Squid Game Season 2 is not here to give us resolution. Rather, it follows a similar trajectory to The Hunger Games. Burning: Now the rich Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) returns to the games, desperate to put an end to them once and for all. The stakes are technically the same as the first season: you win or you die, but another round ramps up the pressure. Now he knows the odds, and so do we; Extratextually we know that this version of Squid Game He has to up the ante for Gi-hun so he can do it for us in the audience.
And he does, with the leader (Lee Byung-hun) accepting Gi-hun's challenge to get back into the game and opting to go along with him. In a way, this is a repeat of what we saw in season 1, with Gi-hun unknowingly befriending and protecting a member of the game's establishment. But Lee Byung-hun and Lee Jung-jae's acting takes the dynamic (and the show's themes) to a new level. This is Squid Gamein a radically new way. And creator Hwang Dong-hyuk asking the big questions.
The events of the season technically arise from Gi-hun's decision at the end of Season 1: not to get on the plane, visit his son, and ride off into the sunset with his billions, but to remain haunted by his time in the game. . but it finds its basis in his final conversation with Oh Il-nam (O Yeong-su), the creator of the games he played alongside him. There, Il-nam lays out a belief that prompted him to create the games: people are inherently greedy and corrupt, and the game is simply a way of allowing people to satisfy their natural impulses to at least provide some fun and take advantage of the game. the “garbage” of the general public.
Gi-hun, of course, vehemently disagrees. And spiritually, the show seems to agree with him: Gi-hun wins Il-nam's bet to have someone help a drunk man out of the cold before midnight, and Il-nam dies in his strange, desolate space. office. But, like that last beat of Squid Game Season 1 teased that such evil could take advantage of the world was too disturbing for Gi-hun to simply walk away.
Image: Netflix
Season 2 doesn't just rely on the usual fallout of bringing Gi-hun into the game and trying to take him down. The season is structured to allow Gi-hun to explore the question of what In fact drives games, whether they're really bad people or just people driven to do bad things. Hwang elegantly explores those questions across the chasm between Gi-hun and the figurehead, even when the former doesn't know he's being tested at all.
The beauty of the season's seven episodes lies in the perfection with which they weigh the meaty themes. Gi-hun makes it his mission to stop the game and recruits a small team of helpers to help sway the crowd around the votes. The leader, now disguised as Player 001 and using the name Oh Young-il, approaches him and pours honey into his ear. But in the meantime, the broader conversation about what drives gaming continues. Like Young-il, he says that Gi-hun's success is what convinced him to stay, that he trusts his judgment. But after voting to keep the game once, he votes no every time, verbally and physically supporting Gi-hun's agenda.
It's never enough, which is poignant. It's not that people are inherently good or bad, but that they are desperate and trapped. Gi-hun is the one fighting an uphill battle here, and even with the guy running the thing on his side (apparently, at least) the game continues.
At a press event earlier this year, Lee Byung-hun told Polygon that the performance was challenging, where he was balancing his characters, including the leader's real backstory as Hwang In-ho, only through his eyes. “So sometimes I had to turn my eyes on and off having to be Young-il's and then the next look having to be In-Ho's, and having to turn them on and off immediately with each look. fleeting moment.”
That his turn is so small is a constant strength of Squid Game season 2. You never lose the character, whether he's docile as Young-il or sinister and imposing as the figurehead. And it reinforces the show's greatest conversation where a weaker show might falter: we can see the places where he ties his lies to the truth of his own life, and how that has corrupted him so deeply that he can't see Gi's hope. -hun. as something more than naivety.
Which, unlike so many equivalent sequels, actually makes Squid Game Season 2 seems worth trying again. Beyond Gi-hun's desperation, the second season explores a variety of reasons why people participate in games: the hope of paying for medical treatments, gambling debts, or simply providing for a life. current future between real-world capitalist interests. Plus, with our first look behind the scenes at some of the guards' motivations, Squid Game It actually seems like something bigger is being built (presumably in a third season that will be more like part 2 of this season).
As all their stories merge and spin, Squid Game finds a rhythm, constantly dancing between the desperation of their current situation and the hopelessness of the life that brought them here. It's a smarter way to advance a point, not withholding answers but miserably asking more questions. Its characters are simple, but they help focus a season that could otherwise be a repetition of basic themes.
And as much as Gi-hun and “Young-il” want to help, the figurehead lets the anguish around them speak for itself. As they witness (or even perpetrate) one heinous act after another, Squid GamePlayers look for easy solutions in a world that has none of those. Instead of running away from that conversation (or just repeating it), Squid Game He looks us right in the face and asks us why we think we are better off.