Apple TV+’s Pachinko Remains One of the Best Shows on TV in Spellbinding Second Season

There’s such an overabundance of TV these days that you would be forgiven for missing one of 2022’s most compelling dramas, Pachinko, a decades-spanning historical epic centered on a Korean immigrant family living in Japan. Jumping between pre-World War II (1915-1930) and the late ‘80s, the first season of this Korean/Japanese language series followed Sunja (Yu-na and Kim Min-ha) as she did her best to protect her family from hardship, while convincing performances and Kogonada’s poetic direction swept us up in this intergenerational tale. Thankfully, the series is back for a second season that not only matches but surpasses its predecessor with grandiose imagery and heartbreaking familial drama that hits deep. To put it bluntly, it’s one of the best shows of the year.

Like last season, the story jumps back and forth between time periods. In the more distant past, we pick up in the mid-1940s as Sunja tries to shield her loved ones from the perils of World War II. At the same time, we see scenes from the late ‘80s as her grandson Solomon (Jin Ha) wades deeper into a world of backstabbing corporate politics. There’s plenty else going on, too; Koh Hansu (Lee Min-ho) continues to keep a watchful eye on his illegitimate son, Noa (Park Jae-jun and Tae Ju Kang), and Kyunghee (Jung Eun-chae) flirts with forbidden romance, for instance. Some of these plot points may sound ripped from a soap opera on paper, but in practice, they’re handled with thoughtfulness, care, and weighty visual language that makes it all come across convincingly.

Much of this dramatic success comes down to the characters that showrunner Soo Hugh and the writers’ room have successfully brought to life from the 2017 novel of the same name. They’re a complicated bunch; even the most likable among them are defined by noticeable flaws, while the most deplorable (generally) have some admirable qualities. Our heroine, Sunja, remains captivating in both eras, expressing a savviness that keeps her family safe in the ‘40s, which contrasts against the listlessness she feels decades later; in many ways, they all “made” it, so why is happiness still so elusive? Both performers get across her steely resolve, with each rare glimmer of unvarnished emotion hitting with additional impact.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, there’s her former lover Koh Hansu, a man entirely sculpted by ambition and violence, but whose actions undeniably help Sunja and her family through the impossibly difficult years at the end of this apocalyptic war. Lee Min-ho gets across both sides of the character with a sternness occasionally interrupted by genuine affection, a dark reflection of Sunja, whose possessiveness and obsession with bolstering his son’s success leads to disastrous ends. Even relatively minor characters are portrayed with similar levels of care that make it easy to become invested in their journeys, however brief.

Out of these characters, Noa’s fate hangs over this season the most: a boy raised by Sunja and her heart-of-gold husband Isak (Noh Sang-hyun) who doesn’t know that Hansu is his biological father. By the ‘80s, he’s become a persona non grata to the family, so the scenes with him in the ‘40s are shot through with dramatic irony—what’s going to happen to this kind and smart kid to make things go so wrong? Much like its complicated characters, the series’ depiction of family is similarly thorny; it’s depicted as something that can bring belonging or be a curse. We see that Sunja is driven to pass on her kindhearted father’s wishes by paving the way for her own children to be successful, but at the same time, we see how these expectations can be suffocating. Visually, the editing emphasizes how the past weighs on the present by seamlessly cutting between World War II and Japan’s Bubble Economy in the ‘80s, events echoing across time. While these transitions could have felt jarring, they’re connected via match cuts and thematic overlaps that grant the show an excellent flow.

This presentation helps capture this family’s weighty intergenerational baggage, and although much of this season is focused on Sunja’s kin trying to survive 1945, a disastrous year for anyone living in Japan, it also hones in on how these events have ramifications for future generations. For her children and grandchildren, there becomes a pressure to “justify” this suffering through future success, and we see that both Noa and Solomon are haunted by their family’s history. One of this story’s most graceful touches is that, while it doesn’t shy away from historical hardships, it acknowledges that every period comes with its own trials, even if previous ones could be more outright dangerous.

As for those dangerous times, they are the main focus of this latest run, and the series captures the suffocating final months of the war as the arrival of the Americans looms. Although Kogonoda and Justin Chon are not back to direct this season, Leanne Welham, Arvin Chen, and Sang-il Lee do an excellent job carrying the torch, delivering stirring images that capture the momentous scale of these events. At one point, stark black-and-white imagery frames the final days of a weapons factory in Nagasaki, each second feeling like an eternity as the atomic bomb looms. Later, we see petrified eyes staring back at a city being bombed, indiscriminate destruction made manifest. And it’s not just the massive, historical moments that are delivered with this degree of aesthetic care, but the smaller ones too, like anticipation over test results or a closeup of a mother realizing she’s lost her son.

Through all of these sequences, both in the ‘40s and the ‘80s, the series engages with the complicated social issues at play, namely how Japanese imperialism and bigotry against Koreans define both eras for our cast. It deeply communicates the hurt and structural disenfranchisement these circumstances cause, but it also hones in on moments of joy carved out in defiance of oppression. And being a story centered on Korean women, we see the intersectional double whammy of misogyny and ethnic discrimination as Sunja and her sister-in-law Kyunghee are forced into certain roles by circumstance but refuse to be crushed by them.

It delves into plenty of other compelling historical details as well, showing what it was like for Korean immigrants to watch their homeland get ripped in half by rival outside factions or alluding to the infamous Jeju uprising, where US-backed South Korean forces killed between 14,000 to 30,000 people, a tenth of the island’s population, for defying the government. Meanwhile, in the ‘80s, we see that the largely unaddressed sins of Japanese colonialism carry on in intolerance that’s more lowkey but still structurally present, making it difficult for Korean-Japanese folks to succeed.

These circumstances are a source of tension between Solomon and his grandmother—she asserts it used to be much worse, but he still has to deal with how awful things remain. He has to shoulder the burden of those who came before, all while being expected to brush aside his own concerns, which his elders view as trivial. Many of the series’ most successful undercurrents are found in this negotiation between different eras, as the camera carries us back and forth through time, emphasizing that although things have somewhat changed, the past isn’t so easily forgotten.

If there are a few small problems with this latest run, it’s that Solomon’s story doesn’t quite receive enough screen time to let these plot points breathe and that some episodes end a little too abruptly, feeling more like a sliced-up film than a show with a weekly release schedule. But overall, in its second season, Pachinko has further asserted itself as one of the best TV shows in recent memory—unflinching in its depiction of history, but not heavy-handed; warm in its portrayal of family, but not overly idealized. Its complicated characters are bolstered by great performances, and its thoughtful look at the past is elevated by evocative camera work and set design that places us in these moments. There’s so much TV these days that it can be hard to make time for it all, but you owe it to yourself to take a risk on this stirring historical drama.

Pachinko Season 2 premieres Friday, August 23rd on Apple TV+.

Elijah Gonzalez is an assistant Games and TV Editor for Paste Magazine. In addition to playing and watching the latest on the small screen, he also loves film, creating large lists of media he’ll probably never actually get to, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Twitter @eli_gonzalez11.

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