When the first season of Squid Game premiered on Netflix in 2021, it was a seismic shock to TV fans around the world — with little to no warning, creator Hwang Dong-hyuk hooked us all on his brutal tale of an underground life-or-death competition, one with a huge cash prize waiting at the end.
Since then, Squid Game has maintained its place in the public consciousness in increasingly weird ways, with the original message of the show most distorted by last year’s “real life” Squid Game competition series, an epic exercise in missing the point. Yet the second season of the show reveals that Hwang, at least, has not lost sight of his message: The seven episodes now streaming on Netflix return us to the scene of many, many crimes, with that same bloodthirsty spirit and even higher stakes.
Season 2 of Squid Game keeps its focus on Gi-hun (Emmy winner Lee Jung-jae), the victor of Season 1 who, in the final moments of the finale, chose not to get on a plane and see his daughter in the United States. Instead, he stayed in South Korea, determined to attempt to uncover who, exactly, is behind these games. Three years later, he’s spent a lot of money but hasn’t made much progress — until a lucky break draws him back in. However, in order to find a way to destroy the games, he might just have to play them again.
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The most important thing to know about the season is that things start slow, in a way that feels like a miscalculation — it’s a seven-episode season, and it doesn’t really feel like things fully begin until Episode 3. For instead of rushing to the action, Hwang chooses to focus on establishing the world outside the game; rather than stick closely to Gi-hun’s point of view, the first two episodes focus on introducing new characters (ie – fodder for the games) in a very deliberate way, while also reaffirming Gi-hun’s dedication to his quest.
Once things get going, everything that made Season 1 so compelling comes roaring back. That said, Season 2 doesn’t follow the same path as Season 1, keeping things fresh in multiple ways. There are also new, even more devious games included in the competition. There are new dynamics within the tribes of players, as well as a twist that brings in a little bit of The Traitors for flavor. And most importantly, there’s even more of a peek behind the scenes of the action.
The new characters brought together for these games are about as well-developed as the characters from the first season, which is to say some of the characterization remains surface-level. However, the show is great at establishing strong personalities right off the bat, while adding new dynamics (a mother-son pairing, a pregnant woman). One painfully relevant update for 2024: Many of the contestants who join this new game are in financial peril because they invested — poorly — in crypto.
In the last three years, it can’t be said that the world has become a significantly kinder or easier-to-live-in place, and that energy feels very present in these new episodes. The nature of all the games that make up this competition still play on that sharp contrast between childhood fun and brutal horror, and the power of that hasn’t diminished. The energy, though, is more desperate. More susceptible to boiling over.
Season 2’s biggest flaw is ultimately that it’s an incomplete story — these seven episodes certainly take you on a journey, but it’s all setup for the third and final season, which has already been greenlit and is set to premiere in 2025. By the end of the seventh episode, you’ll be craving that conclusion, while continuing to wonder at the forces which keep you watching.
What does anyone really want from a new season of Squid Game? The simplest answer might just be “more.” What made the first season so addictive was the way in which it wielded the same tropes of reality television but with far more brutal stakes, without ever shedding the sense of horror that should be felt, when watching dozens of people at a time be murdered. This was the dangerous balance that the subsequent parodies and spinoff games failed to capture, to their detriment — for Hwang’s message feels more relevant than ever, especially by the end of the season. That message remains simple: His dystopia is real, and it’s happening now.
Squid Game Season 2 is streaming now on Netflix.
