In Episode 3 of “Squid Game” Season 2, Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) — the man who was the sole survivor and big prize-money winner at the end of “Squid Game” Season 1 — finds himself back on the same mysterious island three years later, competing once again in a tournament of children’s games in which the losers are shot dead.
Gi-hun chose to return. He is determined to use his newfound wealth to destroy the games, either through a violent coup or by persuading the misanthropes who run the tournament that their cynical take on human nature is wrong. But as he sits in the barracks again, wearing a jumpsuit sporting player number 456 (again), waiting to play another deadly round of “Red Light, Green Light,” Gi-hun looks stricken.
The first time he played, he had no idea what to expect. Now that he knows the stakes? Playing seems like madness.
What doesn’t seem like madness? Making another season of “Squid Game,” the most watched series in Netflix history. Season 1 told a fairly complete story, with Gi-hun entering the games to pay off huge gambling debts before leaving with a full bank account and a shattered soul. There were a few loose ends, though. Who keeps the games going after the founder dies? And what happened to Hwang Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon), the undercover cop shot on the island by his brother Hwang In-ho, better known as the Front Man (Lee Byung-hun)?
More important, “Squid Game” has become an international phenomenon, spawning video games, reality TV spinoffs and brand partnerships. A second season, which debuted on Thursday, was almost inevitable. (Is it in good taste to turn a violent story about human exploitation into a multi-platform franchise? Perhaps not. But it proves one point of this series: The market gets what it demands.)
The big question for the writer, director and creator Hwang Dong-hyuk was whether to take his premise into a new and unexpected place or to repeat what worked so well the first time.
More than three years after the first season debuted, the name “Squid Game” now conjures images of the numbered, jumpsuit-wearing contestants, each competing in the tournament to escape dire financial circumstances that are generally their own fault. They are surrounded by masked, gun-toting, pink-uniformed guards, who follow the orders of a mysterious man in black, the Front Man. The players and soldiers are housed together within a colorful, labyrinthine secret island complex, which looks like a cross between Willy Wonka’s factory and a Batman villain’s secret lair. Can “Squid Game” be “Squid Game” without all this?
For the first two episodes of Season 2, Hwang steers clear of the island, which makes it seem as if he might be up to something entirely new. Episode 1 mostly follows Gi-hun, who hires a gang of loan sharks — they’ve been losing customers and money because of the games — to find the tournament’s snappily dressed recruiter (Gong Yoo). In Episode 2, Gi-hun begins assembling a small paramilitary troupe to storm the island. He then visits a nightclub where a few of the pink guards find him and escort him to a limo containing the Front Man.
There are standout moments in the first two episodes. Episode 1 takes its title, “Bread and Lottery,” from a bizarre scene in which the recruiter takes 100 bread rolls and 100 scratch-off lottery tickets into a park, where he offers people sleeping on benches a choice between one or the other. (He then destroys all of the uneaten rolls while shouting, “I’m not the one here who wasted this!”) The episode ends with the recruiter and Gi-hun playing a game of Russian roulette and arguing about which of them most deserves to thrive in this fallen world — before the recruiter loses, puts the gun in his mouth and pulls the trigger.
There is a similarly spiky conversation about what people are really worth at the end of Episode 2, when Gi-hun is talking to the Front Man (who hides behind glass in the limo’s front seat while communicating through a speaker shaped like a piggy bank). While Gi-hun pleads on behalf of basic human dignity, the Front Man insists the games will continue so long as society keeps filling up with “trash.”
But this season really picks up momentum once Gi-hun wakes up on the island and in his jumpsuit. When the games resume, these episodes fall back into the rhythm fans will be familiar with, as Gi-hun gets to know the new competitors while trying to survive alongside them. There are cliffhangers at the end of each episode, including a season finale that leaves Gi-hun on his knees, with a gun at his head. (There is already a Season 3 in the works, which is supposed to conclude the saga.)
The return to a tournament-driven storytelling format also proves that a near repeat of “Squid Game” Season 1 can work, provided that there is a good twist or two.
The first good twist: Before the competitors begin playing Red Light, Green Light, Gi-hun warns his fellow contestants that the losers will be shot and offers tips for how to survive. But most of the players don’t believe him. They entered the tournament to win money, so they don’t trust the motivations of this prophet of doom … until the shooting starts, that is.
The second twist: In Season 1, the players exercised an option that allowed them to vote to end the games, with no winner and no prize. This time the rules are changed, such that a vote to end the game means that any prize money in the pot is split equally. The votes become a major source of drama as Gi-hun pleads with the surviving contestants after each round to take the deal, only to hear over and over that the payoff is too meager.
There is one more big surprise. Just like in Season 1, where contestant 001 was secretly connected to the games, in Season 2 the 001 number goes to Hwang In-ho, the Front Man, playing incognito. He becomes one of Gi-hun’s closest allies and seems sympathetic to Gi-hun’s goal of keeping as many contestants as possible alive. But because we are never privy to his inner thoughts — or to any secret conversations he might be having with the pink guards — it isn’t until In-ho turns on Gi-hun in the finale that we discover whether the Front Man is actually embracing humanism.
Some of the tensions in this season are familiar from the last time Gi-hun played the games. There is a new band of bullies in the tournament, led by a rapper and reality TV star known as Thanos (played by Choi Seung-hyun, the real-life rapper T.O.P.), who becomes the strong-arm leader of the group voting “yes” on continuing. Hwang doesn’t seem to be merely repeating himself here by dividing the competitors roughly into good guys and bad guys. He is examining the way people in groups tend to order themselves by falling in line, behind either well-meaning would-be saviors or shameless authoritarians.
The rest of the players are an eclectic lot. We have Gi-hun’s longtime friend and gambling buddy, Jung-bae (Lee Seo-hwan). We have Myung-gi (Yim Si-wan), a cryptocurrency influencer whose advice cost a lot of people in the tournament money — including a vengeful Thanos. The deeply indebted gambler Yong-sik (Yang Dong-geun) is in the game alongside his aged mother, Geum-ja (Kang Ae-sim), who wants to help him pay his bills. And one of the more fascinating additions is a transgender woman, Hyun-ju (played by Park Sung-hoon, a cisgender man), who is playing to earn money for gender affirming surgery.
The influx of new characters comes at the expense of the season’s two major subplots, each of which are consigned to a few scenes per episode. The most prominent involves Jun-ho, who did survive the Season 1 shooting. He has spent the past three years looking for the island while avoiding telling anyone about his brother’s involvement with the games. He connects with Gi-hun’s paramilitary squad, but their plan to storm the compound becomes complicated after a tracker Gi-hun had implanted in his tooth is removed when he re-enters the games.
The more intriguing subplot is about No-eul (Park Gyu-young), a North Korean defector whom we find living in a car outside her job at an amusement park, where she works as a costumed character. It appears she is on her way to becoming a contestant until the surprise reveal in Episode 2 that she has been recruited to be a pink guard. But she runs afoul of her colleagues because her overzealousness as a sniper often ruins the soldiers’ side business: harvesting dead contestants’ organs.
This season’s version of the tournament makes it through only three games before the finale. After Red Light, Green Light, Gi-hun’s credibility is tested when the second game is different from the one he predicted. It’s “Pentathalon,” a six-legged race with mini-games to complete along the track. The third game, “Mingle,” is a sick variation on musical chairs, with the contestants quickly grabbing groups of partners and scrambling to a safe zone before the number of zones, the number of available teammates or the clock runs out.
What both of these games have in common in a social element. Players are asked to pick whom they want to play with, without getting much time to strategize. It’s as though the games were chosen to prove a point to Gi-hun. In a pinch, people cling to the strong and abandon the weak.
The same could be said of the votes, which by the end of the season become their own deadly game. In Episode 6, “O X,” the tally ends in a tie, forcing a revote. The contestants get to take a night to lobby one another — or to kill one another. The barracks become a war zone, as the differing factions stake out positions and prepare to attack or defend.
This all sets up the finale, in which Gi-hun leads a revolt, seizing some pink guard weapons and storming toward the grand control room from which the games are run. The episode is action-packed and bloody, making spectacular use of the Seussian sets as a backdrop for devastating machine-gun battles. Some previously strong characters prove to be cowards, while Hyun-ju has a big hero moment, revealing herself to be a capable and courageous former ex-military special forces sergeant.
In-ho joins Gi-hun and Jung-bae’s makeshift squadron; but at a crucial moment, he reverts to being the Front Man, shooting contestants in the back and then slipping into his black mask. He is in disguise when he and some guards capture Gi-hun and Jung-bae. In a voice dripping with contempt, the Front Man asks, “Did you have fun playing the hero?”
Then he kills Jung-bae after saying to Gi-hun, “Witness the consequences of your little game.” He wants Gi-hun to understand that even good deeds have bad ends, and that it’s cruel to encourage people to embrace hope. The Front Man is attempting to prove one of the major points of Season 2 (and one that partly explains why it repeats so much of the structure of Season 1): that in a materialistic society, a sick entropy will always set in, leading people to use and abuse one another.
Can Gi-hun break that cycle? There are plenty of questions left for “Squid Game” Season 3, but that is the biggest.
Postgame
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In-ho’s extreme misanthropy has a sad origin story. Not only did his pregnant wife die; he also lost his job for taking a bribe while trying to raise money for her medical treatment. Jun-ho, though, has no sympathy for his brother’s loss, telling their mother that if In-ho needed money that badly he should have sold a kidney on the black market. (Instead, In-ho donated his kidney … to Jun-ho.) “His actions had consequences,” Jun-ho says, foreshadowing the Front Man’s final line.
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The Jun-ho story line reaches its own cliffhanger ending, when it turns out that the captain helping his and Gi-hun’s attack squadron search for the mystery island may be in league with the bad guys. The implications of this are not explored … yet.
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No-eul’s amusement park scenes are an ironic preview of her character arc, considering she leaves a job wearing a colorful masked costume to take a job doing the same. (In the new gig, she carries a gun, not candy.)
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Another echo between the cruelties of the tournament and the dehumanizing grind of modern life: To find his way back to the games, the newly wealthy Gi-hun makes some financially desperate people do his bidding while he hides out in a secret lair under a pink-hued no-tell motel.
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The giant piggy bank hanging from the barracks’ ceiling — emitting slot machine-style bells and whistles whenever players die and money drops in — remains both hilarious and terrifying. Every time the idea of voting to leave comes up, some contestants look at that big pig, imagine it filling up more, and say, “Not yet.”
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