Raise your hand if you’ve personally been a victim of Gong Yoo – or, better yet, if you still want to be after watching the first episode of Squid game Season 2. Fans of the first season of Squid game– Netflix’s ultra-violent South Korean drama series that became a global phenomenon – you may remember the character known as the “salesman” or “recruiter” – he’s the dapper guy in the suit played by famous South Korean heartthrob Gong Yoo , the first look at it, embodied the brutal anti-capitalist metaphor at the center of the show by slapping the unlucky in the face ddakji in subway stations. The Recruiter (and Gong Yoo) quickly became the internet’s new “problem favorite” – a natural conclusion for a character who uses physical violence to test the limits of desperation of future Squid Game players, while looking and being one Charisma is embodied by one of today’s most stunning actors. Despite only having a few minutes on screen in Season 1, The Recruiter continued to inspire articles with iconic headlines like Vulture’s “So You Want Gong Yoo to Slap You.” Now what?” To answer that title question, you can now watch Gong Yoo’s acting skills shine in an even bigger role as a recruiter in the first episode of Squid game season 2, “Bread and lottery.”

Season 2 of Squid game Picking up right where we left off, Player 456, Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae), decides to use his newly won fortune to go after the Games organizers rather than reunite with his daughter. Now Gi-hun is back in the games, but this time he takes part in the attempt to kill the leader known as Front Man, theoretically decapitating the Squid Games hydra and ending the games for good. During his chases, we meet another group of desperate characters who are competing for money to get out of their predicament. Meanwhile, our good cop from Season 1, Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon), joins Gi-hun in his plan to take down the organization, without revealing that he actually found the front man in Season 1 Finale – who happens to be Jun-ho’s long-lost brother In-ho. While Season 1 wrestled with the depravity caused by capitalism, Season 2 wonders if one man can lead a revolution to stop it. But since the series was renewed for a second and third season early on, it’s clear that we’ll have to wait for at least season 3 to see if Gi-hun manages to be the hero he always saw himself as has.

However, we can’t get to any of this without first re-encountering our favorite gaming-loving villain in a suit. The Recruiter is Gi-hun’s only clue to getting an audience with the frontman, so Gi-hun spends the two years since he won the Games tracking down the Recruiter by hiring the same loan sharks he faced in the first Squadron was obliged to search everyone day after day in a subway station for a man in a suit and with a fancy briefcase who slaps the other while playing a children’s game. Until the leader of the loan sharks, Mr. Kim (Kim Pub-lae), and his deputy, Woo-seok (Jeon Seok-ho), finally find him.

This time we see the recruiter go upstairs and buy bread and lottery scratch pieces. Then he goes to a park and offers the homeless and impoverished a choice: the lottery ticket or the bread. When dozens choose the lottery tickets, the recruiter – in a magnificent moment of ruthlessness played by Gong Yoo so banally that it seems like dark humor – offers everyone a coin to scratch their cards, but asks for it back when everyone loses. He then stands in the middle of the park and throws all the unclaimed bread onto the ground. With a high-angle shot showing the 6-foot-tall actor towering over those he considers smaller, he tells them, “I’m not the one who threw these away. “It was you, ladies and gentlemen,” before stomping on the pile of bread. He jumps on it, throwing what looks like a tantrum, his fancy shoes almost slipping on the sticky goo as he screams with the exertion. It’s the first time he’s lost his temper When he’s finished, he slicks his hair back and rearranges his suit with Joker-like glee. But no need to worry. Soon he becomes a complete clown.

The recruiter ends up arresting both Mr. Kim and Woo-seok, tying them up and, of course, forcing them to play a game. The game is a modified version of rock-paper-scissors, and the loser then has to face the odds at the other end of the recruiter’s gun in a game of Russian roulette. Only when the recruiter is finally killed – when Mr. Kim sacrifices himself for Woo-seok – does he seem satisfied. He quickly finds Gi-hun’s hiding place, where he casually drinks banana milk and waits for the vengeful winner. Upon Gi-hun’s arrival, we learn the backstory of this psychotic villain, and surprisingly, Gong Yoo is playing this guy for the first time. He started out as a worker at the games, removing and burning the bodies of the losers, considering them “just trash, completely useless in this world.” After working hard for a few years, he was promoted to masked executioner. Then, while he was killing people during the games, he came face to face with his father who had lost and begged him to save his life. He brags to Gi-hun that he shot his father without hesitation, then realizes that he was “made for this job.”

What angers the recruiter, who seems unflappable in the face of Shakespearean-level tragedy, is that Gi-hun believes he is special, or more broadly, that human life is special at all. While Gi-hun constantly calls the recruiter a dog, Gong Yoo skillfully portrays a man whose haunt is on the verge of losing his mind. The recruiter challenges our hero to another game of Russian roulette, this time without spinning the revolver and resetting the odds. Each man passes the gun between them and pulls the trigger. One of them will die within six tries, even though the recruiter looks like he’s at full speed.

The exciting confrontation between Gi-hun and the recruiter that ends the first episode isn’t about who will win (we know star actor Lee Jung-Jae will be in the season for the long haul), but about who Types of humanity that mean can exist in these systems – the types that keep the systems running. Squid game is about normal-degular people with morals who either hold on to them or forgo them for money or power – or who have left their morals behind for so long that they have completely forgotten them (like the front man, In-ho). That’s it a story about how capitalism creates these types of people and scenarios, reinforced this season by the presence of a former crypto influencer YouTuber who convinced his followers to invest in a cryptocurrency that crashed and leaving him and many of his followers (some of them) deep in debt to the ones (stuck in the games with him).

But the series benefits from having characters whose morals are determined not by understandable circumstances or character development, but by other rules: chaos for the sake of chaos. Or, in the case of the recruiter, just the opposite: someone who loves clarity– Winners and losers, who are determined using simple, regulated terms that cannot be argued, devalued or misinterpreted. He loves odds, even when they are against him.

When it is clear that the recruiter will lose, Gi-hun repeats the mocking words of the man in the suit, giving him a way out when he wants to admit that he is “nothing more than her dog.” Instead, the recruiter just smiles, the satisfaction of a crazy job well done reflected on Gong Yoo’s face, before he hastily and tremblingly puts the gun under his chin and fires. The Recruiter isn’t just the most intriguing character because he’s good-looking or because he’s Gong Yoo – but those two things play a crucial role in his ability to get people to trust him enough to play his silly games – , but also because his character’s motivations are less complicated. Ruled by chaos, villains with it Codes are fascinating, even if they are destructive. There is something so striking about someone with a different sense of ethics, who was not bullied, beaten and imprisoned in this way, but was born with a different understanding of the accepted parameters of life.

The beginning of the season with the story of the recruiter is also poignant for the central metaphor of the series. It gives the show a chance right from the start to emphasize Gi-hun’s point that they are all still slaves to the game and its organizers, whether they have a gun in their hand or receive an invitation to play. As a metaphor for capitalism, the recruiter’s story reminds us that no matter how far we work our way up the ladder of the system, if we are not in the VIP room, we will be exploited. Gi-hun reminds the recruiter that they will all be exploited in the end –The is the great equalizer. It’s just a shame we had to lose Gong Yoo to see it It.