For a collection credited with beginning a world TV revolution, “Squid Sport” Season 2 certain looks like the usual sequel to a Hollywood blockbuster. The story mirrors the unique, following a contemporary batch of determined have-nots competing in elementary college video games with a large fortune for the winners and pitiless execution for the losers. Season 2 additionally stars the identical lead character — or characters, actually, as Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) guides the A-plot inside the sport, and Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon) drives the B-plot behind the scenes. Creator Hwang Dong-hyuk can also be again, writing and directing each episode, and the already-striking manufacturing is infused with the larger, bolder fashion that tends to come back with additional assets.
A lot of the overlap is an inevitable consequence of following up a world sensation that didn’t demand a follow-up (hey, you gotta give the individuals what they need), however there’s enjoyable available among the many tiring repetition and elongated story arcs — Season 2 is extra like half-a-season, full with a cliffhanger ending. For anybody glad with the primary competitors, the seven new episodes are nonetheless possible to supply sufficient visceral leisure or vicarious thrills to advantage a return journey. Season 2 continues to capitalize on a premise that’s instinctively absorbing — who will win and who will lose, who will play with honor and who will debase themselves, who will we determine with and who will we vilify. The marginally trickier questions — those that final a little bit longer than the size of every recreation — are when and why: When does a personality cross a line? Why do they cross it? And might we empathize with their justifications for doing so?
The place Season 1 thrived on discovery — not solely the grand revelation of every new recreation, together with their guidelines and customs, but in addition a sleeper hit that caught on by phrase of mouth fairly than pre-release hype — Season 2 survives by figuring out there’s much less to find. It leans on our anticipation and infrequently performs off of it, deploying a twist right here and a flip there, however extra typically capably caters to our expectations. Plus, as a way for Hwang to appropriate among the wealth inequality between creator and distributor — making a second season that echoes the primary as his solely recourse to see a sliver of what Netflix made off his authentic work — it’s, fairly frankly, all the better to get pleasure from.
That’s, if enjoyment was ever on the desk. “Squid Sport” was by no means refined, preferring to marry its outrage over capitalist-driven wealth inequality with bodily violence as brutal and graphic because the painful drudgery of dwelling paycheck to paycheck. Such carnage was understandably disagreeable for some viewers — even ones who sympathize with the collection’ eat-the-rich angle — and Season 2 continues to decide on violence.
By now, maybe you may inform, pricey readers, it’s a bit tough to speak about what occurs in “Squid Sport” Season 2 with out spoiling what occurs in “Squid Sport” Season 2. The broader story so carefully follows what got here earlier than, each slight alteration and minor growth helps carries that rather more consequence. So let’s persist with the fundamentals: Choosing up two years after Gi-hun deserted his flight to Los Angeles the place he’d reunite along with his daughter, the only survivor of the newest Squid Video games isn’t dwelling the lifetime of a Korean billionaire. He’s mendacity low in a grungy resort, plotting his revenge, and looking for The Recruiter (Gong Yoo). He’s obtained a complete workforce scouring the subway for a tall, lanky, besuited man difficult down-on-their-luck strangers to one-on-one ddakji. For years, Gi-hun has come up empty, and for years, he retains pouring increasingly cash into the search.
The cash, after all, doesn’t matter to him. Gi-hun sees it as a curse — a reminder of all of the lives misplaced out of greed and self-interest. He wants the money to hold out his mission, however his antipathy towards the cash (and what it might flip him into) mirrors his antipathy for the Squid Sport, which has solely grown since he received. “You don’t get it,” he says. “You couldn’t know what it was wish to be in there, what I did to make it out. You don’t have any concept what the sport’s actually like.”
And but, whether or not Gi-hun finds the Recruiter or not, there’s little doubt he’ll play the sport once more. Hwang does a high quality job justifying Participant 456 re-entering the sector, however he struggles to justify how Gi-hun goes about placing an finish to those battle royales. Like a B-plot about discovering the island, Gi-hun’s fierce convictions in regards to the Squid Sport come and go along with the wants of “Squid Sport” — viewers need to watch the video games, and for some time, Gi-hun has to close up and play.
As soon as he does, Season 2 falls into the acquainted but compelling patterns of its predecessor. The brand new gamers are shocked to be taught of the life-or-death stakes and rapidly divide into two teams: people who need to keep and maintain competing, and people who need to money out and depart. Additional factions emerge from there, as individuals begin enjoying the sport inside the Squid Sport, forming pockets of friendships and alliances, actual and faux. The brand new batch of broad archetypes — together with a tight-knit mom and son, a secretly pregnant girl, and a bossy loudmouth former billionaire — additionally function a couple of intriguing weirdos, just like the runner-up on a rapping actuality present named Thanos (with purple hair and fingernails painted to match the Infinity Stones), a bitcoin bro who went bust, and a snobby shaman.
For probably the most half, the brand new solid comes collectively seamlessly (partially as a result of they settle into comparable dynamics to Season 1’s crew), and Season 2 finds its greatest moments when it sits with these characters and their selections. We get a tantalizing peek into the lives of the guards, and the cockier, smarmier gamers not solely make for risible villains, additionally they create a black-comic undercurrent the season can lean on when it wants a lift. Season 2 isn’t lighter — Gi-hun remains to be “in hell,” in any case — however it’s funnier, which makes its personal peculiar sense. The video games aren’t new anymore (which isn’t to say there aren’t new video games), and the environment have grow to be acquainted — to us and our protagonist. (They’ve been given a pleasant polish, although — love the brand new flooring!) So fairly than attempt to high the depth of not figuring out what horror awaits behind each door, Season 2 laces its sense of doom with an “aw shucks’ inevitability that feels all-too-familiar as Individuals gird themselves for 2025.
Sure, “Squid Sport” Season 2 will undoubtedly spawn an obnoxious variety of assume items about numerous trendy parallels, but it surely actually doesn’t have something to say it hasn’t already mentioned in Season 1. Maybe that can change when Season 3 hits (which, once more, is extra like Season 2’s second half), however for now, “Squid Sport” is content material to exist as instinctual leisure.
If there’s a motive Season 2 exists past Netflix‘s fiduciary duty to take advantage of a couple of extra subscription {dollars} out of its largest hit ever — a narrative motive, if you’ll — it’s within the battle between gamers who resent their billionaire overlords and gamers who knowingly serve them. Early on, somebody name-drops “The Matrix” fairly bluntly, maybe to higher underline that, on this season, Neo/Gi-hun isn’t preventing in opposition to the Architect/Oh Il-nam (O Yeong-su), who created the Squid Sport and Gi-hun defeated in Season 1. He’s preventing the Agent Smiths/Entrance Males who maintain the video games working. In spite of everything, at this level in society, it doesn’t matter how capitalism started. What issues is whether or not we are able to discover a manner out with out dropping ourselves, our lives, and one another.
Grade: B-
“Squid Sport” Season 2 premieres Thursday, December 26 on Netflix. All seven episodes will probably be launched without delay.