#youn yuh jung

so i really liked season 1 of pachinko overall but i also kind of wished they’d figured out a better way to tell the story in just 1 season with more than 8 episodes

one of the things i struggled with in the book was feeling disconnected from the characters as a whole since it jumped across multiple generations of this one family and once you got to know one family member it seemed to move on to the next family member’s story with little fanfare

conversely, when watching the show, i was immediately drawn to sunja and sympathetic to solomon’s struggles, and i love the way the show jumped back and forth in time so we could see both kim min ha and youn yuh jung’s portrayal of sunja as well as the way her struggles and choices tied directly to her grandson solomon’s life

but starting around episode 6 i feel like sunja got sidelined a bit as the story focused more on solomon and no disrespect but i just don’t think his story is the most interesting in this show and even the emotional beats with hana in the finale kind of fell flat for me because the only other time we saw her was when she was being a bad influence when they were teens and so i never really bought into or cared about their relationship

and i think part of the problem is that it feels like old sunja’s story concluded with her emotional journey back to korea and so once that plotline wrapped up, it felt like she didn’t really have much to do, and in episode 8 especially, it seemed like all youn yun jung was doing was looking sad in the background, which is just such a waste of her talent, though i will say i don’t think i’ve ever seen a granny peel an apple with such gravitas and emotion

and i get that there’s still noa’s story to uncover, which will undoubtedly be fleshed out in season 2 but i feel like this show could’ve told a more cohesive story about belonging and family if it focused solely on sunja because the parts of episode 8 where we see sunja come into her own and the last scene where she triumphantly sells her kimchi were so good and so compelling and i was once again left wanting more of her, more of her story, more of how she turned from a young, naive mother to a weary but loving matriarch and so i was really bummed that we never got to see her learn how to be a mother for the first time or see how her relationship with isak developed and honestly i wish we’d gotten to see that on screen instead of all the agonizing scenes of hana slowly dying

i mean, i get wanting to be true to the source material, but i feel like this is an instance where they could’ve improved on the novel by tightening up the story and honing in on sunja, especially considering the talented actresses they got to play her

all that said, i LOVED the first half of the season and liked the second half well enough and pulling in the real-life stories of women like sunja to end the first season was so poignant and such a lovely, respectful note to end on

i get that pachinko is about intergenerational trauma and family legacy and all that and so i understand the importance of solomon’s storyline and find his struggle with his identity to be genuinely compelling

BUT

i just can’t bring myself to care about him at all because kim min ha and youn yuh jung are both SO captivating that i just want more of sunja, more of her life and her joys and her sorrows

Pachinko — Official Trailer | Apple TV+