Like it happens with the follow-up for any successful show, I entered the Squid Game 2 with a fair bit of trepidation. What worked in the first season was the shock value of the setting that posits the innocence of childhood games, sophisticated Western classical music with a kind of savagery few would be able to stomach. Where unsuspecting debt-ridden civilians are lured onto an island to play a series of games – for which they stand to win an obscene amount of money, or pay for it with their life. A cruel, but clinical simulation of our lives in a hyper-capitalist society, the appeal of Squid Game lay in how it studied human nature – especially the ones with limited means, who are driven to take desperate measures. How far would you go to survive/get paid? As the first season showed: to any length.
In the sequel, showrunner Hwang Dong-hyuk not only has the responsibility to keep the story moving forward to keep the audience invested, but also has to find a way to weave in what worked about that first season – to please the platform overlords. How does one maintain the novelty of that first season, without watering down its commentary on an increasingly unequal society, while also recalibrating the paranoia into the second season by raising the stakes of the mind games? Is it possible for peoples’ movements to overthrow those in power? Especially, in a time when we mark ourselves with a chosen ideology, refusing to engage with the other side?
Fans, I have good news: Hwang Donghyuk successfully lands his follow-up season, giving us the taste of familiarity, but without compromising on the psychological warfare unleashed on its characters (and by extension: us). What would we do – is a feeling most viewers will be left with.
The events of Squid Game 2 begins immediately where the first season ended. Seong Gihun (Lee Jungjae) doesn’t take his winnings of ₩45.6 billion and flee, like the creators of the game had anticipated. Instead, he throws down the gauntlet and threatens to shut down the games forever. Two years pass, and Gihun is now holed up in a seedy motel building which he has bought for himself. He’s hired a gang of handymen, tasked with looking for the man (Gong Yoo) who recruited him at a train station. The only way to reach the creators of the game, is to get a hold of their recruiter.
A still from ‘Squid Game 2’.
Yoo’s character is easily one of the best characters in the show, and Dong-hyuk’s competence as a showrunner reveals in how he doesn’t overexploit the recruiter’s character. He shows him playing a sadistic game in a park with the homeless people – where he offers them a choice between a piece of bread and a lottery ticket. As expected, most people choose the lottery ticket and win nothing. To mock their choice, the recruiter throws all the bread on the floor and stamps each and every one of them, as the homeless folk look on with their jaws on the floor.
Donghyuk grounds the early portions of the second season in Gihun’s quest for vengeance, his survivor’s guilt and the nightmares of facing the creators of the game one day. But just when we think this season is going to be about payback, we find Gihun back on the island – despite coming face-to-face with the creators of the game, and telling them his plan to shut down the games forever. Gihun is confident that if he arrives on the island among a new batch of players, and describes his horrors of playing the games – people will refrain from participating in it. Right? Wrong.
Turns out – not everyone values their lives. Most participants have a large debt looming over their heads. They’d much rather die playing, than live without dignity outside. While there are the usual suspects in the new batch of players: the YouTuber behind a crypto crash, a defaulting billionaire, the rapper who poured all his savings into aforementioned crypto – there are also genuinely helpless people beaten by the system to a point where they’d much rather die trying to regain their honour, than declare themselves delinquent, basking in the pity of the onlookers.
What these helpless people don’t see, is that these games are merely an extension of the dance the poor are made to do in the real world. The fate for 99% of the participants are already sealed. By sharing a sliver of their gargantuan fortunes, and offering hope to one contender – the rich entertain the joy of watching hundreds jumping through the hoops, betray one another, backstab each other – only to earn a little bit more of the prize money. Collecting his earnings, Gihun is able to see clearly how the rich dehumanise the poor, by preying on their desperation – and hence, he confidently announces he will stop them.
But here’s where Donghyuk throws his big googly to the audience. The organisers agree with Gihun, and agree to hold a vote after each round of the game. The players are ‘free to leave’ if they deem the game too dangerous, after equally splitting the earnings amongst all surviving players. By holding a ‘free and fair’ voting process – Donghyuk comes up with the diabolical idea where each player voting to leave/stay in the game wears a badge stating their preference. Despite Gihun describing all the horrors that await them, many players vote for the games to continue. Some out of greed, the rest out of desperation. One can almost imagine the relish on the faces of the organisers, who use the predictability of human nature for their personal amusement.
A still from ‘Squid Game 2’.
It’s a fascinating choice – making a spectacle out of democratic processes in an environment that is completely controlled by a few. We might be under the illusion that the voting process at the end of each round is free and fair. However, the organisers have specifically chosen players like a defaulting billionaire and the rapper; both entitled, rich people who would risk their own and others’ lives to win the bounty, instead of paying heed to any of Gihun’s ‘alarmist’ pleas.
The voting scenes slow down the pace of the show, but give us enough time to peek into how the human mind works. Mother and son vote differently, mentor and protege are at odds, best friends betray one another; all capturing the polarity of the world these days. It’s during these moments of quiet when Squid Game 2 luxuriates on the one thing it intends to do with its characters – strip them down to one basic instinct: survival.
Squid Game 2 becomes a full-power war film by the end (it would be spoilery to explain how), but what really stings about the show is for how long it teases poetic justice. Only to snatch it away from us at sniffing distance. Looking back, maybe we never really shouldn’t have mistaken Gihun’s quest for revenge, as his enthusiasm for justice. As a character says: “For the games to be shut down, you would have to change society.” True words, good sir. And we’re so far away.
