The story behind it Squid game The second season seems to be one story In the long-delayed return of the South Korean thriller. Making the show’s first season — a violent satire of late-stage capitalism in which financially desperate people compete in a series of children’s games and the sole surviving player goes home with billions in cash — was so difficult and stressful that it is Creator Hwang Dong-hyuk claims he lost “eight or nine” teeth over the course of the first shoot. It was an experience that unsurprisingly made him wary of continuing the series, even if he ended it on a cliffhanger in 2021.

Why did Hwang finally agree to do more? “Money,” he told the BBC bluntly. “Even though the first series was such a huge global success, I honestly didn’t do much. So doing the second series will also help me compensate for the success of the first.”

Think about that for a moment. We know that streaming ratings are still a black box to some extent, and Netflix has made a habit of coming up with inscrutable, completely useless methods to get audiences excited about various “hit” shows. But according to all reports – including those from the streaming giant itself – Squid game The first season was a huge, solid Sensation, not just in South Korea, but around the world. But Hwang earned a relatively meager amount of money that he was forced to return to such a miserable job, This caused his teeth to literally fall out of his mouth. The television business has become as completely dysfunctional as virtually every other industry right now.

Hwang’s circumstances aren’t quite as dire as those of the players in both seasons of Squid gameback today with seven new episodes. But these circumstances are so darkly comical that they’re more interesting than many of the backstories Hwang and his associates have told the unfortunate souls who come to the mysterious island. The new episodes are still well-made in many ways, even if they have succumbed to streaming bloat, as they essentially function as half a season, the story of which will be completed sometime next year. But they never argue forcefully enough for their need to exist, unless one understands that Hwang deserves compensation for the suffering he went through last time and for all the money he made on Netflix without nearly enough beforehand to be able to participate in it.

When we last left Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae, who won an Emmy in 2022 for the role) – also known as Player 456, the winner of the first season competition – he had decided not to live with his prize money in luxury, and instead decided to finish the game by any means necessary, even if it would cost him his last penny to do so. The story picks up two years later and Gi-hun is stuck in his search as he hasn’t even managed to track down the mysterious salesman (Gong Yoo), who recruits potential candidates by challenging them to a game Ddakji on subway platforms. Meanwhile, police officer Hwang Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon) went undercover on the island looking for his missing brother In-ho – and was stunned to discover that In-ho (Lee Byung-hun) was the masked presenter of the Game War, the frontman, is conducting a search for the island parallel to Gi-hun’s investigation. Eventually, the two men – and the small army of gangsters and mercenaries that Gi-hun has hired with his vast cash reserves – join forces.

Just returning to the island takes two whole episodes. Part of this time is devoted to introducing a new character, No-eul (Park Gyu-young), a North Korean defector who of course also becomes involved in the game. Mostly, though, it’s a cat-and-mouse game between Gi-hun’s forces and the frontman’s. This is not a fair fight, logistically or dramatically. There’s no point in continuing the series – or at least continuing to follow its original hero – if Gi-hun doesn’t end up back in the game and Front Man’s approach is inventive and ruthless enough to turn an average supervillain into the role of supervillain shame. So a lot of it just seems like throat-clearing with an added layer of sadism, such as a scene in which the traveling salesman forces two prisoners to play a mix of rock-paper-scissors and Russian roulette. The first season wasn’t exactly kind and gentle, but the games had a baroque, caricatured quality that often made their excesses palatable. This in turn feels like torture porn. (A later episode adds rape threats.)

And once Gi-hun is back in a familiar green tracksuit, the season introduces smaller variations of the show’s former contestants. Gi-hun ends up starring again alongside an old friend, Jung-bae (Lee Seo-hwan, who appeared briefly in the first season). There’s another aggressive tyrant, only this time he’s a wannabe rap star who calls himself Thanos (and is played by a real South Korean music star, Choi Seung-hyun, aka TOP), and it turns out again , that one of the players is hiding his true identity and agenda from the rest. Some of the character types are new to the series, like Hyun-ju (Park Sung-hoon), a trans woman who is trying to keep the rest of her to pay for gender-affirming surgeries, but almost everyone serves a similar plot function to someone who died in the first season.

Even after we arrive on the island, the story continues at a relatively leisurely pace, with frequent breaks in which Jun-ho and his team try to reconnect with Gi-hun, but repeatedly fail. A given game spans multiple episodes. During the first season, the competition was paused once to allow participants to vote by majority vote on whether to go home or continue playing. This season is pretty much all about the vote, and a vote isn’t even resolved in the episode in which it’s introduced. Despite the frequent threat of death, the second season doesn’t have the relentless quality of the first year.

But Lee Jung-jae’s performance is just as powerful and charismatic as before, as is the production design. (The latter is, in some ways, even more impressive: the seemingly endless, daylight-bathed Lego staircase that players take from their dorm room to the playrooms is somehow larger than before.) And the games themselves are still remarkable set pieces. Some are familiar, because how could the show go on without the iconic red light/green light giant robot girl? Some are new. They are all an impressive combination of excitement and underdog sports story. (Hwang very cleverly divides the most likable participants into a few teams when there’s a group activity, deftly balancing skill and confidence.) But only three games in seven episodes – not counting extracurriculars like the aforementioned Rock Paper Scissors/Russian Roulette – doesn’t seem to be enough.

Among the arguments for a second season was the chance to get a better idea of ​​how the game works behind the scenes and what motivated In-ho to become this monster whose entire existence is everything his brother opposes would. But despite there being a new main character working on the island, despite a significantly expanded role for Lee Byung-hun, and despite the new season providing plenty of padding, we don’t get much additional insight into the operation or its top managers.

By the way, that is not the case either Squid game I have a lot of new things to say about income inequality, and that’s the crux of this macabre story. It’s a societal problem that has only gotten worse since the first season debuted, but the new season comes closest to acknowledging any kind of change because one of the players, disgraced YouTube influencer Lee Myung- gi (Im Si-wan), bankrupted himself and several of the other participants by endorsing crypto.

At one point, Gi-Hun and the frontman get into an argument about whether the game reflects the worst aspects of modern life or contributes to making things worse. “The game won’t end until the world changes,” emphasizes the frontman. The world has changed. But Squid game is more or less silent Squid gamejust slower and better equipped to provide its creator with any emergency dental work needed.

All seven episodes of Squid game The second season is streaming now. I saw the whole thing.