The Cutprice Guignol

I always knew that Squid Game 2 was going to have problems – but it’s the kind of problems it had that surprised me most.

Which is not to say that I didn’t think the first season of this South Korean mega-hit wasn’t good. No, in fact, I think it’s downright brilliant – it’s one of the best pieces of genre fiction of the last ten years, blending exquisitely high entertainment value with a solid central theme of exploitation and class divide and the deft handling of a large but completely convincing ensemble.

But it’s also at the wrong end of two of the most tenuous descriptors any TV show can land itself: high-concept and zeitgeist-y alike, neither of which speak particularly well to a show’s long-term survival. Zeitgeist shows so consistently lose the plot as they try to reclaim some aspect of what made them popular in the first place, while high-concept shows often struggle to maintain a premise that’s already stretching the limits of even in-universe credulity. And it was for those reasons that I just couldn’t see Squid Game 2, which came out late last year, serving up the same level of success as its predecessor – even with the set-up for a second season teased at the end of the first, the shoes (and fetching numbered uniforms) seemed too big to fill.

So, in all honesty, the second season came as a pretty pleasant surprise to me, as a whole. Because I actually think that it’s very much a study in how to expand the universe of your speculative fiction world without losing the central tenets of what drew audiences to the series in the first place. Still following Gi-Hun (Lee Jung-Jae, in a really tremendous performance that builds on the first season without losing the original feel of the character) as he tries to take down the organisation responsible for the Games, it lands us back in the middle of the Squid Game cycle with a completely different perspective – but still lets us get into that good Squid Game groove, with a collection of episodes focused on the games themselves.

And let’s be honest, when it comes to pure thriller goodness, it’s hard to think of many shows that do it better than Squid Game. The direction, the performances, the way the show makes use of the complex relationships overlapping between a large and well-developed cast – you’re on the edge of your seat every time, and watching these moments, it’s easy to remember just why everyone went so nuts about this show back when it first came out. On pure entertainment value, it’s hard to beat.

Squid Game 2 had a tough act to follow in terms of the first season’s ensemble, too, but confidently matches it here with rich and interesting characters who you constantly find yourself watching in the background for – Choi Seung-hyun is the obvious breakout as the repugnantly cringe rapper Thanos, but my personal favourite was Lee Seo-hwan as Jung-Bae, an elderly mother who dodges both the “mother hen” and “bitter old lady” tropes for something more interesting and far more rewarding. The brilliant Lee Byung-hu gets upgraded to a leading role in this season, and it’s such a treat to see such an excellent actor (and action star) get to play in this world, especially in a role as morally ambiguous as this one.

With regards to the cast, I don’t think I can ignore the fact that a cis man was cast as the show’s first trans woman character, Hyun-Ju; I’ve talked a little about trans casting in pop culture before and my thoughts still apply here (though I don’t think actor Park Sung-hoon did a particularly bad job at all), and you can check out some takes on this issue from trans writers here.

I also wondered if the show would be able to meaningfully explore the anti-capitalist and class divide themes that were such a strong part of season two, but I honestly think these were handled pretty well: the first episode, much of which hinges on Gong Yoo’s Salesmen, sets up some really interesting elements that stretch out into the rest of the season with regards to the matter of choice and how meaningful those choices are when the rules that have been instituted around them are abjectly and obviously unfair.

So with all that said – what is my fucking problem with this season? Well, it’s that it’s not really a full season of the show. While the first season left some threads hanging for a season two, it felt like a fully-formed story in and of itself; storylines were brought up and resolved, the games were played, the final moments felt more like an epilogue than anything else. But this? This is very clearly part one of an entire story, and I was pretty disappointed by it.

By the time you get to about episode five of this seven-episode season, it begins to click that not everything is going to come to fruition by the time the final credits roll – characters who are introduced with loads of screentime in the first chunk of the show are little more than a touch-base afterthought, clearly intended for the next season of the show, out later this year. In the final few episodes, there’s a distinct sense of Squid Game pulling its punches, gifting characters with plot armour to make sure it doesn’t have to fill out a new cast for the season to come – one of the best parts of the first season was how brutal it was, how it truly felt like virtually nobody was safe, and that’s lost here once you realize what’s going on. There are a few segments that feel downright bloated (the voting scenes – my God, I’m begging, just a little haste), as though the show is trying to kick big reveals down the path a few episodes.

It was a let-down, for me, for a show that was so fully-formed and slick with its storytelling to fall into the all-too-common streaming trap of breaking down full stories into smaller sections for the sake of pulling in more viewers (Stranger Things, I am very much looking at you). The season overall is still pretty good, even great, but it closed out on a bit of a juddery non-ending that felt distinctly inelegant compared to how well its been constructed before. Will I be back for season three? Of course – but I would have gladly waited another year for this second season to come out in one piece instead of the split ends we got here.

What did you think of the second season of Squid Game? How does it stack up against the original? Let me know in the comments below!

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(header image via Netflix)