Pachinko Season 2 Finale: EP Felt ‘Pressure’ to Deliver on Heartbreaking Moment From Novel — Grade It
The following contains spoilers from the Pachinko Season 2 finale, now streaming on Apple TV+.
The penultimate episode of Pachinko Season 2 surely yanked at the heartstrings of any parent who has ever sent a first child off to college.
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But that feeling, those damp eyes, were nothing — nothing — compared to what viewers had to be feeling when watching Friday’s season finale, in which Sunja (Minha Kim) truly, and unknowingly, said goodbye to her eldest son Noa.
The season finale opened in 1951, with Noa (played by Tae Ju Kang) absolutely thriving at Waseda University. He’s an ace student, he has a proper wardrobe courtesy of family friend Hansu, and he’s dating Anniko (Kilala Inori), the young woman that he locked eyes with upon arriving at Waseda.
Noa, though, refuses to include Anniko in his mysterious weekly dinner appointment (with Hansu). He refuses to let her meet his friend. Meaning, it took a none-too-small amount of pluck for Anniko to show up at Hansu’s, uninvited, during the men’s latest dinner.
Afterwards, back at the dorm, Noa chided Anniko for the bold move. She in turn suggested that he didn’t want her to meet Hansu, because the man clearly is his father!
Noa lashed out, choking Anniko while telling her to shut up, and then raced off into the late night to confront Hansu himself. Hansu, after giving the query some thought, confirmed that yes, he is Noa’s father. And that no, he didn’t “force himself” on Sunja back in the day.
Noa’s next stop was Osaka, where his unannounced return home both surprised and puzzled his mother. He lied to her that everything is fine, that he loves school and for the first time feels like “I can do anything.” He just wanted to see her face. Also, he can’t stay, but must go — after making the trek from Tokyo to visit for barely a minute.
Moments after Noa walked away, it dawned on Sunja that something was definitely amiss (did he learn about Hansu?), and she ran after him. But she was too late. Subsequent scenes showed that no effort by Hansu’s men, even after weeks of looking, could track down Noa.
We then saw — as a cover of “Viva La Vida” by BLACKPINK’s Rose lilted over the scene — that Noa was now in Nogano, to pawn the pocket watch and then ask the local pachinko parlor boss for a job. Noa lied that he was Japanese, and introduced himself as “Ogawa” — as in the name of his Korean high school teacher who passed as Japanese. “Ogawa Minato.”
After showing Noa flourish this season and acquire so much promise, did Soo Hugh, showrunner for the Pachinko TV series, almost dread delivering on this seismic, absolutely heartbreaking moment in young Sunjin’s life?
“We knew that people were waiting for it, people had expected it, so it felt like we really needed to stick the landing,” Hugh told TVLine. “So I think we felt more pressure than dread.”
TVLine also asked Hugh about the almost inscrutable expression on Noa’s beaitific face, as he — unbeknownst to Sunja — laid eyes on his mother for the very last time. Voluntarily, and at so young an age.
“What I love about that scene and Tae Ju’s performance is it’s sort of mysterious, right?” the EP remarked. “At one point he smiles, so it’s almost like he’s outside his own body. There’s a version where it feels like he’s not really there. But then you see his eyes water and there are tears there, and he’s really trying to not let them fall.”
In fact, the key to this scene – the key to sticking that aforementioned landing — was making sure that Noa never came off as too emotional.
“We had to do so many takes with Tae Ju because he got so emotional, and we wanted to have different variations of it [to choose from] in the edit room,” Hugh shared. “But what we talked about on-set is that if Noa gets that emotional with Sunja, she knows something’s wrong. And she wouldn’t let him leave. So he had to play it cool enough that he doesn’t worry her too much, because then she’d figure it out. Because it was a goodbye for him.”
What is Noa’s plan moving forward? To resume a humble life free of expectations and detached from his ties to a criminal?
“If you were to ask him,” Hugh said, “it’s to return to a non-life. He realizes that he wants to make the past disappear. By Noa saying that he’s not Noa, he believes — whether right, or selfishly — that he can make the past disappear.”
Elsewhere in the Pachinko Season 2 finale:
In 1951, Yoseb received and briefly hid the latest in what had been a series of letters from Mr. Kim on the front — but ultimately revealed the whole stack to wife Kyunghee, who at his behest slipped away to read them all.
In the 1989 storyline, Sunja, having been presented by Mozasu with the unsavory facts of Kato’s past, gently severed ties with her gentleman friend. Solomon rode a waive of praise from peers after arranging to have Abe’s loan called, only to later learn that his enemy had died by suicide. Mozasu, meanwhile, confronted Yoshii and ordered him to stay out of his son’s life, teeing up a 1951 scene in which a young Mozasu first met Yoshii, the grandson of a local gangster, at the pachinko parlor where he works….
Want scoop on (a potential) Pachinko Season 3, or for any other TV show ? Shoot an email to [email protected], and your question may be answered via Matt’s Inside Line!
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