Squid Game 2: The Capitalist Demons Of A Bloated Netflix Franchise

SQUID GAME 2 takes off two years after the events of Squid Game, the smash-hit Korean dystopian thriller revolving around a secret contest on a mysterious island where 456 debt-riddled players risk their lives in a series of deadly children’s games for a massive cash prize. If that still sounds like a mouthful, you’ve probably been living under a rock since 2021. The protagonist, Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae), won the contest but remains haunted by the loss of humanity. Gi-hun stays back in Seoul, determined to “end the game”; he pays off his debts but hires the same loan sharks to help him locate the recruiters and their masked Front Man. The other protagonist, Hwang Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon), an undercover detective who infiltrated the contest as a guard only to find that his missing brother was the Front Man, is now a lowly traffic cop. He’s recovered from his brother’s attack, but nobody believes him about the game; he remains obsessed, just like Gi-hun, and spends his off-time on a boat trying to track down that island.

Squid Game 2 spends the first two episodes on this setup. They establish the two men’s isolated mindscape and “after-life” of sorts. Naturally, they find each other and team up to execute their masterplan. The only catch is that Jun-ho continues to keep his brother’s identity a secret. Simultaneously, a fresh crop of debt-riddled people — those trapped by circumstances with no way out — consider entering this contest they hear of during a random Ddakji game on subway platforms. The next five episodes tread familiar terrain: Gi-hun becomes participant no. 456 over five rounds of an increasingly blood-soaked contest featuring new characters. Jun-ho comes by sea, but things don’t go as planned. Chaos reigns, and the foundation for a final season (which has already been filmed) is laid.

On paper, this season does the rational thing. It moves forward in the only way it can: as a narrative of slow-burning rebellion. The pink jumpsuits aren’t as impenetrable anymore; the green tracksuits have a trump card in Gi-hun, a former winner. The commentary isn’t very different from before; a chilling satire on capitalism and class rage becomes a messy reality check about capitalism and class rage. The rose-tinted (or blood-tinted) glasses are off, the honeymoon phase is over, and now it’s all about sustaining the tempo and meaning. The patterns are the same, except the familiarity and lack of novelty is actually the show’s way of indicting us for getting entertained by the first season. Conceptually, it makes sense: Gi-hun’s attempts to mobilise the new group of players are swallowed by the language of the game. Every stage feels repetitive for a reason. As if to confess that no amount of self-awareness, hindsight and conscience can alter the primal instincts of human nature in a consumerist society. The food chain is too strong in a system that pits working-class survivors and victims against each other, while the elite one-percenters treat them like a prime-time reality show.

But the problem with Squid Game 2 is also its alleged strength — it’s a reboot disguised as a sequel. It’s tempting to say that two episodes is too long a setup. But saying this automatically implies that the five episodes on the island are the show's selling point; it exposes Squid Game as a brand that’s indistinguishable from its own storytelling. If anything, those first two episodes represent the original direction of a show rather than a global franchise; the exposition (characters conversing in backstories) is clumsy, but at least there’s a sense of real-world progression. In contrast, you can tell that the game portions exist to milk a huge fanbase; they’re stretched and inflated, barely expanding on the political grammar and metaphors of the first season. We get it: this is a self-cannibalistic age in which kindness and selflessness aren’t handy skills in the game of life. It’s like watching the making-of bits of a film that throws away its fourth-wall-breaking advantage and somehow ends up resembling the film all over again.

The new bunch of participants is interesting: a sociopathic rapper, a pregnant girl, a mother-son duo, a bitcoin Youtuber, and Gi-hun’s childhood friend. There’s also a glimpse of the other side: a young mother in search of her kid enlists as a ruthless guard, symbolising the power delusions of the oppressed who unhesitantly draw the blood of their own the moment they taste it. Playing the role of the oppressors and pulling the trigger allows their bitterness to wear the ruse of agency. But all of these characters can’t escape the inevitability of being a ‘formula’ — a tried-and-tested structure that captured the imagination of a planet locked down and equalized by the pandemic in 2021. Three years on, the cultural fatigue shows; every episode spends way too long exploring their emotions, conflicts, moral fibre, boundaries and fates. The needle drops, tension, violence and slowmo climaxes of every stage seldom add to the overall framework.

This been-there-done-that tone feels like more of a commercial choice than an artistic one. At some point, even Gi-hun forgets that he’s there to end the game. In a way, he’s an audience surrogate who knows how it’s going to pan out but struggles to prevent it anyway. He simply goes along on a survival ride again, only with the new gang of aspirants and tragics — until he rediscovers his original motive in the last episode. The parallel track of Jun-ho on a boat with his own team is so half-baked that it feels like a post-production afterthought. The one twist can be seen coming from (as far as) North Korea. Season 3 will presumably have answers, or a modicum of continuity, but that’s always the issue with “sandwich franchises” — the filling in between, which is the second season, cannot be enjoyed without the buttered bread slices. It’s little more than a transition in a meal that reduces the middle to a no-context bridge between the beginning and the end.

It’s worthy to note the one modification in the rules of the contest this time. Everything else is similar — the grisly murder of the losers, the organ-harvesting of their remains, the surreal dollhouse-like design, the death-fueled expansion of the prize purse. But the participants are given the option of quitting after every stage with the existing purse. It’s the common game-show version of feeding a gambling addiction: walk away with less or risk everything for a little more? The decision to continue or go home rests on the majority vote of those left. Entire chunks of episodes feature the (forced) suspense of this voting process; people change sides, minds and moral identities in slow-motion.

But the significance of this rule runs deeper in Squid Game 2. Exhausted creator-director Hwang Dong-hyuk mentioned that he had no plans of pursuing sequels after Squid Game became the most watched Netflix show of all time. In other words, he was choosing to quit while he was ahead and walk away with his winnings. But his decision to resume the Squid Game universe — the product, the franchise, the legacy and the moment — now defies the core ethos of the story instead of reflecting it. At this point, he’s one of its many participants who vote to carry on chasing the mythical carrot at the end of the stick. The leverage is too attractive to resist.

The rule is perhaps a manifestation of his internal conflict, but it’s also supplied by his ability to swing between mutinous puppet and undercover puppeteer. The time-biding nature of the season is so obvious that an endgame is imminent. Perhaps the show might have been served better by the meta progression of something like the Scream movie series; the newer instalments unfold in a world where Scream is already a pop-cultural phenomenon and a global commodity. It’s like watching the original and parody bleed into each other. Perhaps depth is sacrificed at the ‘fun’ altar of self-referencing, but this specific brand of fame often demands the acknowledgement of it. A Halloween party scene in the second episode hints at that wink here — until it doesn’t. As a result, Squid Game 2 ends up embodying the capitalist excesses it once made a sharp spectacle of. It would rather live long enough to be a rich villain than die a subversive hero. If that isn’t irony dressed in an iconic red jumpsuit, I don’t know what is.

Squid Game 2 is currently streaming on Netflix.