"Squid Game 2": review

Lee Jeong-jae as Seong Gi-hun

[WARNING: spoilers.]

Season 2 of "Squid Game" is titled "Squid Game 2." Again written, produced, and directed by Hwang Dong-hyuk, the new, seven-episode season continues the story of Seong Gi-hun (pronounced "sung ghee-HOON," not "syong ghee-HUNN" the way I'm hearing on so many commentary videos, many of which are AI-voiced), who won the game in Season 1 and now wants the games to be stopped. A totally new ensemble cast confronts a new set of challenges, and a few main cast members from the first season appear alongside Gi-hun to continue their own arcs. "Squid Game 2" deepens the issues explored in Season 1 and seems to be almost self-consciously following a similar trajectory to the Matrix films (overtly mentioned in the series), which started off as a metaphysical hodgepodge combining Platonism, Buddhism, Judaism, and Christianity in the first movie, turning to Foucaultian postmodernism in the second movie (questions of why and power), then to Hinduism and Norse mythology (Neo's Viking funeral) in the third movie—and not too successfully. The trajectory of the Matrix movies makes me worry about the trajectory of the Squid Game series: there are supposed to be three seasons only, with Season 3 wrapping things up, but spinoffs are being planned, as well as non-Korean versions of the show (both of which—spinoffs and non-Korean shows—I think are terrible ideas; just go to YouTube to find endless parodies like "If Black People Were in Squid Game"). Will Season 3 of the show prove to be as much of a disappointment as "The Matrix Revolutions" turned out to be? If the show insists on slavishly imitating the Matrix movies' trajectory, it will be. It should also be noted that Season 2 ends on a cliffhanger (just like "The Matrix Reloaded"), and Season 3—which is basically Part 2 of Season 2—is the conclusion/dénouement, which is going to need to deliver big. This follows the pattern of American movie versions of young-adult novels (cf. the Harry Potter, Divergent, and Hunger Games series), in which the final book is split into two movies as a cash grab. Many critics have complained about Hwang's decision to do this instead of giving us a concise but slightly longer second season that neatly wraps everything up in a bow.

the Messenger

"Squid Game 2" stars Lee Jung-jae, Lee Byung-hun, Im Si-wan, Kang Ha-neul, Wi Ha-joon, Park Gyu-young, Lee Jin-wook, Park Sung-hoon, Yang Dong-geun, Kang Ae-shim, and Jo Yu-ri. The writers must have realized that Gi-hun's goofy, red/pink hair from the end of Season 1 was a non-starter, go Gi-hun loses it within the first few minutes of Episode 1 after he refuses to take the plane to America to see his daughter. Gi-hun soon realizes he's being tracked by the Squid Gamers; he extracts the tracker from his neck. Two years pass, during which time Gi-hun pays off his loan shark and hires the man, Mr. Kim, to help him find the Messenger, who had first challenged Gi-hun in Season 1 to that fateful game of ddakji. The Messenger, meanwhile, is still actively recruiting people for the next Squid Game, but he also seems to have internalized gaming to the point where he's become unhinged. At Seoul's famous Pagoda Park (탑골공원/Tapgol Gongweon), the Messenger offers various homeless people a choice between a pastry from a local bakery and a scratch-off lottery ticket. With only a few exceptions, the people all pick the lottery ticket and lose. The Messenger then takes all the uneaten/unchosen pastries, dumps them on the ground, and very publicly stomps the bread to smithereens, shouting that it was the homeless people who had made their choice to destroy the bread. Mr. Kim the loan shark and his associate Choi Woo-seok finally track the Messenger down, but the Messenger outfoxes them, captures them, and forces them to play a deadly combination of rock-paper-scissors and Russian roulette. Mr. Kim, unlucky, shoots himself. The cop Hwang Jun-ho, who'd been shot in the shoulder by his older brother in the first season, manages to find Gi-hun's hideout, a motel that's been converted into a sort of stronghold where people can train with firearms, plan operations, etc. (Gi-hun himself seems to have trained up on weapons and tactics over the previous two years.) Meanwhile, the Messenger finds and confronts Gi-hun, forcing him to play Russian roulette with the Messenger, who wants Gi-hun to admit he's merely trash who got lucky. Gi-hun replies that he wants the Messenger to admit he's nothing more than a lapdog for the Squid Gamers. Unable to make the admission, the Messenger shoots himself, but he leaves a clue in his pocket about a Halloween party. Gi-hun ends up sharing this information with Jun-ho, who is still determined to find his brother, and with Woo-seok, who is upset about his boss's being killed in that combo game of rock-paper-scissors and Russian roulette. They hire some mercenaries and concoct a plan to go to the Halloween party. Woo-seok gets tased by some Squid Game goons, and Gi-hun gets waylaid and escorted to a limo, where he encounters the speaker-projected voice of the Front Man, who chides Gi-hun for not leaving the country "for [his] own good." Gi-hun, who secretly had another tracker installed in his mouth, demands to be put back in the game, perhaps planning to undermine the game from the inside out. It's a desperate and not very well thought-out plan. Jun-ho, meanwhile, hires a boat captain to help him search for the Squid Game island where his brother is located. One of the female Squid Game guards, a sniper named Kang No-eul, also seems to be quietly doing her part to undermine the games from within, killing still-living losing contestants before their fresh organs can be harvested. Jun-ho, who had been relying on Gi-hun's tracker to find the mysterious island, gets the bad news that the tracker had been extracted from Gi-hun and placed on a totally different person.

Thanos

The rest of the series is about Gi-hun's reintroduction to the Squid Game as Player 456 with a whole new crop of participants, one of whom, unbeknownst to Gi-hun, is the Front Man himself, Hwang In-ho, a.k.a. Player 001. The Front Man's motivations for being in the games aren't the same as old cancer-patient and puppet-master Oh Il-nam's motivations in Season 1. Meanwhile, Gi-hun does what he can to warn this new crop of desperate people about the game's dangers. Some believe him; some don't. Among the new people that we follow are rapper Thanos, an arrogant young man who constantly breaks into English but who owes a ton of debt because of a crypto scam he got mired in thanks to Lee Myeong-gi, a.k.a. MG Coin, another player whose crypto schemes fell through, leaving him in debt as well. Myeong-gi's pregnant ex-girlfriend Kim Jun-hee is also part of the game. Myeong-gi promises Jun-hee to stay away from crypto and to build a better life for them and their child with the prize money. Jun-hee, dubious, remains cold to him. Mother-son pair Jang Geum-ja and Park Yong-shik don't realize at first that the other is in the game, then the mother discovers her son and says she joined the game to win money and pay his debts. Rounding out the main characters are Cho Hyeon-ju, a trans woman; and Seon-nyeo, a creepy mudang (shaman) who is deep in debt.

Gi-hun's motivations for rejoining the game appear to shift as time goes on. He at first wants to save as many lives as he can since he's the only one in the group who realizes the deadly nature of the games. With only some gamers believing his warnings, much of the field gets gunned down during a repeat of the first game of red-light-green-light, but the second game proves to be completely different, making Gi-hun's knowledge of the previous games useless. As time goes on, Gi-hun becomes more pragmatic and utilitarian, willing to sacrifice a few people to save the many, and there's a real question of whether Gi-hun is slowly becoming a convert to the system instead of trying to defeat it.

Season 2 repeats a lot of elements from Season 1. Jun-ho is again searching for his big brother; Gi-hun is again back in the system despite his knowledge of what's going to happen; the group of new victims includes plenty of raging assholes like Player 100, an older man who has a 10-billion won debt (about $70 million, currently); and rapper Thanos (230), who isn't above stepping on others to survive to the next round. The island's location still remains a mystery; the police on the mainland still seem uninterested in finding out more about the games (maybe they're all paid off); player 001—in this case, the Front Man—is still somebody who shouldn't be trusted. Some of these repeated elements are tiresome: why is Jun-ho still searching for his brother? It's as though Season 1 had been, for him, a total waste. As assholes go, Thanos is particularly annoying: his English is right on the edge of sounding plausibly American, but it's fouled up by a still-heavy Korean accent that pokes through at inopportune moments. Kudos to actor Choi Sung-hyeon, who plays Thanos, for having the talent to make us viewers hate him. There seems to be a quota of personality types: in Season 1, there's an annoying Christian fundamentalist who prays loudly; in Season 2, he's replaced by Seon-nyeo, the spooky mudang who likes talking about how the gods have abandoned them all, and who recruits cultish followers to her coterie.

creepy mudang

New elements, though, make for a welcome change. In Season 2, while the games themselves remain deadly serious, it's no longer obvious that they are the show's main focus. We don't join the games until Episode 3, and the season finishes on a cliffhanger as the players abandon the games, trick the guards, arm themselves, and revolt. The revolt is put down at the very end, and we don't know what happens next, but this behavior from the victims/gamers is markedly different from the submission to the system we'd seen last season. The show's treatment of its lone trans character is also compassionate without feeling preachy: Hyeon-ju, who was formerly military, proves to be formidable in a gunfight, and she doesn't take shit from Seon-nyeo the shaman, either.

Still, Season 2 isn't merely a lesser season than Season 1; it also has some out-and-out flaws of its own arising from story structure, story logic, and character development. As my boss complained: why was the Messenger so unhinged this time around? He was cool and collected in Season 1, a perfect cult member and drone who had thoroughly imbibed the Squid Gamers' philosophy, whatever that philosophy is ("Desperate people are horses in a horse race"?). In Season 2, by contrast, he seems to have lost his sanity. Was some part of him resisting the Squid Game organization's mind control? Is director Hwang saying something Matrix-like about the nature and levels of control that come with living in any modern human society? Another problem: before the group of 456 contestants is about to begin red-light-green-light, Gi-hun has the chance to say that it's at least possible that the set of games, this time, will be different. It seems to be a lapse in the script that he doesn't even mention this possibility. Also: later in the season, the sea captain helping Jun-ho try to find the mysterious island turns out to be working for the Squid Game group, but I predicted that betrayal very early in the season. The entire series is based on the idea that nothing is as it seems, another thematic tie-in to the Matrix movies, in which certain people have this feeling that the world they live in is somehow wrong. Anyway, even the sea captain's squid boat is a clue that he's part of the Squid Game network; you can tell it's a squid boat by all the huge light bulbs along its length: fishermen use those lights at night to attract thousands of squids to the surface, where they're easy to scoop up in nets. The captain's intentions were telegraphed from the beginning, especially when he offers Jun-ho the chance to go squid-fishing with him early on.

Hwang In-ho, Front Man ("Yeong-il")

In-ho the Front Man remains something of a puzzle, too: he didn't enter the game for the same reason as Oh Il-nam (who had entered to feel alive and nostalgic one last time before dying of his tumor). We know that the cover story he tells Gi-hun, whom he is at pains to befriend, is at least partially true: he had a sick wife whom he'd been desperate to help. But his purpose for being in the game this time seems to be didactic: he wants to teach Gi-hun the futility of going against the system. I've seen a lot of fan predictions that In-ho the Front Man, who was like Darth Vader in Season 1, will ultimately turn against the system himself. An even sicker twist is possible: what if Gi-hun's spirit is crushed to the point where he joins the system and takes the Front Man's place? One thing we can definitely suss out for ourselves is that the guards and staff are aware the Front Man is in the game, so it's impossible for him to be killed. A lot of savvy critics pointed out the "dominant hand" clue about In-ho: when he shoots his brother at the end of Season 1, he holds the pistol in his left (dominant) hand. In Season 2, when the Front Man is part of Gi-hun's team, he causes a near-disaster when he plays the spinning-top game with his non-dominant hand (right), then switches to his dominant hand at the last moment to allow the team to move on. The whole thing is carefully orchestrated to earn Gi-hun's trust, thus making the Front Man's eventual betrayal all the more acute.

mom (Geum-ja) & son (Yong-shik)

But what's the point of earning Gi-hun's trust? Why is the Front Man so (seemingly) interested in teaching Gi-hun a lesson about the hopelessness of rebelling against the system? Was he affected by Gi-hun's performance and character in the previous Squid Game (recall that I didn't think Gi-hun's character, by the end of Season 1, was all that noble)? Is he looking to replace his biological younger brother Jun-ho with Gi-hun as an adoptive younger brother? If the writing for Season 3 is good enough, plenty of perverse possibilities could be realized. In the final episode of Season 2, the Front Man, with his mask back on, executes Gi-hun's close friend Jeong-bae. If, after that horrible incident, Gi-hun ever discovers that the Front Man is In-ho (known to Gi-hun by the fake name Yeong-il, which also happens to be a pun: yeong-il sounds like the Sino-Korean for "zero-one," and the Front Man's gamer number is 001, which really should have been a red flag), whatever trust the Front Man might have earned will evaporate. So I'm left to think the Front Man is simultaneously fascinated by/obsessed with Gi-hun while also desiring to torture/punish Gi-hun. I guess people who know about such love/hate relationships will understand.

One of the things I talked about in my review of Season 1 was how "Squid Game" could be at least superficially seen as a Marxist critique of society. I gave that insight based mainly on the "text" of the series itself, not on the creator's own comments. And since I'm not a "death of the author"-type thinker, I do think the creator's intentions are important, even if the work, once released to the public, escapes the creator's control and gets interpreted however the public wants. So it was interesting when I found this article, in which writer-producer-director Hwang Dong-hyuk explicitly says "Squid Game" is a critique of capitalism, at least the Korean version of it. This still doesn't make his critique Marxist, per se, but his remarks move his critique closer to that end of the spectrum. Maybe life in a modern, capitalistic society is a horse race, is a system with layers and networks of control. Of course, anyone who makes bank while critiquing capitalism is automatically subject to accusations of hypocrisy: they're benefitting from the very system they're critiquing. But maybe that's the meta-message of Season 2: you can destroy the system as many times as you want, but aggregate human behavior will always ensure that there is a system.

pregnant Jun-hee and MG Coin

Which brings us to an important issue brought out in the plot: one character (the Front Man?) observes that, as long as people don't change, there will always be the game. The deeper question, then, is whether human nature is changeable. A more liberal-leftist point of view would be that human nature is, in fact, perfectible, and we can plausibly work toward the goal of a perfect, harmonious society, a utopia. But a conservative-rightist point of view would be that human nature is unalterably inscribed in our material being; we are, to put it religiously, fallen beings who cannot change without outside, redemptive help; no utopias are possible in this mortal realm. If no redemptive help is coming, we are trapped in a hell or samsara or our own making. The utopian vision is scary to righties; the unchangeable-nature vision is a nightmare to lefties, and both possibilities are kicked around by implication in the series. This makes me wonder whether the character of No-eul, the NK defector who has become a sniper for the Squid Game society, will play a major role in Season 3, and not a positive one: in Season 1, the North Korean defector was named Sae-byeok, which means "dawn." She ended up dead. This season's defector is named No-eul, which means "sunset." Things don't look too good for our heroes if names mean anything.

In all, "Squid Game 2" wasn't as good as Season 1, mainly because of the repeated elements, the inevitable lack of novelty, and the structure/character/logic problems I pointed out above. There also an incommensurability problem: if the old man from Season 1 is right, the games were started as a way to get people currently living oppressed lives to feel deeply again, to feel alive, but how can that compassionate impulse be reconciled with the games' obvious cruelty, humiliation, crass financial incentives, and deadliness? Are people horses in a horse race, or are people people? My main worry is that the series is consciously or unconsciously imitating the trajectory of the Matrix films, which started out amazingly and fizzled disappointingly by the third chapter. There's a real risk that "Squid Game," which evokes plenty of philosophical questions, may be promising more than it can deliver, but I'll keep watching because I have high hopes that the series will end up saying something coherent and profound, even if the conclusion is open-ended, which I'm sure it will be.