Squid Game season two review: Netflix returns to the deadly arena

Squid Game felt like a one-and-done. It had a beginning, a middle and an end, perfectly structured for emotional carnage, tied off with a bow.

But then there was that tease, a promise from Seong Gi-hun, aka Player 456 (Lee Jung-jae), a pledge to stop the games once and for all.

The second season of Squid Game had a formidable task in front of it. It not only had to justify the continuation of the story more than three years after release but also take fans back to what made the series so compulsive in the first – the games – without retreading the same steps.

Creator Hwang Dong-hyuk, who wrote and directed each of season two’s seven episodes, has concocted a story that suits both those agendas, while exploring some new ideas about the nature of humanity, greed and a system designed to enrich the wealthy and keep the poor enslaved.

The story picks up three years after Gi-hun won the game. As we saw in the previous instalment, rather than start a new life in America with his prize money, he decided to not get on the plane and instead try to take down the cabal responsible for the games that have been running since the late-1980s.

He’s trying to locate the well-dressed recruiter who played the envelope game ddakji in the subway, and is using his now considerable resources to do it.

As it was made clear in the trailer, so this is not a spoiler, Gi-hun does return to the game with the objective to end it once and for all.

But there are new challenges, both in the games themselves (Young Hee, the terrifying Red Light, Green Light doll returns but everything else is different), and in the group dynamics of this new cohort.

Some of the new characters include Jung-bae (Lee Seo-hwan) an old friend of Gi-hun’s, an ex-marine (Kang Ha-neul), a young father with a sick daughter (Lee Jin-wook), a young pregnant woman (Jo Yu-ri), a famous rapper and chaos agent (Choi Seung-hyun) and a mother-and-son pair (Kang Ae-shim and Yang Dong-geun). Of course, there is also the Front Man (Lee Byung-hun), who will we be spending a lot more time with this season.

Without spoiling too much of what happens, one of the more significant updates to the rules of the game is that after each round, the surviving players can vote to leave the game and share in the accumulated prize money. In the first season, they’re only given the chance to leave after the first round, and there is no money to take home.

This introduces a different conflict between those who want to keep going and those who want to go home, and they’re branded by the Xs and Os on their teal uniform, so no one ever forgets which “team” they’re on. How much money is enough to leave?

It’s Lord of the Flies meets the most extreme zero sum game in which players openly moan that not enough people have died in the previous game. It’s fascinating to watch how greed, fear and the value, or lack thereof, of other’s people’s lives have on those entranced by the golden-lit money pig promising them riches.

And what effect, if any, Gi-hun’s implorations that everyone will die if they don’t vote to leave have on others.

If the first season explored a debt system that dehumanised the vulnerable, these new episodes consider how people have become more and more individualised, driven by their own wants above the collective and motivated by the falsehood that they are the exception.

We’re manipulated like marionettes to constantly strive for more, and told the furphy if others fail, it’s because they’re lazy or weak or dumb. It’s the hamster wheel of life, and it pits the plebeians against each other rather than look at who’s really responsible for the status quo.

That’s the brilliant thing about Squid Game. It does all the things you expect of a propulsive and meticulously well-made series, but its thematic foundation is an urgent social critique.

How much of that sinks in is up to the audience – and certainly the fact Netflix made a reality TV version that goes against of the show suggests social commentary is lower on the list of the streamer’s priorities than the colourful production design and twists and turns that rack up the engagement hours.

As always, watch the series in the original Korean language with subtitles instead of the English-language dub which not only doesn’t match the lips but sands down the precision of the dialogue.

For example, in one scene, the dubbed English line is “When we get out of here, you can buy me a drink”, while the subtitled version says “you can buy me a soju”, a reference to the popular Korean drink that’s stocked in almost every Australian bottle shop.

Why even watch a Korean series if you’re not going to embrace the specificity of another culture, such as its cuisine or the fact that its mandatory military service is implied in the high number of characters who are adept with weapons. Short of being able to understand Korean, watch it as close to originally intended as possible.

A third season has been confirmed for 2025, but it really should been called season two, part two, because this series ends on a cliffhanger with much left to be resolved. Undoubtedly, the date for season three will be revealed in the coming days after everyone starts becoming obsessed with the world of Squid Game again.

Squid Game is streaming on Netflix