‘Pachinko’ Creator on the Season 2 Scene That Still Makes Her Weep
[This story contains spoilers from season two, episode two of Pachinko, “Chapter Ten.”]
Pachinko, Apple TV+’s ambitious series adaptation of Min Jin Lee’s novel about a Korean family’s fight for survival during and after the Japanese occupation of Korea, has never used episode titles. But if creator and showrunner Soo Hugh had to assign a title to the latest chapter of her breathtaking multigenerational saga, she would call it “The Boogeyman.”
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Written by Hugh, Christina Yoon and Melissa Park, the second hour of Pachinko’s sophomore season reintroduces Isak (Steve Sanghyun Noh), the pastor husband of protagonist Sunja (Minha Kim), who, in the season one finale, was arrested in 1938 for trying to fight for labor unions — an effort seen as an affront against the Japanese emperor. Seven years later, Hansu (Lee Minho), Sunja’s wealthy first love who abandoned her while she was pregnant with their child, is able to negotiate the safe passage of a Japanese official’s family out of Osaka in exchange for Isak’s release.
A badly battered Isak — whom Hugh considers “The Boogeyman” in this episode — returns home and collapses in the arms of his sister-in-law, Kyunghee (Jung Eunchae). Sunja, who became the breadwinner of the family in Isak’s absence but always prayed for his return, rushes to her husband’s aid, even enlisting Hansu’s help to track down the best remaining doctor in the city. But much to her dismay, Sunja comes to realize that Isak’s injuries are fatal.
In his final hours, Isak forgives the current pastor who expresses his remorse for turning him in years ago. He tells his sons, Noa (Kang Hoon Kim) and Mozasu (Eunseong Kwon), that he will always be their father (the scene that Hugh tells The Hollywood Reporter always makes her cry the most). And he says goodbye to Sunja, whom he agreed to marry even after learning that she was carrying another man’s child.
Isak Says Goodbye
When she first read Pachinko years ago, Hugh recalls feeling “really angry” about Isak’s death. “It feels so unfair — this is a guy who did everything right. He tried to live with so much empathy and kindness, and he got completely beaten down by the system,” she tells THR. “The injustice of Isak’s death always felt really raw to me, and I really wanted to capture that here in episode two.”
For Hugh, one of the biggest challenges of designing the episode was figuring out when to dial up the level of emotion so as not to dull the impact of the ending. She decided to structure it as a John Carpenter-esque horror film — using an unsettling sound design, as well as camera angles, to give the impression that someone is watching the characters from afar. But the emotional climax of the episode is fittingly quiet and intimate.
“It was really important that [Sunja and Isak’s goodbye] mirror the scene in episode five from season one, when they first make love. “The camera angles are exactly the same,” Hugh explains. “I really wanted that to show just how far these two people have come. Those two people were strangers [when they got married].”
Minha Kim, who had a similarly visceral reaction upon reading the script, reveals she couldn’t stop crying while shooting the scenes after Isak’s return — to the point that she couldn’t even say her lines. In order to curb the issue, director Leanne Welham encouraged Kim to “diversify” her emotions in each scene. For instance, Sunja is more tender and comforting when she tells Isak to relax, but more angry and steely when walking away from him to ask for help.
Speaking about Sunja’s headspace during that pivotal scene, Kim explains to THR, “In the scene when Sunja and Isak lie down … and eventually she loses Isak, I just wanted to touch him. I just wanted to share my warmth and my temperature to keep him alive.
“I [as Sunja] was very angry about the situation that he had faced for a lot of years, and I felt so sorry for him,” she continues. “Eventually, when I realized that I can’t do anything for him to make him [stay] alive, that’s why I just wanted to touch him and share my warmth. I just wanted to make the promise: ‘Don’t worry about our family and our kids.’ Even now, when I’m thinking about it, it’s very emotional.”
Sunja’s reaction to Isak’s passing will ring true to a lot of children from Asian families, whose parents are known for their quiet stoicism, even in the face of tragedy. “Sunja doesn’t break down, and it isn’t until after his death and she walks out by herself and she sits that that’s when the release comes,” Hugh says. “It just felt that approach was so more honest.”
“She knows that there’s no time to break down, unfortunately, so that’s why she hides her tears and she just [stays] silent,” Kim adds. “I don’t know how she does it, but when I’m looking at my mom and my grandmother, they do it. But they don’t intend to do it; it just happens.”
14 Years Later, Hansu and Sunja Reunite in Osaka
It remains to be seen how Isak’s death will impact Sunja’s relationship with Hansu going forward. But Sunja and Hansu, as the actors who play them insisted, aren’t the same people they once were.
“The element that I love about the relationship between Hansu and Sunja [now] is that they’re the parents, so most of the conversations they’re having [this season] are about the kids and about Noa,” Kim says. “In the first season, we were so busy hating each other and trying to have each other. But now, they kind of wrangled [their feelings] a little bit because of their kids.”
In the season premiere, Sunja runs out of kimchi to sell on the street and begins peddling rice wine to support her family, but she quickly gets arrested. However, instead of facing any kind of trial or punishment, Sunja is set free as soon as the processing officer hears her (Japanese) name, and she is ushered into a waiting car by a mysterious man named Mr. Kim, who has been hired by Hansu to keep an eye on Sunja and her family.
As Hansu confesses to Sunja, he never truly lost her — or their son, Noa, who is still unaware of his true paternity in 1945. “[Hansu’s] probably been dreaming of one day that he will be able to embrace Noa and Sunja completely as his own. I think that could be his life’s goal,” Lee says through a Korean interpreter. “For season two, Hansu’s emotion towards Sunja is more than just love [for her]. I think it has evolved into some sort of love for family, love for his bloodline and his son.”
When she set out to create her own backstory for what happened to Sunja between seasons one and two, Kim imagined that Sunja continued to think about Hansu “almost every day.” Sure, Sunja may have been “quite angry” that Hansu has been spying on her family for over a decade. But Kim reasons that part of her must have mulled over this reunion for years, so she couldn’t be too shocked.
“I think she might have dreamed about him, or maybe she made up her own picture in her imagination [about their reunion],” Kim says. “She wants to get rid of [him], but she can’t, which is so annoying, so depressing. But right at the moment that she realized that she cannot get Hansu out of her life, she just accepted that she cannot live without him.”
Whereas the first season found Hansu having and asserting his power over Sunja, the second finds them on more level terms — and finally beginning the uncomfortable process of getting to know one another.
“There’s even moments in season two where you actually wonder: Can these two people be friends? There’s this one conversation they have later on that I find really touching,” previews Hugh. “But the thing that’s always going to stand between them is Noa, and they both have such different worldviews on what kind of world Noa should go into, and that really provides a lot of conflict for the two of them.”
The Next Generations
As Pachinko marks the passage of time, the second and third generations of the story will come further into focus later this season. The dual timelines of the show will remain in constant conversation with each other, showing that history tends to repeat itself across multiple generations of the same family.
“You see the same hopes and burdens that are now loaded on these kids,” Hugh says of the subsequent generations. “Sunja [played by Yuh-Jung Youn in the ’80s timeline] thinks that she’s not going to make the same mistakes she made with Noa. She said that in season one, and yet she’s still placing this tremendous burden on Solomon [played by Jin Ha]; she is making the same mistakes. Noa had to carry all of that family’s hopes and dreams, and she’s doing the same thing with Solomon. She just doesn’t realize it yet.
“But what’s interesting about Noa and Mozasu, who are played by four very precocious actors, is you have Mozasu who says, ‘Yeah, I feel your hopes and dreams, and I say, “Screw you.”’ But then you have Noa who’s the opposite,” adds the creator. “Isak’s death is such a turning point for [Noa]. Before Isak’s death, he says, ‘I’m going to be a pastor. I’m going to be like my father.’ Then, after Isak’s death, something clicks in him and he says, ‘I don’t want to end up like my father.’”
Still, given that Noa was raised by Isak up until the age of 6, Noa still feels his late father’s influence. “There’s so much of Isak’s goodness still in Noa. Later on, when Noa witnesses Hansu beating a man ruthlessly, he’s really shaken by that and he really wants to disavow Hansu. I think that’s Isak’s influence,” Hugh says. “Noa’s constantly put in this vice between Hansu and Isak, and that’s why it’s so devastating later on when he learns who his real father is.”
Lee Minho: Hansu Wants More
Lee previously described Hansu, in a past THR interview, as “a villain generated by tragedy.” The second season attempts to peel back the layers on that character by exploring “the seams” of his family and business life, Hugh says. “Even in his own house where he’s his father’s favorite son — even though he’s not a biological son — he’s still called out for being Korean. He’s still denigrated for being an outsider, and yet Hansu is very, very good at holding it in until it erupts in the most destructive ways.
“The big arc for Hansu in the second half of the season is, he has to end up betraying that beloved father figure, and that’s also something Noa does as well,” the showrunner teases. “There’s so many [similarities] between Noa and Hansu about who your father figure is. In season one, we met Hansu’s real father. We placed [him] with this Yakuza leader, so Noa and Hansu actually have very similar arcs in that way.”
Hansu has a one-track mind on accruing power — not only in business, but in politics — this season. “He’s even more unstoppable, and I think he just crossed the river that he cannot come back,” Lee says. “I believe Hansu desires more, wants more. So even if he reaches the end of his desires, he eventually ends up not getting what he really wants. I think that’s the main story arc for Hansu: He will just lose more, and then he will desire more, and he’ll get obsessed more with Sunja and his son, Noa.”
As one of the most prominent South Korean actors working today in Asia, Lee has played his fair share of flawed leading men. But the second season of Pachinko represented a new kind of acting challenge for the 37-year-old superstar, who originally had to audition for the role.
“I haven’t lived that age yet myself, so I felt, from time to time, very strange emotions when I’m portraying Hansu as a character,” Lee explains. (Hansu is now in his mid-to-late 40s.) “I don’t have that very deep experience [where] I met someone and then we just parted ways and then met again later on after some time period. I don’t personally have that emotion, so feeling that emotion through this role and character was special.”
When he began to feel those new emotions stirring inside of him, Lee says he would often turn to Kim and ask: “I’m feeling this certain way about trying to film the scene. How do you feel about this?”
Lee adds, “We were trying to communicate a lot on the emotional [parts of our characters]. I think I was trying to focus on these tensions and the feelings and emotions that cannot be easily described in words when I was trying to portray Hansu during season two.”
The Rice Fields
The second episode is bookended by tragic irony. After witnessing a neighboring family receive the dreaded news that their patriarch was killed in action, Mozasu asks Noa if that family will ever get back his remains from the warzone. In the final scene, Sunja and her family are forced to leave Isak’s remains behind to escape an imminent bombing in Osaka — but Hugh points out that they were extremely privileged to flee at all.
Under Hansu’s care, Sunja’s family will be taken to seek refuge in the countryside, where the women are expected to work in the rice fields.
“When we think of World War II, you always think of the battlefields; you always think of the men who pick up the guns and fire. Now, we’re showing what it was like from the perspective of those left behind,” Hugh explains. “This is crazy, but in some ways, in the rice fields, there are moments of happiness for them. Even with all the things that they’re going through and all their fears, there’s a moment of freedom that they have.
“I really love that juxtaposition — that you can have these huge world stakes of a country being bombed, and that’s rhymed with a child’s laughter as he flies a kite for the first time. That feels like the language of Pachinko — that big and small in the same frame.”
New episodes of Pachinko release every Friday on Apple TV+.
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