'Squid Game' Season 2 Review: South Korean Drama That Conquered the World Loses Its Edge
Netflix's bizarre South Korean drama about economic desperation, bloodsport, and childhood pastimes, which soon became one of its most-watched programs, aired with minimal advertising and no reviews 1,196 days ago.
Lee Jung-jae in 'Squid Game' season two.
Even by the unpredictable release standards of post-COVID, post-strike television, that's a long break. I was cautious about how the series' subtle tonal turns would handle the burden of expectations, so I had myself watch Squid Game again in its entirety.
Netflix
The pleasant surprise was that the first season of Hwang Dong-hyuk's program was just as powerful without the element of surprise. The gloomy social satire, harsh odor of hopelessness, and nostalgic undertone kept me immensely fascinated. The one episode I initially despised — the rightfully derided "VIPs" — remained a cartoonish outlier in my opinion.
The second season of Squid Game is a complete disappointment. It will be fascinating to see if the most dissatisfied viewers are those looking for a smart replication of what the first season accomplished so brilliantly, or those who want more depth in the series' narrative and world-building. Because, in seven episodes, the second season of Squid Game manages to achieve neither. It's completely lacking in fresh facts or insights into the nature of the Game.
Squid Game's second season is disappointing, but it isn't terrible, and it doesn't undermine what made the first season popular. (Netflix has previously done this with their competitive series Squid Game: The Challenge.) In actuality, it is hardly a season at all. It's a seven-episode build-up to a third season set to premiere in 2025, a long bridge that lacks the structural strength to support its defenders' inevitable Empire Strikes Back parallels. Instead, it's reminiscent of the glass bridge in "VIPs," with Hwang and company standing on an untempered glass pane and tumbling through.
The second season, which, like the first, is solely written and directed by Hwang, picks up where the first season ended: Lee Jung-jae's Gi-hun, soul crushed despite winning 45.6 billion in the Game, foregoes a plane ticket to the United States to see his daughter in favor of finding the elusive Front Man (Lee Byung-hun) and putting an end to the Game for good.
The narrative jumps ahead two years. Gi-hun is still looking for a means to reach the Front Man or the Game. His primary target is the Recruiter (Gong Yoo), who, in the first season, approached him on a subway station, duped him into progressively violent rounds of the game "ddakji," and finally offered him with the card to participate in the Game. Gi-hun struggles to locate the Recruiter.
Meanwhile, police officer Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon), last seen being shot by the Front Man, who turned out to be the cop's brother, is still alive and working a less taxing beat in traffic enforcement. In his leisure time, he's looking for proof that there is a Game out there where regular people play childhood games to the death in front of animal-masked VIPs.
Gi-hun will eventually return to the island and participate in the Game. You know this because that is the only thing that makes sense, and it is what Netflix has been heavily advertising. But how much time does it take for the reset to occur? Wow, it's lot longer than you expected.
Squid Game's first season moved at its own slow pace. Its pilot is more than halfway complete before the first round of Red Light, Green Light, and the second episode is essentially game-free. However, that time is dedicated to helping viewers comprehend the amount of desperation felt by all of the characters, which represents South Korea's current economic inequalities.
The second season takes two full episodes to get back into the game, but what happens during that time isn't as general as "Here's a guy who has hit rock bottom." the following: "Here's a guy who wants season two of a TV show." For two hours, it appears like Squid Game is laying the groundwork for Gi-hun and Jun-ho, who met just briefly last season, to collaborate. However, by the third episode, Jun-ho has returned to being a distraction. During my rewatch, I discovered that I recalled 90% of Gi-hun's storyline and 5% of Jun-ho's plot. That is still true here; the character serves only to ruin momentum.
You know Gi-hun is returning to the game, and it's poor narrating to have it take so long for him to get there. But once he gets there, it puts a fundamental shift on the Game that the franchise isn't prepared to manage.
The essential irony of the Game, as portrayed first, is that it is hideous, but in an unjust world, it is inherently just. The Front Man ignores black market organ harvesting, but he becomes enraged when he discovers that some of the pink-clad guards have been informing a participant about impending games.
Returning Gi-hun to the Game, on the other hand, eliminates equity and turns it from a 456-player competition in which each player is the hero of their own sad narrative to a 1-person, elaborately orchestrated lesson in which 455 persons participate and are slain for Gi-hun's punishment. Is that properly nihilistic? Sure! Is it almost as satisfying? Not even close. This time around, the other individual participants receive no flashbacks and very few stories. They are tragic character types: a former soldier (Park Sung-hoon's Hyun-ju) looking to complete her gender transition; a mother (Kang Ae-shim's Geum-ja) and son (Yang Dong-geun's Yong-sik) looking to pay off his gambling debts; a former crypto-bro (Im Si-Wan's Myung-gi) who went belly-up and his ex-girlfriend (Jo Yu-ri's Jun-hee), who is also pregnant.
The second season is full of pre-existing relationships rather than establishing the groundwork for character relationships created within the game. One such relationship is that between Jung-bae (Lee Seo-hwan), another of Gi-hun's outside friends, and the rapper (Choi Seung-hyun's Thanos), who was bankrupted by Myung-gi's crypto scheme. The drama is predetermined and so less earned.
After Gi-hun arrives, the game becomes fairly similar. There is no sign that someone has given the M.C. Escher day-glo set a new coat of paint, and the new games are barely on-theme. At some point during the first season, everyone jokes about the various childhood games that might be played next, but even with so many options, Hwang already feels stretched thin.
By that criterion, you can almost see why the Game is treated as an afterthought in the season's new development. Hwang definitely understood that people didn't like the VIPs, and they are nowhere to be found this season. However, he also realized that the most popular section of the pilot was when players voted on whether or not to end the game. A new regulation requires users to vote in every tournament, and the voting procedure takes up just as much screen time as the games themselves, with no similar benefit. If I'm being fair, I can explain how it becomes a statement on how frequently democracy drives people to vote against their interests, either individually or collectively, which applies not only to South Korea but to every democracy. It's a point made and then reiterated until it becomes tedious.
Democracy, the series contends, is bleak. And everything in the program has gone bleak. Lee Jung-jae received an Emmy for the first season in a part that required live-wire agility. Everything in Lee's performance was enormous, from broad humor to broad sadness, and it all came together flawlessly in the end. While Lee is a skilled enough actor to make Gi-hun's one-note haunting aspect a natural progression for the character, he is less engaging as a consequence. Except for Choi, who makes Thanos wildly unpredictable and vibrant (though never close to a real person), every new character feels like a lesser replacement for someone we lost the first time around, and the series suffers greatly from the absence of O Yeong-su's wily Il-nam, Jung Ho-yeon's deeply tormented Sae-byeok, and others.
Among the newcomers, Jo and Kang come close to making their characters distinctive. And if your characters aren't memorable, murdering them has no impact. So, until the sixth episode—for me, the only new episode that equaled the visceral intensity of the first season—there's a lot of violence but little impact.
That's not to mention the problematic casting of cis actor Park Sung-hoon as a poorly drawn trans character. I fully recognize and appreciate that merely having a trans character in a South Korean drama is a huge step forward. However, there is a baseline expectation that an international television show in 2024 will fall short. Both can be true.
Similarly, while it is true that most of the lessons Hwang appears to have learned from the first season have been misapplied, I am interested whether the majority of the more inventive features, format-shifting twists, and discoveries will be preserved for the third season. What was initially thrilling about the series' idea has not been completely lost (the juice created by the sixth episode verifies this); the style is intact, although stagnant; and Lee's acting remains solid, if less amusing than what drew people in the first place.
Squid Game isn't broken in its core, but season two just doesn't appeal.
