Squid Game Season 2 wastes no time pulling the Netflix hit’s reluctant hero Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-Jae) back into the business of playing twisted games of life and death. In fact, our boy Gi-hun, aka Player 456, spends the entire first episode of the new season of Squid Game hunting the mysterious “Recruiter” (Gong Yoo) down. When Gi-hun and this deeply nihilistic man finally do meet up, they play a far more bloody game than simple ddakji. The Recruiter and Gi-hun play Russian roulette…to the death.
**Spoilers for Squid Game Season 2 Episode 1 “Bread and Lottery,” now streaming on Netflix**
Squid Game Season 2 literally picks up where the show’s record-shattering first season ends, with Gi-hun deciding not to board a plane to visit his daughter overseas. Instead, Gi-hun devotes the next few years of his life spending his fortune trying to track down the mysterious powers that created Squid Game in the first place. His mission? Putting an end to their brutal games forever.
Gi-hun’s best bet on finding this shadowy cabal is hunting down the well-dressed man who lured him to Squid Game in the first place. He dispatches men to roam the Seoul subway system everyday in the hopes of reconnecting with this man. The Recruiter eventually captures two of the men on his trail and forces them to play a mash up of “Rock, Paper, Scissors” and Russian Roulette. When Gi-hun finally tracks down the Recruiter, they decide to play their own version of the game.
“That sequence, even on the script, it was so intense and impactful,” Lee Jung-Jae told Decider during a recent roundtable interview. “And, you know, Gong Yoo says that to me, and I say it back to him, that I could actually just shoot you. I could just kill you with a bullet. But instead, they decide to follow the rules of Russian roulette.”
So much of Squid Game Season 2 is about exploring how people are incentivized to act against their own best interest. We see it earlier in the premiere episode when the Recruiter offers a park full of homeless people the option of a lottery scratch card or fresh bread. Overwhelmingly, these starving souls choose the unlikely chance of great wealth over feeding themselves. It disgusts the Recruiter and serves as a central theme of the season, as the rules of the new Squid Game allow the contestants to take a vote to go home, splitting the cash prize, after each challenge.
For Lee Jung-jae, the game of Russian roulette that Gi-hun plays is about a larger idealogical battle between a man devoted to dismantling the games and someone so devoted to them, he killed his own father when he lost.
“I think actually the setup of the Russian roulette is just a cover of the book and, actually, inside the book, it’s all about the psychological warfare between these two guys,” Lee said. “So they start off with the Russian roulette and they go into this psychological warfare.”
“There’s those ups and downs in that story, within the story, which I thought was very impressive.”
Ultimately it becomes obvious that the Recruiter’s final turn will result in his death. Nevertheless, he doesn’t balk. Gi-hun eviscerates him for being his masters’ “dog,” mindlessly following their orders, blindly loyal to the rules of a game. However, with a final smirk, the Recruiter shoots himself in the head and dies.
“Gong Yoo pulled off that scene so awesomely that it really helped me as an actor to counter that,” Lee Jung-jae said, giving his famous co-star props for a thrilling and unsettling performance.
If fans of Squid Game were worried that the new season would play it safe and pull its punches, then this first “game” serves as perverse proof that series creator and director Hwang Dong-hyuk still has more dark and depraved social commentary to impart.
Squid Game Season 2 is now streaming on Netflix.
The post ‘Squid Game’ Star Lee Jung-Jae Says That Harrowing First Game of Russian Roulette Is Really “Psychological Warfare” appeared first on Decider.
