By Dustin Rowles | TV | January 3, 2025 |
I went into the second season of Squid Game thinking, “Do we really need a second season of Squid Game?” And having watched it, I’m still mostly wondering, “Did we really need a second season of Squid Game?”
That said, I’ll give it this much: the second season may be largely unnecessary, but once it gets going, it manages to be tense and relatively entertaining. There’s a lot of mileage in a premise where adults play kids games for their lives, and a few fresh twists and strong casting can go a long way. Relative to other Netflix shows, the second season is good. Relative to the first? It leaves something to be desired, namely, a clear purpose.
The first two and a half episodes (of a seven-episode season) are not great. Writer-director Hwang Dong-hyuk spends too much time contriving a way to get Lee Jung-jae’s Seong Gi-hun back in the game. Set three years after the events of season one, Seong Gi-hun is wealthy and depressed, weighed down by the guilt of being the sole survivor. He’s spent those years seeking a way back into the game to offer advice to new players and take the system down from the inside. While there’s an intriguing encounter with the recruiter early on, most of these episodes drag.
However, once Seong Gi-hun reenters the game, that old magic resurfaces. The new set of games, with a fresh group of desperate players, introduces an interesting twist: after each game, the surviving players vote on whether to continue risking their lives for the giant cash prize or to split the accumulated earnings among themselves. While one might think the lethal stakes would deter them, Squid Game effectively demonstrates how greed and desperation can easily corrupt democracy, especially when debt has left players with little to lose.
This season also introduces some great characters. Among them: a mother who joins the game with her son to help him pay off his debts; a crypto investor whose failed investments plunged other players into massive debt; a drug-using rapper villain named “Thanos”; a trans woman underdog who becomes part of the resistance; and one of Seong Gi-hun’s childhood friends. There are a lot of heartbreaking stories here.
We also gain insight into one of the masked soldiers, Kang No-eul, a North Korean defector trying to earn enough money to rescue her daughter. Her storyline includes interfering in the organ-harvesting operations of other soldiers. It is not a lightweight series.
Once the season gains momentum, it’s undeniably compelling television. However, it ends abruptly, just as it builds steam. Since seasons two and three were filmed back-to-back and take place during the same Squid Game, this feels more like season 2A. The cliffhanger is effective, but it dampens the impact of this season as a standalone story. With season three not arriving until late 2025, there’s also little urgency to binge-watch now. It might even be more satisfying to watch both seasons back-to-back when the next one releases.
Thematically, the second season feels more muddled. Is it still an indictment of capitalism when Hwang Dong-hyuk was paid a fortune by a giant corporation to make two more seasons? Perhaps, if you consider that he only agreed to a second season because he wasn’t adequately compensated for the first. I can appreciate its existence if it means Hwang and Lee Jung-jae finally get their financial due, even if it slightly undermines the original season’s message.
Despite its flaws, this (half) season is so effectively made that I’m willing to trust Hwang Dong-hyuk to tie it all together in season three. It feels almost premature to judge this season without its conclusion, but if I must: it starts slow and falls short of its predecessor, yet still outshines most of Netflix’s algorithm-driven content. But no one here needed a review to know that.