South Korea’s limited series, “Squid Game,” became a national sensation when it debuted in the U.S. in the fall of 2021. Its combination of hyper-violence and reality show meets “The Hunger Games” proved the perfect blend of entertainment for an audience still dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic and feeling that life’s many challenges placed their odds for success at an off-kilter scale weighed heavily against them in favor of the wealthiest in society. Series creator Hwang Dong-hyuk tapped into something that resonated beyond his home country, and the result was an all-too-relatable tale of Goliath vs. David, with the decks stacked immeasurably in Goliath’s favor.
For fans of the first iteration of “Squid Game,” you’ll remember that season ending with Seong Gi-hun, the divorced father and heavily indebted gambling addict, the sole survivor of a brutal series of games designed to test the limits of a struggling class of players’ insatiable need and desire to keep participating in a contest designed to kill them, all for the chance to win a potential USD $31 million That amount won’t put you on par with the Elon Musks of the world, but it will dig you out of most financial holes.
Along the way, Gi-hun learns valuable lessons. The most important: the best way to win at Squid Game is not to play. By the series’ first season’s end, Gi-hun makes it his mission to put a stop to these games once and for all.
When we pick up the action in “Squid Game 2,” several years have passed since Season 1, and Gi-hun is no closer to finding the elite responsible for these nefarious games. Gi-hun devotes his amassed Squid Game fortune to hunting down the people involved and the mysterious and elusive “Front Man,” who, under a mask and black outfit, is the seeming current mastermind of the games.
Also on the hunt for the Front Man is Hwang Jun-ho, a police officer who, in searching for his lost brother in season 1, discovers the truth that his brother is the Front Man. The Front Man shoots Jun-ho towards the end of the first season, but we all knew he would survive his fall off a cliff into the ocean depths. And he does.
It doesn’t take long in Season 2 before Jun-ho and Gi-hun meet up and join forces to take down the creators of the game. And it takes equally less time for their plans to go up in smoke, invoking the old adage, “The house always wins.” And trying to beat the house is where the fun comes when watching “Squid Game 2.”
Show creator Dong-hyuk makes a wise decision here. The novelty of the original season is gone. The audience knows what to expect or believes they know what to expect. And I suppose Dong-hyuk could have followed the exact blueprint and got an audience to tune in and enjoy by giving them nothing more than a new cast to root for and against. However, exploring the same territory twice would get old, and what makes “Squid Game 2” so entertaining is how Dong-hyuk subverts expectations and leans into darker themes. When Gi-hun re-enters the Squid Game (I’ll leave how this occurs up to your viewing, but did you think he wasn’t going to find a way back into the games?) he has a seeming advantage-he’s played it and won. So, his first order of business is to try to save as many lives as possible for the other members playing.
The first game is the same red-light, green-light contest from season one, but this time, Gi-hun knows how to fool the game makers, and despite some of the other contestants’ reluctance to follow Gi-hun’s lead, those who do make it across the finish line with their lives intact.
Much of the tension and drama of Season 2 comes between contests when the surviving players can decide if the games should continue or if the winning pot gets divided amongst those left. Gi-hun tries to warn the other contestants what will happen to them, and his belief in humanity tricks him into believing that, armed with information about how stacked the deck is against them, the players will wisely choose to opt-out. But as those elitists at the top have already figured out, people at the end of their rope will risk even their own lives for a shot at a financial windfall. This new crop of Squid Gamers has so much debt that it would take surviving several rounds of the game to amass a pot large enough to bail them out of their glum circumstances.
As an audience, we want to watch these players’ poor decision-making with an air of disbelief, but we cannot. We recognize that the decision-making of those so desperate that they’d gamble their life for a chance to turn their fate around is all too prevalent in our society. We’ve seen how the masses in our country were willing to vote against their best interests, and for an upcoming administration who will have scarcely those interests in mind when they execute policies that will largely benefit the wealthy and the powerful, all for the remotest chance that they will somehow be the beneficiary of their cast ballot. What economic windfall are they hoping or expecting? It is unknown, but understanding such irrational thinking and behavior lends enormous credibility to buying in on the circumstances unfolding over these seven episodes. Yes, it may be cynical, but creator Dong-hyuk understands his audience of home viewers are willing to sit through violent escapades in the first place, and he is going to pour that Heinz 57 sauce of retribution all over the television screen.
By the end of Episode 3, Dong-hyuk throws in a sizzling twist that brings together a whole new dynamic between Gi-hun and his nemesis, the Front Man. I’ll avoid spoilers, but the plot developments make for some engaging and intense viewing over the final 4 episodes of Season 2.
Throughout the season, Gi-hun is put into the meat grinder once more, and he needs to learn plenty of lessons. Again, the most important is that the house always wins. By the end of Season 2, Front Man relishes teaching Gi-hun this lesson. There is a fascinating interplay between both men and in classic Asian film tradition, a yin-yang duality forms between these two men, battling wits for control and the soul of the Squid Games.
A spoiler for those who wonder why there are only seven episodes in Season 2 vs. the 10 in season 1: This season ends on a cliffhanger. It’s annoying, and I’d have preferred just one extra-long Season 2, but that is the way. Netflix craves viewership, and they want to give people a reason to tune into a third and final season. In this case, Netflix is the house, and the house always wins. They are promising Season 3 later this year, so at least we don’t have to wait another three years to find out how it all ends.
James Kent is the publisher’s assistant at The Mountain Times, and author of “Parental Guidance Suggested.”
