Previously, on Squid Game: It is a dystopian time. The people of South Korea narrowly thwarted a coup by its own president, while the people of the United States rewarded a narrowly thwarted coup by its own president by re-electing him. This electoral calamity grants a coterie of the world’s richest and most spiteful men access to unfettered government power, which, when combined with their own obscene wealth, will enable them to…oh, I’m sorry. I got confused.
Previously, on Squid Game: It is a dystopian time. The people of South Korea are being preyed upon by its wealthiest residents, in an alliance with equally wealthy Americans. Wearing masks and commanding a small army of similarly disguised workers and enforcers, they lure people in crippling debt into playing life-or-death games, one after another, until the sole survivor pockets an unbelievable amount of money. The rich men behind the scenes do this to restore some joy and excitement to lives rendered largely pointless by possessing money in an amount that makes life effectively frictionless. They sell this to the contestants as a superior alternative to life on the outside, since at least here, there’s a slim chance you can beat their rigged game.
Maybe something was in the air — go figure! — but somehow, this incredibly grim premise helped make Squid Game, writer/director/creator Hwang Dong-hyuk’s brutal survival-horror thriller the biggest Netflix Original series in history at the time. And all in Korean, too! Turns out the concept of being a hapless rat made to run fatal races for the sport of the overclass resonates in any language. Ditto the warm, compelling performances of the (largely doomed) core cast, most notably game-winner Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae, who won an unprecedented Best Actor Emmy for his non–English speaking role).
Is a sequel strictly necessary? If you’re a Netflix exec or shareholder, you betcha. In fact, Netflix beat itself to the punch by turning the dystopian fiction into an actual honest-to-god game show, an act of point-missing so impressive it should be studied in a lab. For crying out loud, they created a Squid Game Netflix logo card just for the show. Squid Game was simply too big a hit for them not to come back for a second round.
For Gi-hun, the Game is equally difficult to leave behind, which is what left the door wide open for a second season to begin with. Though he nearly left the country to reunite with his estranged family in the States at the end of Season 1, a chance (?) glimpse of the recruiter (Gong Yoo) who hoodwinked him into playing the game in the first place, still up to his old tricks, changes the survivor’s mind. After first slicing a tracking device out from behind his ear with a box cutter, he goes underground to start the hunt for his tormenters.
Within two years, he’s presiding over a massive search operation that he runs from a motel he bought and took over as his seedy private residence. He really did win that money, keep in mind! In fact, that’s how he went from owing loan sharks — represented here by their boss, Mr. Kim (Kim Pub-lae) and his chief minion Woo-seok (Jeon Seok-ho) — to hiring them to serve as his search teams. He’s offered half a billion won to whoever winds up finding the elusive Recruiter.
Gi-hun’s not the only one on the hunt, though. Having narrowly survived being shot and knocked into the ocean by his brother In-ho (Lee Byung-hun) — once a contestant in the Game, and now its sinister, masked Front Man — idealistic Seoul cop Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon) is back on the force. But he’s left the Major Crimes unit behind after most of his colleagues refused to believe his horrifying tale of secret islands and life-or-death children’s games, presided over by an army of guys from Daft Punk. Now he works traffic, where the stakes may be low, but the evidence is always right in front of you. That said, he still spends his spare time chartering a boat and scuba diving, trying to find which of several hundred uninhabited islands is the one where his brother’s Games take place.
The action heats up when our loan shark buddies finally spot the Recruiter. They follow him, calling in reports to Gi-hun, who tries to join them. Unfortunately, he gets pulled over for speeding by, you guessed it, Jun-ho and his rookie partner. It’s not until afterwards that Jun-ho connects the name to the face. He’d seen Gi-hun on the mainland during the brief break the contestants were given near the start of Season 1, and also saw him while posing as a pink guard on the island. If Gi-hun got off the island, maybe he can get Jun-ho back onto it.
The loan sharks, meanwhile, watch the Recruiter cruelly taunt a series of homeless people by offering them a choice of either bread or a lottery ticket; almost all of the poor people choose the latter, and none of them win. The Recruiter then takes the bread and stomps all over it, virtually shrieking with manic energy. The message is clear enough: The unlucky don’t deserve to eat. (Sounds like something Elon Musk would tweet.)
The Recruiter’s sadism is showcased even further after he gets the jump on his pursuers. Mr. Kim and Woo-seok awaken to find themselves with dog-bone BDSM gags in their mouths and their limbs tied to chairs. The Recruiter forces them to play a combination of Rock Paper Scissors: Expert Edition and Russian Roulette, while blasting “Nessun Dorma” on the record player. (Squid Game is innovative in many respects; giving its villains ironically classy musical taste is not one of them.) When Woo-seok makes a stupid error, Mr. Kim can win the game easily — but he refuses to keep playing, sacrificing his own life for that of his employee.
You don’t expect that kind of selflessness from that kind of character, but that’s this show’s strength. However they seem on the surface, Squid Game characters are rarely just stock types. Even the Recruiter, whose sadism is a bit seen-it-before, does that weird, almost giggly shrieking when he stomps on the bread. He’s not completely cold-blooded.
But when the Recruiter confronts Gi-hun at the motel (to which Jun-ho is already on the way, having tracked Gi-hun down himself by breaking into the loan sharks’ office) after getting the location off Woo-seok, his sadism deepens. Now playing Sarah Brightman and Andrea Bocelli’s lugubrious “Time to Say Goodbye” (the most Carmela Soprano-core music choice in the show’s history), he ups the ante on the Russian Roulette, filling five chambers and leaving one empty instead of the other way around.
Gi-hun, who is very clearly completely traumatized by his time in the Game, goes along with it all the way to the end. Why? The Recruiter goes on at length about how good he is at his job of ruthlessly killing people, up to and including his own father, who became a contestant at one point. He believes others, like Gi-hun, like the unhoused folks from the “Bread and Lottery” game that gave the episode its title, like anyone else unfortunate enough to get in the kind of debt that lands you in the Game, is trash. They’re useless and better off disposed with. The Recruiter argues that if either of the cheated, that would prove his point, and apparently Gi-hun agrees.
So when Gi-hun wins fair and square, the Recruiter is true to his ideals. He blows his own brains out, ending the episode.
Maybe it goes without saying, but like most episodes of Squid Game, this is a nasty bit of work. The episode stays fairly light until the end, characterized by joking banter between the loan sharks on one hand and Jun-ho and the fisherman (Oh Dal-su) who plucked him out of the sea after the Season 1 finale and now helps him search for the island. Then, all of a sudden, you have a protracted scene of queasy brutality and emotional torture straight out of The Deer Hunter, set to opera. This is followed almost immediately by a very similar scene in which the sociopathic Recruiter positively beams with joy over being a sociopath before shooting himself to death on camera. It’s a lot, but it’s supposed to be. If individual viewers find it’s too much to justify what is at root not all that different from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s The Running Man in conceptual terms, I get it.
But it sure looks good. We haven’t yet immersed ourselves in the pink pastel hellscape of the Game’s HQ yet, but the red and green lighting that falls on Gi-hun and the Recruiter during their face off, along with a sudden cut that jumps the 180-degree line so we suddenly see the bright red window against which they’re seated, had me thinking favorably of Drive director Nicholas Winding Refn’s own beautifully colored foreign-language Netflix thriller, Copenhagen Cowboy. (Go watch it, it rules.)
The most important contrast in this scene isn’t one of color, however, but of character, or more accurately of performance. Gong Yoo is positively demonic as the Recruiter here — eyes gleaming with the joy of cruelty, voice not skipping a beat when he reveals he killed his own father, mouth agape and grinning as he almost lewdly inserts the barrel of his gun into it before pulling the trigger. Lee Jung-jae, meanwhile, retains the sad-sack lovability that endeared him to audiences in the original, but it’s now tempered by trauma, grief, guilt, and the horror of knowledge. You still want this dear man to win, or at least to survive. Under the rules they make us play by, that’s usually the closest to winning you can get.
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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