Let the Torture-Porn Games Begin Again

The story behind Squid Game Season Two feels like it should be a story in the South Korean thriller’s long-delayed return. The making of the show’s first season — an ultra-violent satire of late-stage capitalism, where financially desperate people compete in a series of children’s games and the lone surviving player will go home with billions in cash — was so difficult and stressful that its creator, Hwang Dong-hyuk, claims he lost “eight or nine” teeth over the course of that initial shoot. It was an experience that unsurprisingly left him wary of continuing the series, even though he ended things on a cliffhanger back in 2021. 

So why did Hwang eventually agree to make more? “Money,” he bluntly told the BBC. “Even though the first series was such a huge global success, honestly I didn’t make much. So doing the second series will help compensate me for the success of the first one too.”

Think about this for a moment. We know that streaming ratings are still a black box to a degree, and Netflix has made an art out of coming up with inscrutable, utterly useless ways to frame the audience for various “hit” shows. Yet by every account — including that of the streaming giant itself — Squid Game Season One was a massive, massive sensation, not only in South Korea, but around the world. Yet Hwang earned such a relatively paltry sum that he felt compelled to return to a job that was so miserable, it made his teeth literally fall out of his mouth. That is how completely dysfunctional the television business has become, like practically every other industry at the moment.  

Hwang’s circumstances are not quite so dire as those of the players in either season of Squid Game, back today with seven new episodes. Yet those circumstances are so darkly comic, they’re more interesting than many of the backstories that Hwang and his collaborators have given the unfortunate souls who come to the mysterious island. The new episodes are still well-crafted in many ways, even if they’ve succumbed to streaming bloat, with them essentially functioning as half a season, whose story will be completed sometime next year. But they never argue forcefully enough for their need to exist, unless you understand that Hwang deserves some compensation for the suffering he went through last time, and for all the money that he made for Netflix without previously getting to share in nearly enough of it.  

When last we left Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae, who won an Emmy for the role in 2022) — aka player 456, the winner of the first season’s contest — he had decided against leading a life of luxury with his prize money, and instead resolved to take down the game by any means necessary, even if it cost him every last cent to do it. The story picks up two years later, and Gi-hun has gotten no further in his quest, having failed to even track down the mysterious Salesman (Gong Yoo) who recruits potential contestants by challenging them to a game of Ddakji on subway platforms. Meanwhile, cop Hwang Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon), who went undercover on the island in search of his missing brother In-ho — and was stunned to discover that In-ho (Lee Byung-hun) was the game’s masked host, the Front Man — is conducting a search for the island, parallel to Gi-hun’s investigation. Eventually, the two men — and the small army of gangsters and mercenaries Gi-hun has hired with his massive cash reserves — team up.

It takes two whole episodes just to get back to the island.  A bit of that time is devoted to introducing a new character, No-eul (Park Gyu-young), a North Korean defector who will, of course, also wind up involved in the game. Mostly, though, it’s a cat-and-mouse game between Gi-hun’s forces and the Front Man’s. This is not a fair fight, both logistically and dramatically. There’s no point to the show continuing — or, at least, to it continuing to follow its original hero — if Gi-hun doesn’t wind up back in the game, and Front Man’s operation is resourceful and ruthless enough to put your average supervillain to shame. So a lot of this just plays as throat-clearing with an added layer of sadism, like a scene where the Salesman forces two prisoners to play a mash-up of Rock Paper Scissors and Russian Roulette. The first season wasn’t exactly kind and gentle, but there was a baroque, caricatured nature to the games that often made their excesses palatable. This, on the other hand, feels like torture porn. (A later episode adds rape threats.)   

And once Gi-hun finds himself back in a familiar green track suit, the season presents minor variations on the show’s former contestants. Gi-hun once again winds up playing alongside an old friend, Jung-bae (Lee Seo-hwan, who appeared briefly in Season One). There’s another aggressive bully, only this time he’s a wannabe rap star who calls himself Thanos (and is played by an actual South Korean music star, Choi Seung-hyun, aka T.O.P.), and one of the players again turns out to be concealing their true identity and agenda from the rest. Some of the character types are new to the show, like Hyun-ju (Park Sung-hoon), a trans woman trying to pay for the rest of her gender-affirming surgeries, but almost everybody is fulfilling a similar plot function to someone who died in the first season.  

Even after we get to the island, the story continues at a relatively leisurely pace, with frequent breaks to show Jun-ho and his team trying and repeatedly failing to reconnect with Gi-hun. One specific game spans multiple episodes. The first season paused the competition once so that contestants could conduct a majority-rules vote on whether to go home or continue playing. This season is practically all about the voting, and one vote isn’t even resolved within the episode in which it’s introduced. Despite the frequent threat of death, Season Two doesn’t share the relentless quality of the first year. 

Yet Lee Jung-jae’s performance is as powerful and charismatic as before, as is the production design. (In some ways, the latter is even more impressive: the seemingly infinite day-glo Lego staircase that the players use to get from their dormitory to the game rooms is somehow bigger than before.) And the games themselves are still remarkable set pieces. Some are familiar, because how could the show continue without the iconic Red Light/Green Light giant robot girl? Some are new. All of them function as an impressive combination of suspense and underdog sports story. (Hwang very smartly puts all of the most sympathetic contestants onto a couple of teams when there’s a group activity, and also deftly balances skill and confidence levels.) But only three games in seven episodes — not counting extracurricular action like the aforementioned Rock Paper Scissors/Russian Roulette — doesn’t seem like enough. 

Among the arguments in favor of a second season was the chance to get a better idea of how the game functions behind the scenes, and into what has motivated In-ho to become this monster whose entire existence is everything his brother would stand against. Yet despite there being a new major character who works on the island, despite a significantly expanded role for Lee Byung-hun, and despite the new season having plenty of padding, we don’t get much additional insight into either the operation or its top manager. 

Nor, for that matter, does Squid Game have much new to say on the subject of income inequality, which is the whole point of this macabre story. It’s a social issue that’s only gotten worse since the first season debuted, yet the closest the new season gets to acknowledging any kind of shift is the fact that one of the players, disgraced YouTube influencer Lee Myung-gi (Im Si-wan), bankrupted himself and several of the other contestants by endorsing crypto. 

At one point, Gi-Hun and the Front Man get into an argument about whether the game reflects the worst aspects of modern life, or is contributing to making things worse. “The game will not end unless the world changes,” the Front Man insists. The world has changed. But Squid Game is more or less still Squid Game, just slower, and better equipped to provide its creator with any emergency dental work required. 

All seven episodes of Squid Game Season Two are now streaming. I’ve seen the whole thing.