Adapted from Min Jin Lee’s novel, the sprawling Apple TV+ drama “Pachinko” — about a Korean family’s plight living in Japan and the challenges they endure across generations — weaves between past and present timelines, unfolding a complicated multilingual tale of resilience, identity and generational trauma. “Pachinko” editor Susan E. Kim, who is Korean American, was deeply connected to the material, which helped inform the editing process.
“Whenever I approach anything as an editor, I am drawn to how things are impacting me emotionally,” she said. “It’s the believability, the authenticity within the specific language of [the] project. Through the process of assembling and refining the edit, you’re tracking different kinds of information within the larger scope of the story, making sure the information is being planted in the right ways at the right times.”
“Pachinko’s” emotionally fraught Season 2 finale was, in many ways, two years in the making — and putting together the episode was both daunting and exciting. “[It] felt like a great responsibility,” Kim said. “There were more characters. There were more loose ends to tie up, many of which came to a head [in the finale]. I wanted to do justice to the storytelling and the incredible performances that had been crafted throughout the season and make it — story-wise and emotion-wise — as satisfying as possible.”
Mainly taking place in 1951 Japan, the episode’s primary storyline tracks a college-aged Noa (Tae Ju Kang), the obedient son of Sunja (Minha Kim), as he learns the devastating truth that his biological father is Hansu (Lee Minho), the corrupt businessman with ties to the yakuza (Japanese crime syndicates).
It’s the heated confrontation between Noa and Hansu that Kim considers the emotional apex of the finale, as well as the series.
“Lee Minho and Tae Ju Kang provided such rich material to work with,” she said. A lot is at stake for both characters in that moment: A few minutes earlier, Noa had violently assaulted his girlfriend, Akiko (Kilala Inori), after she planted seeds about Hansu’s true identity.
“It didn’t make the edit, but there’s a shot of Noa looking at his hands,” Kim said. “It gets at the theme about the blood running through you. [Noa] is so shaken up by the possibility that Akiko’s words might have some truth.”
In the pivotal scene where Noa challenges Hansu to come clean about the secret he’s kept hidden for years, which Hansu eventually confesses, Kim had many discussions with showrunner Soo Hugh about how big (or small) that sequence needed to be.
“Something Soo likes to do, especially in scenes like this, is make sure we have options in the cutting room,” Kim said. “She calls them ‘mild,’ ‘medium’ and ‘spicy’ performances.” Her first pass featured a more nuanced performance from Kang since his character, Noa, was “the son who does everything right.” It didn’t make sense, at first, for him to be so vulnerably raw. “I remember being in the cutting room with Soo, and she said, ‘I think we need to go bigger.’
“The more we talked about it, [the more] I understood this to be completely true,” Kim said. “This is Noa’s moment to completely explode and relieve himself of this huge responsibility and weight for being not only the person who was going to save his family but for his entire community to have all these expectations for him. By calibrating and reworking the performances in this scene and letting him explode and letting there be so much more fire, it allowed us to track a change that happens to him.”
She’s talking about the switch Noa turns off where he decides to leave everything behind. “You can actually see him break, and it’s with this emotion that he heads to say goodbye to his mother. Without that intensity, the story would have unfolded in a different way.”
It was also important that the finale show Lee’s character, Hansu — who spends much of “Pachinko” operating in degrees of stillness and stoicism — at his most exposed.
“That scene was the most emotional moment I have ever seen for Hansu,” Kim said. “If you’re looking, you can see [Hansu’s] eyes are welling up with tears, and those are real tears. He’s so committed to not breaking that wall that has fortified him his entire life, it’s only after ‘cut’ is called that you see tears from his eyes. He kind of sniffles and turns away. I was moved by that and wanted to honor that performance.”
The sequence that bookends the season is equally significant and leaves room for a possible Season 3: Noa resurfaces in Nagano, no longer going by his given name and fully stripping away his Korean identity, ultimately taking a job at a pachinko parlor.
“That felt like an appropriate full-circle moment that gets at all of these very “Pachinko” themes,” Kim said. “The game of life, how things work in cycles and how there’s so much that happens to these characters that for him to end up there is heart-wrenching. It was a great moment for all those elements to come together.”
This story first appeared in the Below-the-Line issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine.
Read more from the Below-the-Line issue here.
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