Africa-Press – Cape verde. Three years after winning Squid Game, Player 456 gave up going to the states and comes back with a new resolution in his mind. Gi-hun once again dives into the mysterious survival game, starting another life-or-death game with new participants gathered to win the prize of 456 billion won.
Seong Gi-hun returns in season two of Squid Game and is hellbent on finding and bringing the puppet masters of the twisted game to justice. Only the second series, as expected, lacks the shock value and intrigue of the first, and it is far too slow a burn to forgive, considering the momentum of the first.
Is it shameful of me to admit that by episode three, I was eagerly anticipating the moment the deadly games would begin?
Season two picks up three years after Seong Gi-hun, played by Lee Jung-jae, took home the 45.6 billion after winning the deadly games. He was the sole survivor, but couldn’t simply carry on with the “blood money”. Instead, he gave some of it to the families of those who died during the games, while the rest was spent on tracking down the salesman, who preyed on him and others and invited them to the games, so he might finally get some justice.
This time, he had help from detective Hwang Jun ho, who you’ll remember from the first season as he attempted to find his missing brother, only for it to be revealed his brother was in fact the front man of the games behind the cool, geometric black mask.
The first two episodes of the second season are particularly slow. It follows Gi-hun’s search and feels more like an action-packed blockbuster, which would’ve been fine, but it lacked the dystopian thrill – even the low saturation, lighting, and film graininess appeared missing and took away from this. And though actor Gong Yoo’s gripping performance as the salesman in a scene in the park and a few games of Russian Roulette was totally unhinged and indicative of the brutality to come, things only really picked up once Gi-hun reentered the games as player 456.
From then, there were two main storylines, as in season 1: (1) that of the detective trying to find the games – so nothing new here – and (2) the actual games – and while most of the games were, in fact, new, again, nothing was surprising about it.
Yes, the cash-strapped were eager to play. Then, horrified, they fear for their lives after finding out the deadly nature of the childhood games. Ultimately, director Hwang Dong-hyuk proves, again, that morality can be bent and broken as he comments on capitalism, classism, and the unfairness of an exploitative economic system in the South Korean series. But again, nothing particularly surprising.
That said, it’s evident Dong-hyuk is laying the foundation for a showdown in season 3. Season 2 not only introduced us to a few new game players – some for us to root for (a trans woman, a young, soon-to-be-mom, and a mother-and-son duo) and some for us to hate (purple-haired rapper Thanos had me questioning my own morality). But they also shared more about the games’ soldiers. So I’m sure, or instead, I hope, season 3 will wrap things up neatly in a pink little bow because there’s too much going on right now, with season 2 concluding with far too few, if any, answers.
And this isn’t even mentioning the future of the organ harvesting business.
The release date for season 3 has yet to be announced, though it will be sometime in 2025. That said, there is much work to be done if production hopes to captivate and keep viewers the way they did three long years ago.
Squid Game 2, in a nutshell, is entertaining, horrifying, and gory, but it is just as expected, and it has far too few twists to really make my tummy turn.
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