In an early episode of Squid game 2The series’ blue-collar hero, Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae), is called to a dance club on Halloween night. As he weaves his way through revelers dressed as sexy nurses, police officers and skeletons, he eventually spots the masked figure he’s been chasing, dressed in the pink tracksuit of a Squid Game guard. The scene could well be a nod by creator Hwang Dong-hyuk to the ubiquity of Squid game Halloween costumes in 2021, as the holiday fell about six weeks after Netflix’s Korean megahit debuted and quickly became the most-watched series of all time on the platform. Regardless of Hwang’s intentions, the immediate connection fans will surely make between this moment and the immediate commercialization of the series shows how drastically the meaning of the latter phenomenon has changed.

Squid game— you know, the blood-spattered thriller about how capitalism pits desperate people against each other in a battle royale to entertain corrupt elites — is a brand as long as it’s a global sensation. Buy viewers Squid game Merch, pay to enter Squid game Simulations and turn on Squid game Spin-off reality competitions. Considering that the show is a product of the world’s largest streaming service, this progression is as predictable as it is ironic. But now that the long-awaited second of three planned seasons has premiered, it’s clear that the Squid game-Industrial complex has been undermined Squid game the work of political art, in a way that is both tangential to Hwang’s storytelling and inherent to him.

When we last saw Gi-hun, the guilt-ridden victor was on his way to the airport to meet his young daughter in the US when he spotted Squid Game’s recruiter (Gong Yoo) in a new victims at the subway station, realizing that he won’t just get away with his 45.6 billion won. So much for a new beginning. In a brief introduction to the season two premiere, Gi-hun leaves the airport, vowing to find Squid Game’s mysterious masterminds “no matter what it takes,” and cuts out the tracking device they had inevitably implanted under his skin.

Two years later, he’s hiding out in the run-down Seoul hotel that has become his personal fortress, still obsessed with taking down the monsters that made him rich. To that end, he pays a shady search party millions to scour the transit system for the White Rabbit-like recruiter. Meanwhile, police detective Hwang Jun-ho (Wi Ha-jun) has recovered from an attempted murder by his older brother In-ho (Lee Byung-hun). His search for this sibling who had disappeared years before led him to Squid Game Island in Season 1, where In-ho revealed to Jun-ho that he was the evil frontman of the deadly Playground Game tournament – and then Jun- ho shot after refusing to join In-ho in the annual massacre of 455 unwitting debtors. A disillusioned traffic cop, Jun-ho gets caught up in Gi-hun’s unofficial investigation, which sends Gi-hun to the arena for the Squid Game 2024, while Jun-ho and his ragtag team try to follow him and end the game forever. Like the castaways of Lostthey have to go back to the island.

It takes too long — two tedious episodes out of just seven this season — to get them there. How the show stalls needlessly repeats Gi-hun’s broadsides against the bored billionaires for whom Squid Game is a spectator sport, and wastes time on characters who, in the end, aren’t particularly important. Once Gi-hun is back in his green tracksuit, we meet the new players who give the season its emotional meaning, but the plot feels too much like a repeat of the first season: gambling, killing, anger, repeating. (In this sense, Squid game 2 is very similar to another extremely popular death game sequel, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.) It’s pure fan service when giant, creepy robot doll Young-hee returns for another round of Red Light, Green Light. Yes, there are new games, but their candy-colored, nursery rhyme-set killing fields aren’t all that different from the violent spectacles viewers saw last time. Once the games begin, Jun-ho’s search for the island becomes an afterthought. And the finale’s cliffhanger ending is so abrupt that it makes the disjointed season feel frustratingly unfinished.

Not that Squid game 2 is a total disappointment. It remains one of the most aesthetically distinctive and compelling television shows; Lee Jung-jae’s international success, in particular, is worth celebrating. It’s nice to see more and better developed female characters from a pregnant player this season to a self-proclaimed shaman. There is a man (Yang Dong-geun) who is surprised that his mother (Kang Ae-sim) is attending the games in hopes of helping him pay off his crushing debts. (I couldn’t help but think of the beloved mother-son team of Squid Game: The Challenge.) The first guard we really get to know is a woman (Park Gyu-young), albeit one whose plot never lives up to what the early episodes promise. A sensitively portrayed trans woman who also happens to be an Army veteran makes a strong argument for LGBTQ people in the military (though that statement is somewhat undermined by the already controversial decision to cast a cisgender male actor, Park Sung-hoo, in the role ).

Thematically, a rule change where players vote after each game whether to continue or quit and split up the money they’ve earned so far develops notions of the tyranny of the majority that the first season only hinted at. Watching the uniformed masses make their often suicidal decisions one by one causes the same trepidation as watching election results come out. But these sequences, like every single game, last too long. In the third round, fear gives way to boredom. It takes almost the entire season to break up the various forms of monotony, and when interesting things finally happen, you feel like you’ve just spent seven hours watching what amounts to an oversized teaser for Season 3.

Squid game The brand that needs to provide content to meet customer demand has taken over Squid game the show whose first season was a complete artistic statement. “I had no intention of doing a second season,” creator Hwang recently said diversity. But in another bitter irony, he had previously explained that he only signed up to continue the series because he felt he wasn’t sufficiently compensated for the debut season. “I’m so tired of this.” Squid gameHwang complained at the same moment diversity Interview. “I’m so tired of my life doing something, promoting something.” This exhaustion is noticeable throughout the second season.

One cannot separate this excess of narratives from the abundance of narratives Squid game Derivatives that we have sold in the last three years. Both official ($110 Young hee necklace, anyone?) and unofficial merch has surged. Mattel, Crocs, Johnnie Walker and many more jumped on the season two brand collaboration bandwagon. Netflix has invited fans to play non-lethal Squid Games The challenge too immersive Squid Game: The Experience Pop-ups on three continents, as if the point of the series was to make macabre versions of childhood games fun. YouTube king MrBeast revolutionized the internet with “$456,000 Squid Game in Real Life!” He then brought this hit into the Prime Video competition Beast gameswhich premiered just a week earlier Squid game 2. In an unfortunate case of life imitating art, this is New York Just reported complaints from several cast members about lack of sleep, inadequate nutrition and even hospitalizations on the set of the off-brand competition.

The populist point of the original Squid game was that we should resist the commercialized and aestheticized violence inherent in a system that enriches a rich few while forcing the poor to fight each other for the rest. If anything, the bankability of Squid game the brand – a category I would include Squid game 2– shows how thoroughly we have failed to internalize this lesson. What Squid game drowned something out Squid game says. And what started as a stark satire on greed, exploitation and economic polarization has largely become a cash cow franchise like any other. It reminds me of something frontman Gi-hun says in the new season: “The game won’t end unless the world changes.” Will it ever?