Pachinko Season 2 Episode 8 Review: Chapter Sixteen

The Pachinko Season 2 finale is the series’ most heartbreaking hour to date, as Noa finally learns about his true heritage and Sunja’s family is changed forever. 

In many ways, this is the moment the entirety of Pachinko has been building toward thus far, and while other things happen in this finale — most of which seem to be setting up for a potential third season — the bulk of the hour is rightly devoted to the circumstances of the reveal and its aftermath.

Following Noa’s departure for Waseda University last week, “Chapter Sixteen” skips ahead a year. It’s now 1951 and Noa’s a second-year student, really coming out of his shell and feeling his confidence.

He’s got that early college kid thing going where he argues weird contrary positions as a way of proving his intelligence, though he’s not entirely wrong that Tolstoy sucks. 

He also has a girlfriend, Akiko, the daughter of the Japanese Foreign Undersecretary. (She was the girl who was loudly condemning the American empire at a protest last week.)

She’s got peak rich girl attitude, obviously slumming it by dating a Korean boy and loving every minute that he’s lecturing her about her greed and inability to sympathize with the less fortunate. 

Noa also has a “mysterious benefactor” he refuses to let Akiko meet. It’s Hansu, obviously, it’s Hansu, whose gift of that spiffy trunk last year kicked off a whole new stage of their relationship, which now involves weekly check-in dinners with conversations about nebulous concepts like Noa’s “future”. 

During their get-together this week, Hansu introduces Noa to Kurogane, aspiring politician and son-in-law, and while he doesn’t refer to him as his son, he’s beaming with pride talking about his intelligence and drive. 

Honestly, for all his flaws, Hansu’s genuine enthusiasm about Noa’s education is adorable. The guy’s reading along with his son’s syllabus, so he can keep up with him! He also has Thoughts about Tolstoy! 

Sure, he wants Noa to go into politics, while Noa wants to be a teacher, and while Hansu is really rude about it, implying that he’d be wasting his Waseda education, this is an argument that literally every parent and child throughout time have had about career paths. 

It’s so peak dad, that it all just sort of underlines why literally every other character on the show has seemingly figured out that Hansu is Noa’s father. Including his girlfriend, who shows up unannounced at their weekly dinner, despite not being invited. And the fact that Hansu knows who Akiko’s father is makes everything worse for Noa, who hates everything about this.

What follows is disturbing on multiple levels: Sure, it’s problematic that Akiko barged her way into a place Noa repeatedly asked her to avoid, and doesn’t seem to feel bad in any way about her behavior. In fact, she seems to be more than a bit excited by how angry he is over it. 

But when he tries to end things with her for real, Akika lashes out: Is he just doing this because she figured out Hansu was his father?

Noa’s response is wildly over the top — first, he yells at her, then he physically assaults his (former?) girlfriend, choking her against a wall.

It’s the sort of violence we’ve never seen him display before, and the fact that it’s connected so closely to the reveal of his biological connection to Hansu is…well, it’s certainly concerning. 

Gentleness and mercy have always been keystones of Noa’s character. (We saw him both forgive and become besties with his school bully, for goodness sake!) It’s shocking to see him snap in this way, particularly when such a big part of the reason Noa pulled away from Hansu as he was growing up was the violence he witnessed him commit. 

Because it’s a clunky way to make an even more awkward point, that Hansu himself later insists on, that somehow, Noa is his on some cellular, genetic level and his reaction — to Akika’s taunting, to Hansu’s confirmation of the truth — on some level seems to bear that out. 

Perhaps that’s, ultimately, what makes Noa run. Not that he can’t necessarily stomach the idea that this man is his father (though that’s likely true, in its way), but that he’s inherited something from him, unknown and unseen. 

His trip home to Osaka, just to see his mother one last time, is more emotionally devastating than had he just told her straight out he was leaving.

Watching Sunja clearly recognize that something is wrong with her son, but not be able to figure out what it is until it’s too late is gutwrenching. Minha Kim has been extraordinary throughout this season, but her wordless performance as Sunja recognizes that her son is gone gone is next level. 

The season ends with Noa in Nagano, with a new identity as Minato Ogawa, a new job at (what else?) a pachinko parlor, and a fresh start financed by the sale of the same watch Sunja once pawned.

Where does he go from here? And how does his family fill the hole he’s left behind? Any potential Season 3 will have to answer these questions, but it seems that nothing on Pachinkowill will be the same again.

Stray Thoughts and Observations

• At this point, it seems inevitable that the threads of the past are going to collide with the 1989 story eventually. This does make for some rich connective material — the realization that Mosazu and Yoshii Jr., grandson of the Yoshii that Hansu has been making deals with have a dark past, the visible absences around Sunja’s table in the hour’s closing moments — but it also means that the 1989 story has been stuck in what must surely be the longest summer ever. 
• Seeing Sunja finally realize that Mosazu is not Noa and that it’s okay for him to want and pursue a different path was extremely satisfying. 
• I’m so mad that Mosazu and his stupid private investigator ruined his mother’s relationship with Kato. He’s very straightforward and honest when Sunja asks him about his literal war crimes, and while she doesn’t seem to be put off by his past behavior, she can’t deal with the fact that he tried to forget his past as much as he could. For Sunja, that’s never been an option. 

What did you think of this episode of Pachinko? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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All episodes of Pachinko are now streaming on Apple TV+. 

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