The Netflix hit’s second season can’t quite break out of its own vicious cycle.
Juhan Noh / Netflix
December 26, 2024, 7 AM ET
When the South Korean drama Squid Game hit Netflix in 2021, the show became a bona fide cultural phenomenon. The story of people in debt competing to the death for a massive cash prize looked like nothing else on television, juxtaposing candy-colored children’s games with horrifying hyper-violence. Squid Game soon turned forest-green tracksuits into a trendy Halloween costume. It helped enter the word dalgona—the sugary treat used in one of the contests—into the pop-culture lexicon. It was parodied on Saturday Night Live. For weeks after I watched, I couldn’t get the murder doll’s song during the first contest, Red Light, Green Light, out of my head.
The second season, now streaming, begins where the first ended: with the game’s latest winner, Seong Gi-hun (played by Lee Jung-jae), choosing not to board the plane out of South Korea that would have reunited him with his family. Instead, he threatens Hwang In-ho (Lee Byung-hun), the tournament’s supervisor known as the “Front Man,” over the phone. As he hails a cab, Gi-hun warns In-ho that he’ll find him and stop the games—but In-ho is unperturbed. “You will regret your decision,” he coolly replies.
I began having regrets of my own as I made my way through Season 2. Gi-hun’s revenge quest is, for the most part, the opposite of thrilling. The show’s tedious opening hours depict him as a recluse who has hired a collection of incompetent men to find the games’ slap-happy recruiter (Gong Yoo). They’re monitoring every subway station in Seoul in the hopes of coming across him, but none of Gi-hun’s employees knows exactly what their target looks like. Gi-hun isn’t a reliable boss either; he’s too paranoid to visit the stations himself. Even teaming up with Hwang Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon), the police detective who discovered that the Front Man was his own brother last season, to track down the island where the competition took place yields a monotonous search. Without the sadistic games going on, the show lacks momentum.
Read: In Netflix’s Squid Game, debt is a double-edged sword
And then—and this is only a spoiler if you haven’t seen a single trailer—Gi-hun winds up back in that tracksuit, reliving his worst nightmare. It’s a neat trick: Season 2 withholds the deadly events just long enough for viewers to yearn for their return, making them wonder whether they’re actually on the protagonist’s side. As a result, when the games do begin, they make for an even uneasier watch than before. Season 1 framed the tournament as a straightforward allegory for the punishing trap of financial distress, rendering even the greediest characters as sympathetic to an extent. Season 2 isn’t as totalistic; it further blurs the lines between the show’s victims and perpetrators. The series displays a meaner, more critical streak toward the cash-poor participants this time around. It emphasizes how, as much as the capitalistic system may push people to do rash things for money, the players themselves work to uphold such values. Thornier questions arise: Is it possible to overcome cruelty, avarice, and selfishness? And if not, do the players actually deserve to live?
To Gi-hun, the answer to both questions is a resounding “yes”—but the show seems to revel in countering his perspective whenever it can. Even before this season’s competition begins, Squid Game argues that individuals will chase financial gain above all else with an interminable scene in which the games’ recruiter mocks unhoused people for choosing lottery tickets over food. Gi-hun reenters the competition in an effort to dismantle it from the inside and save his fellow players, but the show immediately underlines the futility of his attempt, with a fresh, brutal round of Red Light, Green Light. In-ho, too, toys with Gi-hun’s belief in the goodness of humanity by ordering players to vote on whether to end the bloodbath at the end of each trial; if they do, they walk away with far less cash than they could have if they continued on, because every death improves their chances of landing the jackpot. These deliberations unfold over and over, and they’re not especially fun to observe: Gi-hun sees each election as an opportunity to convince players that, together, they can defy both the temptation of the prize money and the game makers. Each time, he fails.
Still, the show’s latest lineup of trials allows it to return to form. Each contest is more diabolical and intriguing than those Gi-hun had experienced in his first go-round. The violence is more over-the-top, the visuals more absurd. And unlike Season 1’s hopscotch-like glass bridge and biscuit-carving challenge, which relied mostly on a person’s individual luck, Season 2’s selections are more dependent on interpersonal skills from the start, requiring the players to form alliances and rivalries right away. As such, the contests themselves help expand the new characters beyond their initial archetypal trappings: The pregnant player proves to be an asset. The wallflower being bullied by the obnoxious rapper has a callous side. One of the ubiquitous pink-suited soldiers might even care about the competitors. In Squid Game, people tend to reveal who they really are at their most desperate.
Read: What happens when real people play Squid Game?
In-ho seems to hope that by playing the games again, Gi-hun will discover a surprising side to himself as well—and that doing so will break his spirit. The series shines most when the two share scenes, because they’re diametrically opposed in their worldviews: In-ho is convinced that people are inherently heartless, while Gi-hun insists that they can choose to be good.
When the season finale wrapped up with yet another cliff-hanger, however, I found myself wondering whether the story had progressed at all. Squid Game was meant to be a limited series; the first season’s ambiguous ending simply underlined Gi-hun’s Pyrrhic victory. These new episodes just emphasize the foolishness of his bravery, forcing him—and a batch of other players I’ve come to root for—to undergo freshly excruciating tests. The show’s bleakness has always been quite torturous to absorb, even if I couldn’t help but keep watching. But in Season 2, the gloom comes not only from the violence. It comes from the show’s overindulgence in proving its own protagonist wrong.
