Advertisement
Advertisement
Minha Kim as Sunja in a still from Pachinko. Photo: Apple TV+
Opinion
What a view
by Stephen McCarty
What a view
by Stephen McCarty

Best shows to stream this week – Pachinko and Downfall: The Case Against Boeing

  • Unflinching Apple TV+ series Pachinko follows four generations of a family of Korean immigrants in Japan, living under colonial rule and dealing with bigotry
  • Meanwhile, Downfall: The Case Against Boeing is a damning examination of the scandal surrounding the two avoidable crashes of the ill-fated Boeing 737 MAX

There can’t be many Korean-Japanese-American-Canadian joint productions of Korean-Japanese historical dramas featuring joyously loud hit singles from Talking Heads and The Cure. But Pachinko (Apple TV+) isn’t your ordinary Korean-Japanese-American-Canadian joint production.

Adapted from the 2017 bestseller of the same name by Korean-American novelist Min Jin Lee, the engrossing, eight-part family saga unflinchingly confronts the grim reality of life for Koreans under Japanese colonial rule in the early 20th century – especially those Zainichi Koreans who sailed to Japan for work, despite the endemic bigotry and subjugation.

Told in Korean, Japanese and English, the tale flits from Busan in 1910 and later to Osaka, and Tokyo in 1989, at the peak of Japan’s “economic miracle”. In Tokyo, Solomon Baek (Jin Ha), a Zainichi Korean descendant, is floundering in his efforts to buy land on behalf of his American bank employers.

Dubious about his motivation is his grandmother and hard-life endurance champion Sunja (Young Yuh-jung; Minha Kim in earlier scenes), who experienced the roughest possible end of the emigration-to-Japan deal decades earlier.

From left: Inji Jeong, Yeji Yeon and Bomin Kim in a still from Pachinko. Photo: Apple TV+

And still not meeting with her full approval is her son, Mozasu (Soji Arai), Solomon’s father, a success in the shady, Korean-dominated pachinko parlour business – which, in the first series at least and despite the show’s title, doesn’t provide a strategically important setting. It is, however, useful shorthand for Koreans exacting financial revenge on their Japanese tyrants of yore.

Eighty years and four generations were never going to fit into a single Pachinko series; so far from being an irritant, this season’s innumerable loose ends tantalisingly suggest what must follow. Roll on, pinball wizards.

A still from the Netflix documentary, Downfall: The Case Against Boeing. Photo: Netflix

Named and shamed

The rise and fall of even big-name companies might not always make news beyond the business pages. But when a company’s products start falling out of the sky, that’s a different story.

Downfall: The Case Against Boeing is a withering indictment of a corporate culture whose rot from the top would lead ultimately to two preventable crashes and the loss of 346 lives.

Indonesia allows Boeing 737 MAX back, years after fatal Lion Air crash

With Ron Howard and Brian Grazer as executive producers, this Netflix documentary goes in hard on a company that once represented the aviation industry’s gold standard, but which sabotaged its reputation by putting profit before passengers and crew.

Pilots (including Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger), engineers, industry experts, investigative journalists and ex-Boeing staff tell how the firm’s corporate culture changed following its 1997 merger with McDonnell Douglas and how Boeing’s traditional “laser focus on safety […] was compromised” after Airbus surpassed its market share in 2003.

“Boeing quit listening to their employees”, we’re told and with corners cut and workers fired, suddenly “everything was about speed”.

A still from the Netflix documentary, Downfall: The Case Against Boeing. Photo: Netflix
What resulted was the lethal dash to put the 737 MAX in the air – and 157 fatalities for Ethiopian Airlines, in March 2019, to add to the 189 suffered by Indonesia’s Lion Air just months before, after which Boeing, refusing to ground the aircraft, played an arrogant, shameless blame game by intimating that the Lion Air pilots were incompetent.

As the documentary indicates, Boeing claimed that pilot training on the new aircraft wasn’t necessary because it wasn’t really “new”, just an updated version of older 737s. Crucially, this meant the company could circumvent the stringent certification process to compete with Airbus’ rapid sales of its 737 rival, the A320neo.

Eventually, Boeing would pay US$2.5 billion in fines and compensation after being charged with criminal conspiracy to defraud the US Federal Aviation Admin­istration – an enormous sum bringing no comfort to the heartbroken relatives of the deceased appearing in Downfall.

1