“Squid Game” season 2 on Netflix: The review

Sometimes, rarely, a series still functions as a big event even in the streaming age, namely: if it triggers such hype as “Squid Game” in 2021. The pull of the first season was so strong that you had to watch it at some point if you wanted to have a say – or even just to understand where all the new Halloween costumes came from. That was 2021, it was still a pandemic, “Squid Game” was not only incredibly exciting, nasty and brutal, but also a great metaphor for the times, for late capitalism as a human-destruction machine. And because the series was also brave, it had a philosophical, open and at the same time satisfying ending.

Hwang Dong-hyuk, writer and director of “Squid Game,” said several times in interviews after the series became such a huge global hit that he never had a second season in mind. However, in Netflix’s profit arithmetic, such success must necessarily be continued.

The winner/survivor of the first season’s deadly games, Seong Gi-hun, has now bought a love hotel. But it doesn’t offer any rooms because the landlord is suffering there with the billions he won as the unexpected winner of the first season. He is ashamed of his wealth, which he owes to the deaths of his fellow players, so he uses all the money to expose those behind the “Squid Game”. The most important one died at the end of the first season, but a few villains can still be found to prolong things. After struggling for a while, Seong Gi-hun also gets back into the “Squid Game” in a very implausible turn of events. He wants to essentially destroy the system from the inside. From the third episode onwards – attention: recognition value – a new game starts. Even the big bad girl doll that was particularly scary in the first season appears again. But the surprise effect has disappeared.

Everything that worked in the first season goes wrong. You neither root for the protagonists nor are you surprised by the setting or wonder how you would act yourself. One of the bad guys from the first season switches sides and becomes a participant, which is supposed to give the matter a bit of tension. At the same time, a police officer who was actually thought to be dead at the end of the first season goes to the island in a parallel plot level who will host the death game. He doesn’t find her until the end of the second season, which would be a spoiler if the season didn’t just end halfway through the story. The third season was filmed together with the second, and it’s obviously just an extremely long story that is based on what is already known and is not intended to have an end, see above.

The widely praised meta level of the first season? Well, by changing the rules, the capitalism metaphor becomes a story about how the stupidity of the majority can drag a smarter minority into the abyss. Subtext: Democracy is a fine thing, but unfortunately humanity is too stupid for it. This even has a certain drama given the recent political events in South Korea, and who knows what the next four years will be like in the USA. Probably not as boring as the long discussions that the participants in “Squid Game” have to constantly have in order to explain to the audience what they should think about it.

Children’s games of life and death

The most important elements, which of course couldn’t be missing from the sequel, were the games themselves. Children’s games that had to be played to the death, so simple and mean that you bit your fingernails while watching them. But since neither the main character nor the many other players are given any motivation in the second season, the games remain exciting, unfortunately also brutal, but are no longer as dramatic. A bit like “Takeshi’s Castle” with a firing squad.

The season leaves viewers with many questions. Especially with how an obviously clever storyteller like Hwang Dong-hyuk was able to get so caught up in the self-generated hype that he almost negligently destroyed it with the second season. Or is that even more meta? A metaphor for the ruthless game that Netflix plays with creative people all over the world and in which they become prisoners of their own success? Hwang Dong-hyuk successfully escaped from this death game with the second season. Hopefully he can at least enjoy the prize money.

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