Squid Game Season 2 comes as a little holiday treat — the perfect watch when you need something with a vague pretence of substance, but that's truly just a reliable good time. The new instalment doesn't quite have the drive of the original season, which took over everyone's television screens in 2021, and it doesn't have its characters, or writing, or sense of… purpose, really. But, still, it has the games — so it's still plenty of fun. For a show that was so self-contained, it is troubling to watch it not only decide to forcibly expand its world past its original, perfectly-tailored, confines, but doing so by creating a season that's just a glorified set-up for even more empty entertainment.
Season 2 takes us back to the airport where Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) last stood, suited up with fresh pink hair, deciding whether to board a plane to see his daughter in LA or storm back into Seoul and have his revenge. Our unlikely hero picks the latter — riddled with guilt at his own victory, he sets out on an obsessive quest to take down the game and its controllers. You can quickly tell Season 2 is an undoing of the narrative completion of its predecessor from the instantaneous decision to undo the dye job on Gi-hun's hair with no context at all, though presumably he wouldn't have been able to go into hiding as well with a neon sign on his head.
The first two episodes, in which the hunt for the recruiter takes place in order for Gi-hun to access the games again, are hard to get through — but you are rewarded once you're finally thrown back into the pastel-coloured geometrical structures that made the show feel so new and memorable the first time around. This time… let's say that if you've watched The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, you've seen a parallel story, just on a different soundstage. But it's not ever-so-complex Katniss leading the charge, and as much as Jung-jae tries to hold the narrative threads together with his piercing, scarred gaze, it isn't quite enough to keep us interested in anyone but Gi-hun himself.
The cast of participants isn't quite as strong, but not at all from an acting perspective — all performances, though limited by the scarce individual character development, are as always emotive and engaging. Served once again with the mostly good (Gi-hun, former marine Dae-ho, S1 gambling friend Jung-bae) and mostly bad (easily-despised rapper Thanos and sidekick Nam-gyu) personality separation, the same threats and tensions of the first games repeat. That's kind of the point, right? Humanity is predictable when faced with the choice to die, kill or get rich. The character you think you're going to root for, the father of the adorable kid seen in episode 2, gets lost in the green-jumpsuit crowd of other characters and for most of the runtime, you're just left to place your own bets. Season 2, for the first time, gives us a bit more of a glimpse into the other side behind the meshed pink masks, but not really enough to do anything with it. It'll maybe be worth the thin set-up in Season 3, if anyone will still be watching.
Disjointed and a pastiche of its first iteration, this latest season remains surprisingly watchable, but for all the wrong reasons. While Season 1 kept us hooked both for the life-or-death stakes of the game and the morality mirror it held up to humanity in the face of capitalist violence, Season 2 just kind of… lets you enjoy the kills, with no didactic punishment. That's fine, in principle, but completely dilutes and invalidates the ethical compass and map that Season 1 had so carefully, and skilfully, constructed.
If Season 1 had taught us anything — let one bury the dead, instead of carving out their organs for more profit. Yet here we are, with a season so clearly aimed at a continuation and so uninterested with its own current storyline, that it fails to stand on its own two feet and instead Frankensteins Season 1 material into a clumsy, disjointed spectacle.
Squid Game Season 2 is now streaming on Netflix.
