Squid Game Rebukes Its Own Popularity

Photo: Netflix

Light spoilers for Squid Game season two follow.

Squid Game was never a subtle show. Sniper rifles executing the debt-plagued and trod-upon; a gigantic gold-plated piggy bank brimming with bundles of blood money; global elites donning gilded animal masks to signify their position at the top of the food chain — these are not the images of a show trafficking in ambiguity. In its second installment, which premiered all seven episodes on Netflix Thursday, Squid Game spreads its tentacles further into sadism and dystopia, with a new set of competitors and a new set of games they’ll die while playing. Yes, it can get repetitive. But it’s also effective, with shocking cliffhangers and ghastly heel turns that pull you even tighter into Squid Game’s bloody, cynical worldview: Hope is for suckers.

Creator Hwang Dong-hyuk begins Squid Game’s second season in the closing moments of the first’s finale, with winner Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) abandoning his plan to visit his estranged daughter in the United States to instead enact vengeance on those who run the games. Creator Oh Il-nam, who masqueraded as a regular player during Gi-hun’s run, might be dead, but the recruiter (Gong Yoo), overseer Front Man (Lee Byung-hun), and the anonymous VIPs who gamble on the games are still out there, and Gi-hun becomes obsessed with finding them. He joins forces with disgraced former detective Hwang Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon), whose search for his missing older brother In-ho and investigation of the island was the first season’s secondary plot. None of Jun-ho’s superiors believe his stories about people being forced to play children’s games until they died, while Gi-hun has cut himself off from everyone in his former life; as they grow increasingly maniacal about gaining revenge, the pair’s common alienation draws them together. (Also providing some narrative pressure: Gi-hun not realizing that Jun-ho’s brother is the Front Man, and Jun-ho has an agenda of his own.)

Season two opens with this dual hunt, and uses agilely edited montages of Gi-hun chasing leads all around Seoul and Jun-ho hitting investigative dead ends to establish the ratcheting pressure of a heist — a genre whose viewing satisfaction is tied to our expectation that the central scheme or caper will work out for our protagonists. There’s an anticipation and assumption of success that Squid Game wants us to feel here, so that when the series undercuts it over and over again, the heartbreaks hit all the harder. Because of course Gi-hun makes it back into the game, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire-style, and of course the games are ready for him. As soon as he tries to convince other contestants that the money isn’t worth it, the piggy bank full of crisply bundled cash glides down from the ceiling to entice them into sticking around. When Gi-hun tries to strategize how to approach future games so more contestants can stay alive, the organizers unveil new challenges he’s unfamiliar with to make the other participants doubt his experiences. And a new rule allowing players to vote after each game on whether they want to divide up the current prize or play one more round in order to increase their winnings — which is sold as a means of self-determination — is actually the players’ greatest divider, and a direct challenge to Gi-hun’s certainty that people will do the moral thing when given the chance.

Once Gi-hun is back on the island, he serves as the straight man and anguished leader to a new cast of characters, including Jung-Bae (Lee Seo-hwan), a friend and coworker from his old factory job; MG Coin (Yim Si-wan), a crypto bro who scammed people with bad advice; and Hyun-ju (Park Sung-hoon), a trans military veteran saving up for her gender-affirming surgery. Most shocking of all is In-ho, who hides his real identity, enters the game as Player 001, and ingratiates himself within Gi-hun’s group to undermine his gameplay. (Lee delivers a perfectly icy, multilayered performance of a man who once won the games but lost his family and his soul.) Within that milieu, the question posed by Squid Game is no longer “Could you kill someone else to live?” but “Could you help someone else live even if it meant less for yourself?” That proposition is not so much about individual survival as it is about group dynamics: how to build consensus and camaraderie between disparate people with misaligned agendas. Squid Game’s primary, most immersive fascination this season is conceptualizing how grueling it is to craft a society that protects and provides for everyone — including the people who reject common goals because of their obsession with self-gain. Is that effort even worth it, Squid Game wonders, when you first have to defeat all the selfishness and avarice stemming from the top-down nature of capitalism?

If you’re a George Carlin fan, you’ll think more than once this season of his bit about how working-class people are more inclined to align with the rich than the poor because of the delusion that they’ll one day join the former class despite their closeness to the latter. (“They’ll get it all from you, sooner or later, ‘cause they own this fucking place. It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.”) Squid Game now feels like a rebuke of its own popularity; these episodes are suffused with that familiar fury for the inhumanity of the powerful toward the powerless, but also an encroaching bitterness toward the proletariat — against those swayed into selling out their peers by the slivers of hope provided by the beau monde and their ilk. How much is your new friend, or your mother, or your lover worth to you? A fantastically disorienting and chaotically edited musical chairs-like contest makes this point plain as players have to make split-second decisions about expanding their established alliances to new members, then race each other to shelter; the shocking betrayals that follow suggest maybe the nice guys are the ones we should watch out for. But that scene’s stress level is nothing compared to those groupwide votes, and the agony of watching people willingly raise their hands for their own destruction as long as it means someone else’s life might get ruined, too. The greatest villain of all, Squid Game suggests, might be democracy itself.

That skepticism toward whether people can be trusted with their own autonomy feels a little authoritarian when Squid Game probably wanted it to feel more anarchic; another episode would have helped round out the rushed revolt that gives the end of the season an abruptly Andor-like feeling. Yet overall, Squid Game pointedly pushing against its labeling as pandemic-era escapist programming and attempting to have a larger conversation about how to wield power and enact change feels bold and timely, thanks to the oppositional outcomes of America’s November presidential election and the December impeachment of South Korea’s president after his martial-law attempt. This is a talkier, more philosophical season, with fewer opportunities for Lee to be goofy — there are no moments as meme-able as his frantic dalgona licking, which replays as if to remind us of the (somehow) comparatively lighter tone of the preceding season. Rather, he reprises the somber quality of his performance in The Acolyte, as Gi-hun and the new Player 001 trade some of Squid Game’s most incisive observations about why people resist accepting what they need in order to continue pursuing what they want.

Most of Squid Game’s opinions about the perniciousness of capitalism and human nature arrive at the very beginning of season one: People are selfish and cruel; society at large is tribalist and antagonistic; money is our most driving desire and our most damaging weakness. In season two, those theses turn into tough questions: Should we use violence as persuasive means? Should we try to plan for the future with pessimism or optimism? Rarely does this dialogue feel like Hwang lecturing rather than world building, and if you’re the kind of sicko whose idea of fun is a Philosophy 101 class with intermittent bursts of bloodshed, the arguments are engaging. For those watching more for the carnival grotesquery of these games and the candy-fueled-nightmare production design, those are as effective as ever. Together, they create a bridge season of Squid Game that is most vivid and audacious when it’s painting self-government as an act of insanity. In these times, it’s a grimly understandable response.