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This article contains no spoilers for Squid Game season 2.
Near the end of Squid Game season 2‘s second episode, returning antagonist Hwang In-ho a.k.a. The Front Man (Lee Byung-hun) hits our hero Seong Gi-hun a.k.a. Player 456 (Lee Jung-jae) with an unlikely movie reference.
“Have you seen The Matrix?” the masked man asks the former game winner via a piggybank intercom. “They could’ve lived in peace if they chose the blue pill. But they still chose the red pill to play the heroes.”
A second season of Squid Game is the ultimate pop culture example of choosing the red pill … and not in the politically-charged sense that the term “red pilling” has come to be associated with. The Netflix survival drama could have swallowed the one-season blue pill and lived in peace, comfortable in its status as one of the most successful TV shows ever released globally. But reality doesn’t quite work that way. As The Matrix itself understood – the red pill and blue bill don’t represent choice but the illusion of it. Take the blue pill and you’re still fundamentally living a lie.
As long as season 1 existed as exploitable IP in Netflix’s vault, more Squid Game would always be an inevitability. Rather than wait for Netflix to bring someone else in to usher in that future, creator Hwang Dong-hyuk opted to to just write a second and third season while the cast was still relatively young and available. It’s probably not a coincidence that that’s the same conclusion The Matrix co-creator Lana Wachowski came to when electing to helm 2021’s The Matrix Resurrections for Warner Bros. Discovery’s content-ravenous investors. “Fine, I’ll do it myself before you ruin it,” isn’t exactly an artistically-thrilling proposition but it’s better than the alternative. And sometimes it can lead to compelling art anyway. It did so with the aforementioned Resurrections and it’s done so once again with Squid Game season 2.
While not as groundbreaking as its first outing, Squid Game season 2 is a satisfying and entertaining episodic experience. The story picks up two years after the conclusion of season 1, with Gi-hun still reeling from being the “winner” (and only survivor) of the 2021 iteration of the contest that pits the impoverished against one another in deadly versions of childrens’ games. Singularly focused on ending the exploitative competition once and for all, Gi-hun puts his ₩45.6 billion prize winnings to good use by hiring a veritable army of observers to search for signs that the games are starting back up again.
The first two episodes of Squid Game season 2 are understandably a bit contrived as they try to cobble together a reasoning for Gi-hun to endure hell once again by entering into the games for a second time. It’s to Hwang’s credit that he doesn’t rush through the necessary set up to make Gi-hun’s decision as logically sound as possible. Having existing season 1 characters like police officer Hwang Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon) and the unnamed mysterious recruiter (Gong Yoo) around to liven up the proceedings certainly helps. This portion of the story even gets the welcome addition of a Jar Jar Binks type in form of Gi-hun’s new employee Choi Woo-seok (Jeon Seok-ho) and I swear that dynamic is not as annoying as it sounds.
But, as Ben Wyatt could tell you, it’s about the games. And once those games finally do roll around, season 2 reaches another level. As was the case in Squid Game‘s brilliant first season, the central dramatic tension here lies in the uncomfortable space between a scathing critique of capitalism and a reveling in the splendor of its violent delights. This time around, Squid Game brings back one classic contest from season 1 while introducing no fewer than seven* fresh takes on traditional Korean playground games. Of course, you’re not supposed to have fun watching desperate individuals engage in bloodsport to amuse the wealthy but you certainly will anyway and the show doesn’t judge you too harshly for it.
*Sort of. One challenge consists of multiple games. It’ll all make sense once you see it.
The allure of high-stakes childrens’ games is so intoxicating that it helps logically smooth over the players’ willing participation in them. Once again, Squid Game‘s creative masterstroke is making the squid games themselves voluntary. There has perhaps never been a more thematically load-bearing hour of television than season 1’s “Hell,” in which the squid gamers vote to exit the contest only to come right back when confronted with a real world full of debts and despair once again. Season 2 brilliantly expands upon these dynamics of desperation even further by introducing multiple votes between games, mimicking an ongoing democratic process complete with its own “X” and “O” political parties.
One shortcoming that season 2 shares with the show’s first go-around is some relatively poor characterization for most of its ensemble beyond Gi-hun and the Front Man. This squid game roster is filled with colorful, but shallow figures like a failed cryptocurrency influencer (Im Si-wan as #333 Lee Myung-gi, an ex-military trans woman (Park Sung-hoon as #120 Hyun-ju), and, borrowing a little from Netflix’s Squid Game: The Challenge, a mother and son (Yang Dong-geun as #007 Park Yong-sik and Kang Ae-shim as #149 Jang Geum-ja). The charitable read on these surface-level characters is that the show is commenting on how the vagaries of poverty can reduce an individual’s otherwise vibrant personality into a stock archetype. The more likely interpretation is that it’s really hard to write about 456 unique contestants.
Squid Game season 2 is also not immune to the recent streaming trend of “incomplete ending-itis,” cutting things off right when the shit is about to really hit the fan. Because of that, this middle chapter of a planned trilogy leans more Matrix Reloaded than Empire Strikes Back. But, as Matrix fan Hwang In-ho could tell you: Reloaded is still pretty sick.
All seven episodes of Squid Game season 2 are available to stream on Netflix now.
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