In the fall of 2021, Squid Game arrived on Netflix with minimal fanfare, and seemingly overnight became the streamer’s most-watched series of all time. Its popularity led to critical acclaim and major awards, including an Emmy for star Lee Jung-jae, and paved the way for an inevitable return. Season two has finally arrived, and it lives up to the drama, excitement, and violence of season one, while revealing more of the Squid Game world and furthering the first season’s thought-provoking themes.
With that in mind, we binged it eagerly—so here’s what we liked (and a few things we didn’t) about Squid Game 2.
Liked: The Russian roulette scene—and that it takes awhile to get into the actual games
We knew that Player 456 was going to get back into the game. That was the tease at the end of last season, his ultimate goal—and frankly, it was in the trailers. But we didn’t quite think about what, exactly, that would entail. It’s not like these games are publicized. So it was fascinating to watch him spend huge chunks of his winnings, hiring people to scour the subways, looking for the Salesman, the one clue he had. It was, in a way, his very own Squid Game. A big citywide game of needle in a haystack. It was great.
Then, once he found him, the game of Russian roulette the two play was perfectly terrifying and revealing. We learned so much about both men and while, sure, we knew the main character of the show wasn’t going to die, his willingness to do so told us everything we needed to about his mindset this season. Finally, killing off the Salesman illustrates that anything can, and will, happen on the show.
In tandem, season two really played with your expectations, making us increasingly anxious and excited to get back to the island and back to the games.
Liked: Thanos
Squid Game loves a villain and season two’s most memorable villain is, of course, Thanos. Played by actor Choi Seung-hyun, Thanos is the wannabe rapper and social media influencer who’ll stop at nothing to win the money for himself. He’s ruthless, he’s diabolical, and he’s hilarious and charming as he does it. The fact he slips into English from time to time works to illustrate his broad appeal, and the fact he paints his fingernails like Infinity Stones shows how fully he embraces his character.
What we maybe love most about the charismatic, entertaining villain though is that he’s also kind of dumb. In the comics and movies Thanos was of course very evil. But at least he had a code. This Thanos does not, and the fact he doesn’t quite grasp his own persona is an excellent choice to make the character that much more specific and memorable.
Liked: Player 120
Player 120, real name Hyun-ju, is Squid Game‘s first trans character. A former soldier, she’s there to win enough cash to complete her gender-affirming surgery, and hopes to start a new life in Thailand where she can escape the discrimination she faces in South Korea. It’s something we see her endure within the microcosm of the game.
Ideally, Hyun-ju would have been played by a trans woman. But as Squid Game creator Hwang Dong-hyuk has explained, he cast Park Sung-hoon, a cis male actor, after realizing the talent pool in Korea has almost no performers who are openly trans, or even openly queer. That makes Hyun-ju’s presence here feel even more important, especially after you get to know her and it’s made perfectly clear she hasn’t just been written in to make a statement about diversity. Far from it! She’s one of the standout new characters, a true leader who will slap some sense into you if you start freaking out at a crucial moment, and who maintains a sense of compassion while also being a total badass.
Liked: No-eul and getting more insight into guard life
In season one, we barely got any idea of who the pink jumpsuit-wearing Squid Game guards really are. We know they will kill on command—and that some of them make extra cash harvesting organs from the bodies of dead (or almost-dead) competitors.
In season two, we see that guard life is almost as grim as player life; they sleep in austere quarters that resemble jail cells, and must follow a strict schedule and obey all orders without question. Though they’re all armed, there’s a sense that violence could break out at any moment, and they won’t be protected by anything except their own weapon; they’re just as disposable as the Squid Game participants.
That’s why No-eul—Guard 011—is such an exciting new character. Some time prior, she escaped North Korea and feels deep regret over leaving her daughter behind, as we learn in a poignant backstory leading up to her Squid Game employment. She may be ruthless (she’s absolutely deadly accurate with a rifle, thanks to her military training), but she’s also not a robot, and her disregard for rules has already gotten her into trouble. We have a feeling she’ll play an even greater importance in season three, and we can’t wait to see what this refreshingly unpredictable character does next.
Liked: The new relationships formed during the games
One of the many things that makes Squid Game so good is the odd pairings and relationships that this whole scenario creates. Forced to fight for their lives, the characters end up teaming up with people they normally wouldn’t associate with. And, in turn, that creates even more memorable moments.
That trend continued this season. The biggest one, of course, is the Front Man entering the game (more on that later) and how he befriends and uses 456. But the mother and son are fantastic, adding an interesting dash of family to it all. The man pretending to be a military vet is sad but interesting and his worship of the actual former soldiers is powerful. The fact that one man knows 456 in real life is cool. Player 120’s dynamic in the group really shines. And up and down the list we could go.
Liked: The ensemble is huge, but all of the players are distinctive and memorable
In a quality that carries over from the first Squid Game season, despite the fact that the show has dozens of characters, and you meet most of them very quickly once the games get going, and they’re all dressed alike, everyone is distinctive and memorable. That they wear numbers on their jackets helps differentiate everyone, of course, especially when the competition picks up. But the array of personalities and backstories represented among the players feels both diverse and realistic. Most everyone is desperate to get rich, but under that umbrella there’s a pregnant young woman, a mother and son team, a shaman, a crypto scammer, and so many more—including, as we already mentioned, an obnoxious rapper named Thanos.
Credit’s due to the performers, who craft detailed characters despite getting only scattered moments of screen time, and creator Hwang Dong-hyuk, who expertly paces each episode to make sure the show’s high-tension action and emotional resonance stay on equal footing.
Liked: The Front Man’s new role
The reveal that Lee Byung-hun’s malevolent Front Man has entered the competition is a delicious moment at the end of an episode named for his faux identity: Player 001. The fact that he’s wearing 001, taking after Oh Il-nam—season one’s secret puppeteer—somehow doesn’t ring any alarm bells for Gi-hun. In fact the two men become trusted teammates… or at least Gi-hun believes so. The Front Man’s two-faced (or three-faced, even, if you count his third identity as Jun-ho’s missing brother) scheme anchors season two with its carefully calibrated duplicity, giving Lee a juicy part to dive into after spending most of season one behind a mask.
Season three is going to be huge for this character, and we can’t wait to see what happens when, inevitably, the truth comes out.
When we met him at the start of Squid Game season one, Gi-hun was a gambling addict who had zero problems stealing from his mother and betting cash intended for his daughter’s birthday at the racetrack. Being thrust into a life-or-death nightmare quickly helped him develop a moral compass, and in the season one finale we saw him decide it’s time to stop the Squid Game from doing any more harm, even if it means giving up his own freedom and happiness.
In season two, which picks up two years later, he’s struggling with a mountain of survivor’s guilt, and his goofball tendencies have been completely erased; instead, he’s a man who’s as haunted by his past as he is determined to do what he can to set things right. Lee Jung-jae once again adeptly handles all of Gi-hun’s deeply felt emotions, with a much, much darker intensity to his personality this time around.
Liked: The voting
Obviously the games in Squid Game are the main event. It’s right there in the title. But adding in the ripple of letting everyone vote, out in the open, about whether or not to keep playing or not was a masterstroke. What better way to set up dueling factions as well as some very intense drama in between the games? If you’re like us, you jumped out of your seat when a character you expected to vote one way voted another. You cheered people on as they attempted to politic those on the other side of the aisle like a cruel game of government. Plus, the voting really allowed us to think about the repercussions and morality of what’s happening in the games on a whole new level. An A+ addition this season.
Liked: The player rebellion
With fewer episodes this time around, we had a sense we weren’t going to finish the games. So what could happen that’s new and exciting? Well, how about a group of players overthrowing the guards and attempt to take over the games? The players literally going to war with the games added not just action and adventure but a whole new level of drama.
We knew, and maybe the characters knew it too, that this was an impossible task. There are too many guards and too few players who choose to partake. But we cheered and watched eagerly as 456 and his friends continued to make headway. Sure, ultimately, it was a failure—thanks in large part to the Front Man being a traitor—but it’s just another example of Squid Game going against expectations in delightful and exciting ways.
Didn’t like: Too much time on the boat
We had a good feeling Jun-ho, the cop who infiltrated the games in season one while searching for his missing brother, would resurface. Sure, he was shot and fell over a cliff, but we didn’t see him die—and after the big reveals that his brother was a) a past Squid Game winner, and b) the masked Front Man, it seemed obvious that Jun-ho would be back on the hunt in season two.
We did like that he joined forces with Gi-hun (or more specifically, Gi-hun’s money) and a bunch of gangsters (Gi-hun’s greedy associates) to try and find the games’ secret island location. But once Gi-hun is whisked back into the competition, we get a few too many scenes of Jun-ho and his team on their fruitless search. Near the end of the season, we learn why their quest has been so unsuccessful—the captain who Ji-hun believes he met by chance is not on their side, and has been sabotaging their efforts. The double-cross twist is fun, but not enough to make up for all that time spent being boring at sea.
Didn’t like: The games themselves
One of the main pleasures in season one of Squid Game was just how big and diabolical the games got. “Red Light, Green Light” was the baseline as things got either bigger or increasingly dangerous. This season we copy that game for some reason while the others are just kind of—okay. The huge version of musical chairs definitely allowed for some fun groupings and scenarios, but it didn’t really require too much strategy or skill. And the six-legged race, while also providing plenty of drama and intrigue, was just a bunch of mini-games in one. We didn’t hate the new games, they just underwhelmed when compared to things like a giant game of tug of war or a platform where you have to test your luck on glass that may or may not shatter beneath your feet.
Didn’t like: It had Empire Strikes Back middle-story syndrome
After waiting almost four years for Squid Game to return, to leave us once again on a cliffhanger was a bummer. What will happen to 456 and his surviving friends? And are we just going to forget that whole other storyline on the boat in the end? Surely these questions and more will be answered in season three, but season two really didn’t answer anything from the first season. The cop and the Front Man don’t reunite. We don’t see any progress that could result in the games being shut down or exposed. It’s all just set up—entertaining set up, but set up none the less—for a third and final season we, hopefully, won’t have to wait as long for.
Squid Game season two is now streaming on Netflix.
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