Recapping this episode of Squid Game is a daunting prospect. Not because it’s complicated — on the contrary, it’s a simple as these things get. The players play a game, the survivors take a vote and then a break, they bond with each other, they start a new game, there are brief detours for the No-eul and Jun-ho side plots, the end.
No, the problem stems from how much of the energy of Squid Game is lost if you summarize it. I mean, the show really is as simple as it sounds above. The characters sound equally sketched out when you break them down in text form: the kindly old woman, the genial jarhead, the arrogant celebrity, the gentle trans woman, the surprisingly human villain, and so on. I found all their interactions compelling, but if I were to sum up their conversations without the benefit of the performances conveying them, they’d seem gossamer thin.
And action-wise, what am I going to tell you? Our heroes have to play children’s games, again. They show surprising strengths and weaknesses in doing so, again. The perversely chipper soundtrack and sets make the graphic violence feel like a true violation, again. Our heroes survive in a buzzer beater, again. They vote themselves into disaster, again. They spend the night fretting about the other players and the next game, again. The game begins and then the credits roll, again. You get it by now.
And while I certainly think humanity can stand to learn lessons about capitalism’s destructive greed and murderous cruelty — in fictional form, I mean; I’d like to think we’ve learned plenty IRL, though some people never quite get it — I’m not sure the Game is worth the candle, so to speak. Is Season 2 making any points that weren’t made in a more novel way in Season 1, at least as effectively? Not from where I’m sitting.
So you see that when you sum it all up, it doesn’t sound like much. And who knows? Maybe it’s not much, when broken down. But Hwang Dong-hyuk reminds me of the players trying to keep a jegi, the Korean equivalent of a hacky sack, in the air. As long as you’re doing it well, something that’s just a cheap little nothing when you hold it in your hands and look at it clearly becomes dazzling to see in action.
Hwang writes and directs each game for maximum watchability. In his hands, a six-legged race where you stop to spin a top at one point has the edge-of-your-seat tension of the attack run on the first Death Star. He can cram in more heart-to-heart conversations between contestants after the game than Peter Jackson crammed endings into The Return of the King and make every one feel like it plumbs the depths of these damaged people. His camera makes the already massive and garish sets look even more so, providing a level of dystopian visual absurdity that’s hard to find outside of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.
And he knows how to get the most out of his cast. He gets Lee Jung-jae to revert to the hard-luck loser personality he had for most of Season 1, before the Game hardened him, and it’s like seeing an old friend. Casting a cis male actor as a trans woman is a dubious proposition, but as written, Hyun-ju lays out the cost society exacts from trans people as the price of their liberation with the kind of clarity an audience as huge as this one won’t get from this country’s paper of record or its opposition party (to their great discredit), and actor Park Sung-hoon handles it as straightforwardly as possible. Kang Ae-shim’s Geum-ja is becoming the kindly heart of the season. Lee Byung-hun makes Player 001, who gives himself the name Young-il, a fascinating presence: We know he’s a liar and a killer, but we’re not sure how much he’s currently lying, or how much he wants to get his teammates killed. Actors can easily get lost in roles that require that much guesswork on the part of the audience, but Lee occasionally tricks you into thinking he’s just one of the gang.
So there’s your recap of Squid Game, as the players prepare to play Mingle, a game in the vein of musical chairs involving a big spinning platform and the lighting scheme of a carnival. Lots of shows could have a plot like this, but it’s all in the way you tell it.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
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