has in this father figure. He didn’t just say [to the hitman], ‘Do it. Tell me when it’s done.’ He sat there and watched the whole ordeal. I think that tells you it was a lot more personal than he is letting on.”
Lee adds, “If Hansu believes a certain person — whether that is his own father-in-law or whoever he has a relationship with — will come into his way as an obstacle, then he doesn’t care [about them]. He only has his eyes on the bigger, better things. So if you look at it from the humanity aspect, then how can you possibly kill your own? But to Hansu, that’s completely reasonable, and the only right choice he can make at that specific moment in time.”
But Hansu will, ultimately, now have to live with the consequences of his actions. “At the end, when we’re with him in that nightclub and we have him stare directly at the camera, he’s by himself; he’s been abandoned, forsaken by everyone,” Hugh says of the scene in which Hansu strikes a woman offering companionship. “There was always this feeling, [this] realization that he can’t hide from us, which is, ‘I did this.’ The house of cards starts falling down around him.”
The Next Chapter of Pachinko
In the final scene of season two, Noa finds himself all the way in Nagano, where he sells the gold watch Hansu gave him and, assuming a new Japanese identity as Ogawa Minato, gets a job at a pachinko parlor. “I think the minute he casts off his name and takes someone else’s name, he’s going to live another life,” Hugh says. “He specifically chose a Japanese name. I feel like it’s directing the audience to believe that Noa’s going to live as a Japanese person and, what is the cost of that kind of passing?”
The season two finale has also planted some new seeds that would ideally come to fruition in the future. For starters, after hitting rock bottom professionally in 1989 due to a failed business deal, Solomon (Jin Ha), Sunja’s grandson, schemes his way back into the good graces of his peers. But he does so at the expense of his girlfriend, Naomi (Shōgun Emmy winner Anna Sawai), and Abe (Yoshio Maki), one of his former clients against whom he tried to exact revenge.
“Solomon has destroyed Naomi’s career, and a man that he resented very much was so ruined that he committed suicide — and this is all directly at the hands of Solomon. He can’t lie about that, so he’s going to have to reckon with this,” Hugh says. “He can’t run away, because he’s done a very good job running it away or talking his way out of things. Solomon is a really good salesperson. I always feel like immigrants are very good salespeople. That compartmentalization, that coding that a lot of immigrants do, at some point catches up to you.”
Viewers also got a glimpse of the antagonistic relationship between Solomon’s father, Mozasu (Soji Arai), and Yoshii Isamu’s grandson, Yoshii Mamoru (Louis Ozawa), who met when they were just children. Mozasu even goes as far as to threaten the younger Yoshii, in an attempt to get him to stay away from working with Solomon.
“Obviously, there’s a bigger history between Mozasu and Yoshii, and that, of course, circles back to Hansu, because in season two, we realized Hansu also knows Yoshii,” Hugh says. “Melodrama is those delicious, juicy ways characters fit and don’t fit, and collide and scratch one another. I think that’s the fun part of being able to sit with these stories for a long period — you get to set it up and then you see the fallout from those actions. So right now, obviously, the audience has no idea what’s happened, but we know [that storyline is] coming.”
For now, Hugh is still waiting for an official decision from Apple TV+ about the future of Pachinko. “This is really, now, one of those things that’s so out of my hands, and I think Apple’s also waiting to see how the show does,” the showrunner says. “I think we’re really trying to fight for a third season — and it really comes down to viewership.”
If she had it her own way, Hugh would still want to make four seasons of Pachinko in total. “In some ways, it feels like there’s a version where one or two more seasons does feel like the right way to end this,” she says. “People can’t live forever. At some point, life happens, time passes and people pass. But it does feel like there’s another season or two to eke out.”
***
The full first two seasons of Pachinko are now streaming on Apple TV+.
Best of The Hollywood Reporter
Sign up for THR's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Solve the daily Crossword
