'Squid Game' Season 2 is ruined by its latest twist: Full season review
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During Squid Game Season 2's Mingle game, contestants stand on a rotating platform as an unsettling children's song plays. "Round and round, round and round," children sing. "Let's go around in circles and dance."
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The song may be an apt way to kick off one of Squid Game's many deadly children's games, but it also proves a pretty accurate description of the viewing experience of Season 2. Despite all the hype — three years of it — for the return of Netflix's biggest series ever, Squid Game Season 2 is frustratingly recursive, characterized not by Season 1's propulsive do-or-die stakes, but instead by repetitive, borderline uninspired storytelling.
That problem of repetition hangs over the whole season, but nowhere more so than in the return of Squid Game's voting mechanic, which takes on a larger role this season (much to the show's detriment).
What is Squid Game Season 2's voting mechanic, and why doesn't it work?
The players of "Squid Game" Season 2. Credit: No Ju-han / Netflix
In Season 1 of Squid Game, once the players experience the horrors of Red Light, Green Light, they are offered a choice. If the majority of them vote to end the games, they can all go home. They do (by one vote). Yet when the players re-enter the real world and are confronted once again by the full weight of their debt, most of them choose to return to the games for the slim chance that they might be able to win a life-saving amount of money.
When Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae, The Acolyte) returns to the games in Season 2, he experiences the post-Red Light, Green Light vote again. Only this time, things are different. Now, players get the choice to end the games between every challenge. If they do choose to leave, they get to split the current prize pot, which goes up with every death.
This change to the games' voting mechanic is a fascinating twist. It tests whether players are willing to survive and walk away with a comparatively smaller (but still significant) amount of money, or if they'd rather risk their own lives and those of the people around them for a shot at more money in the next round. "One more game," they tell themselves, calling to mind the gambling addictions that landed them in debt.
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The extra voting also further stokes tensions between those who wish to leave and those who wish to continue. Finally, it serves as a message from the Front Man (Lee Byung-hun) to Gi-hun: Despite Gi-hun's attempted heroics, there will always be people who will choose to play at the cost of others. That's part of why the Front Man and the other people who run the games view players as "roaches," even though they're disregarding the injustices of the capitalist system that put them there in the first place.
With all this nuance in mind, the repeated voting works in theory. But in practice, it falls flat. There are three voting scenes in Season 2, and each drags more than the last. After all, there are only so many ways you can make people lining up to push a button interesting. Not to mention that after every vote, people have to apologize or explain themselves. These scenes feel so much like RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars contestants justifying whose lipstick they pulled that you might wonder whether you turned on the reality show Squid Game: The Challenge instead.
Squid Game tries to play with its own formula by having "shocking" switch-ups in who votes for what. It's an easy way to chart where people stand on the games, but it's tough to focus on the personal arcs of people choosing to leave or stay when the outcome is so obvious. The meat of Squid Game is the games themselves, so we know going into each vote that there's no way it's going to pass. By design, the show has to stay in this hellish playground.
Really, the repeated voting only gives us the illusion of difference, just as it gives players like Gi-hun the illusion of escape. What could have been an interesting game mechanic becomes dreaded padding in an already frustrating season. So by the time the third vote results in a tie, I'm less intrigued by what will happen next and more horrified at the promise of yet another voting sequence. (At least the series avoids round four thanks to Gi-hun's finale rebellion.)
Squid Game Season 2 is just like its voting mechanic: dull and repetitive.
Choi Seung-hyun in "Squid Game." Credit: No Ju-han / Netflix
Squid Game's overemphasis on voting is just one symptom of Season 2's overarching problem: Recycling Season 1 plot points with twists that run themselves into the ground.
Let's start with an obvious one. Once again, the games' player 001 is a plant from the people controlling the games. This time around, it's none other than Front Man Hwang In-ho, who's snuck into the games to watch over Gi-hun, and who ends up becoming one of his closest allies. All the better to break his spirit once he finds out his true identity! The only problem is, Gi-hun doesn't learn who 001 really is this season, so we lose the feeling of brutal catharsis we got with the Oh Il-nam (O Yeong-su) reveal from Season 1.
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(That detail is just one of many unsatisfying arcs Squid Game leaves dangling at the end of Season 2. No wonder, given that creator Hwang Dong-hyuk told Entertainment Weekly that he originally envisioned Seasons 2 and 3 as one story.)
Elsewhere, Squid Game looks to add a new perspective with the character of Kang No-eul (Park Gyu-young), a North Korean defector — like Season 1's Kang Sae-byeok (Jung Ho-yeon) — who's become a soldier in the games. What could have been an illuminating look into what pushes someone to take that role quickly becomes a remix of the organ-harvesting plot from Season 1, with very little thought given to No-eul's inner conflict once she recognizes someone she knows from the outside in the games.
Even the games themselves become rote. The Six-legged Pentathlon is a mishmash of too many games, to the point that watching it becomes a slog. Mingle overstays its welcome after a few rounds. It feels like you're watching Squid Game beat itself into the ground. Add in the overlong subplot of Detective Hwang Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon) puttering around, lost, on a boat, and that becomes doubly true. We're going round and round, dancing in circles, with not much to show for it.
Squid Game Season 2 is a step down — but that's not solely its fault.
Park Gyu-young in "Squid Game." Credit: No Ju-han / Netflix
When Squid Game Season 1 first hit, it felt like a fresh take on the "death game" genre. It spoke directly to anxieties about debt and inequality that spring from living under late-stage capitalism. Plus, the children's game elements offered a fiendish aesthetic twist, complete with pastel playgrounds and the now-iconic shape masks the soldiers wear.
Since then, though, the concept of Squid Game has been done to death. Beyond Netflix's ill-advised reality spin-off, YouTuber MrBeast recreated the games for his channel in 2021, then basically ripped them off again for his Beast Games game show. Meanwhile, Netflix has continued to release countless tie-in products, a mobile game, and even a real-life experience. Squid Game mania and a long wait time between seasons has only increased expectations, but it's also diluted what once felt special. Season 2 further dilutes Squid Game, even ending with a generic gunfight that's miles removed from the claustrophobic, almost intimate stakes of Season 1.
With every effort to dial up an element from Season 1, be it the voting mechanic or the Front Man's role, Squid Game Season 2 weakens its own mystique and appeal. It's proof that too much of a good thing can absolutely ruin a show's momentum, and that sometimes, some great series just don't need a second season.
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