You may ask yourself, “Did the world need a ‘Squid Game 2?’” Hwang Dong-hyuk, who wrote and directed 2021‘s “Squid Game,” didn’t think so originally, having devised the Korean Netflix series as a single-season stand-alone. But success is a great corporate intoxicant, and so Hwang has found something new to do with Lee Jung-jae‘s Seong Gi-hun (a.k.a. Player 456) and the secret island where luckless souls are murdered in the name of rich people’s fun, under the pretense of playing a game.
You may also ask yourself why a show with such a sadistic premise and content has been such a worldwide hit, but perhaps you are the sort of person who went to see “Saw X,” and are waiting breathlessly for “Saw XI,” in which case that question will make no sense to you. Nor would you question the rationale behind last fall’s “Squid Game: The Challenge,” a U.K.-produced reality competition — also on Netflix — which may now be regarded as sort of a curtain raiser to the sequel, premiering Thursday, to harsh your Christmas mellow. (No one was actually murdered in the course of “The Challenge,” merely metaphorically.)
Not that I mean to imply any sort of qualitative or moral equivalence between “Saw” and this. “Squid Game” was intelligently written, beautifully acted, well directed; it had ideas and a moral core — was even a little sentimental — with a hero who survives with his humanity intact in the face of violence, decadence and corruption. Still, it is not the sort of show I would care to watch twice.
Instead, I have watched its follow-up, professionally but without complaint. As with most sequels, it is — almost by definition — less essential than the original, whose conceits and M.C. Escher by way of Fisher-Price settings it repeats. There are, of course, new characters, many of the old ones having died in the first go-round — I suppose I should add for anyone who hasn’t seen the first series, that it involves financially strapped citizens lured into playing a series of murderous versions of children’s games with a giant cash prize for the last person standing. There is a rule by which the game may be stopped and the wealth shared, but you know how people are.
The conclusion of the first season did imply further action, though the implication was enough to go on with; ambiguity can be more powerful than closure. (We have in any case lived in that caesura for three years with no ill effects.) It ended with Gi-hun, newly rich and presentable, about to board a flight to Los Angeles to see his daughter; glimpsing the Squid Game recruiter known as the Salesman (Gong Yoo), he realizes the game is still running, turns back and walks toward the camera, with an I’m-coming-for-you look of determination. The new season picks up there, and focuses on Gi-hun’s crusade to destroy the game once and for all. There is really no other option, dramatically speaking, or consonant with his character. And away we go.
Three years on, police detective Hwang Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon) awakens from a coma, having been shot at the end of the first series by his just-unmasked stepbrother, Hwang In-ho (Lee Byung-hun) — a.k.a. the Front Man, a former player who now runs the game. Having somehow survived that and a fall into the sea, Jun-ho has transferred from major crimes to the traffic division, for the clarity it affords. (He can’t produce evidence or the location of the island, for which he has been searching in his off hours.)
Gi-hun, meanwhile, is living like a pauper, holed up in an empty fleabag hotel he owns and refusing to spend any of the fortune he’d won on himself. Calling it blood money, he uses it only to fund his inchoate plan to crush the Squid Game. An attempt to locate the Salesman through a network of agents occupies the first couple of episodes. These are not without violence; still, it’s nice not to be back on the island yet, where players — not informed of this outcome beforehand — will be literally eliminated; while Gi-hun, who has returned, scrambles like the catcher in the rye to save as many as possible.
Though I am not going to rewatch the first season for comparison, because life is short, my impression is that the new season has more of an emphasis on interpersonal relationships (good and bad) and team dynamics, which, of course, fall apart as people die. (The games feel bloodier and even more evil this time around.) There are more young people involved: Thanos (Choi Seung-hyun), a former rapper, lost all his money in a cryptocurrency scam pushed by YouTuber Lee Myung-gi (Yim Si-wan), who was bankrupted as well (he’s also wanted for fraud), along with his former girlfriend, Kim Jun-hee (Jo Yu-ri). All are there, quite coincidentally. Coincidental, too, is the presence of Jung-bae (Lee Seo-hwan), Gi-hun’s outside-world gambling pal from Season 1, whose survival is more than usually personal to our hero.
Thematically, it’s pretty straightforward, even conventional: kindness is better than selfishness, community trumps isolation, however much the deck is stacked against it or how depressing the outcome can be. That “Squid Game,” which is more than a little depressing, can be read as a critique of late-stage capitalism was often noted in reviews and essays at the time of the first season, and income inequality is clearly the structural basis of a story about the jaded rich exploiting the desperate poor, whom they divide in order to stay in power. If this season has its own theme, it may have to do with telling the actual enemy from the false ones the enemy engineers.
“You think people are just horses in a race, and you own the horses,” Gi-hun tells the Front Man. (They are speaking via a pig-shaped speaker, echoing the giant money-filled piggy bank that hangs above the players’ dormitory, tempting them to play on for an ever-bigger payout — typical game show stuff.)
“They were all just losers of the game,” the Front Man says of the hundreds of dead. “Trash eliminated from the competition. A ton of new trash is being poured into the world as we speak.”
Gi-hun, who has been stockpiling weapons in Seoul and assembling a strike force, and Jun-ho, who wants to confront his brother — the Front Man, remember — will begin to converge in their missions, which seem to promise some sort of battle royale. But this is just the middle chapter; a third season is slated for 2025, and it is my holiday wish that it spells “comeuppance.”
Will “Squid Game” have the courage of its philosophy, or will this be just another horror story? “The game will not end unless the world changes,” says the Front Man, which, one would like to think, gets it backward. But you never can tell.
