The worldwide phenomenon is back, as Squid Game returns to Netflix this week for another thrilling season. Three years after the Korean drama first arrived on the streamer, this continuation is receiving similarly favorable reviews, confirming that season 2 was worth the wait. Fans of the original season will enjoy the revisited premise, especially the violent games played by desperate contestants, as well as some new directions for the show. However, many reviews point out that season 2’s storylines wind up unresolved as the series mostly sets up the concluding Squid Game: Season 3.
Here’s what critics are saying about Squid Game: Season 2:
How does season 2 compare to the first?
Squid Game Season 2 is a worthy follow-up expanding on the ominous themes of its predecessor.
By all accounts, it’s just as good as the show’s first outing.
This new set of episodes is also richer and more cohesive than what came before, without ever betraying the roots of where it came from.
It ups the ante of just about every stake and shock in the first season by losing itself to the spectacle.
Not only a continuation, but an evolution — and in the process, an escalation… the new episodes retain the thrilling spirit of the first season, but its many individual departures build to something new and fascinating.
This show remains incisive, thoughtful, and rightfully pissed off at the status quo.
It’s a thorough letdown… lacking in the fun and whimsy that kept the first season from wallowing in its backdrop of misery, and entirely lacking in new details or insights on the nature of the Game.
(Photo by No Ju-han/Netflix)
Will it keep audiences guessing?
Brace yourself for many shocking surprises and long stretches of white-knuckle tension.
There’s an unexpected twist around every bend, ultimately altering (or rather, magnifying) what the show is about at its core.
Boasting several mind-blowing twists, these seven episodes advance the story to what will undoubtedly be an electric conclusion when Season 3 debuts in 2025.
You can see the plot twists coming a mile away even when a new game is introduced — and if you don’t, the show flashes lights in your face to make sure you’re prepared for the incoming twist.
How are the games this time?
The games are just as surreal and perverse.
Like Red Light, Green Light, they are incongruously barbaric. This is no place for spoilery details, but I can say that each game generates gut-twisting, yell-at-the-screen suspense, even on a second watch.
The variety of games play reaches into childhood but also looks beyond it and attempts to exploit every relationship and person to the fullest… The ruthlessness it pulls out of people is higher, as is how they try to force comradery simultaneously.
The individual games range between “similar to what we’ve seen” and “variations on a theme,” but what has changed is the downtime between them.
The games feel different this time… After each game, all the surviving players can vote on whether to continue, and these moments of counting hundreds of X’s and O’s are extremely tense.
These games eventually go to fresh places that recreate some of the first season’s cold dread as we witness new depraved challenges, but it’s still not quite as thrilling.
There’s no evidence that anybody has given the M.C. Escher day-glo set a fresh coat of paint, and the new games themselves feel barely on-theme.
(Photo by No Ju-han/Netflix)
Is it still just as violent and terrifying?
Things eventually culminate in a bloody massacre that pushes Squid Game further into horror than it’s ever been.
The highs are nail-bitingly tense, often euphoric.
The show’s signature brutal violence, blood, guts, and gore are still hyper-present, but the terror among the players, including Gi-hun, who has experienced it all before, remains palpable.
There’s lots of bloodshed, no impact.
Does season 2 do anything new?
Season 2 devotes itself to elevating the first by throwing a wrench into every element of the machine we thought we understood.
The show’s second season doesn’t really depart from [the original] premise, but it remixes known elements just enough to feel fresh, with musical motifs that take exhilarating form.
One of the most interesting aspects of Season 2 is that it moves beyond the players…[It] illustrates how easily people can inflict pain and violence on others when they are emboldened by a sliver of power.
What Season 2 does best — apart from turning the risk-and-thrill meter to a 100 — is cement Gi-hun’s interiority as a changed man.
How’s the writing?
With a much leaner seven-episode run at his disposal, creator, writer, and director Hwang Dong-hyuk explores the layers of this universe with rich storytelling that doesn’t simply take the cruelties and inequalities of this system to task.
This is a deliberately disjointed tale, meant to ramp up an itch for the next season. The gamble is not yet over, and the results of this zero-sum game leave too many unresolved strands in stasis.
Season 2 feels more like a “part one” than its own story, and that’s partially by design… a means to an end that we have yet to see.
It’s not as tightly written, falling into commonplace TV woes as it struggles to get to the point. Thankfully, though, there’s still enough here thematically to largely make up for these shortcomings.
Too often it forgets what makes it tick—and, just as frustratingly, fails to resolve its many storylines by the conclusion of its too-short seven-episode run.
Does the new season have something important to say?
It becomes a commentary on how frequently democracy forces people to vote against their interests, either as individuals or a collective, which can be applied to South Korea but really any democracy.
This latest season has a timely focus on how capitalism overlaps with flawed democratic processes.
It mostly thwarts repetitiveness by finding new angles to examine what seemingly ails modern-day Korea: capitalist exploitation, the erosion of morality, and class inequities.
Squid Game Season 2 turns the spotlight on us. Those of us who tuned into this new season…What happens when we are the problem?
The show never stoops to sermonizing, yet there’s no mistaking its censure of its protagonists for their responsibility for their predicaments, both before and during the games, and that angle lends the material welcome, added complexity.
(Photo by No Ju-han/Netflix)
How is the acting this time?
Lee Jung-jae really proves his mettle this season, especially when you compare his performance in the series premiere to where he ends up at the end of Season 2. He’s a delight as a protagonist.
Lee Jung-jae is a good enough actor to make Gi-hun’s one-note haunted aspect a fitting development of the character… [His] performance remains sturdy, if less entertaining than what attracted audiences in the first place.
It’s the role of a lifetime for Lee Jung-jae, whose expressive face conveys the horrors of what he’s witnessing; the sole voice of reason in an insane world. He won an Emmy for best male actor for the drama in 2022; surely more will be on their way for the show at the next ceremony.
Lee Byung-hun really impresses as the increasingly conniving Front Man.
Are there any memorable new characters?
Hyun-ju is a wonderful addition to the cast. A trans character, her growing relationship with Geum-ja is not only heartfelt but a window into understanding the importance of communicating across generations.
One of the new players is a transgender woman, Hyun Ju… She ends up one of the most surprising and meaningful characters.
Thanos is a lightning bolt of unrepentant chaos in an already electric environment, and [Choi Seung-hyun] has found a way to imbue pitch-perfect physical comedy, rage, and tragic recklessness into a character that makes the viewer simultaneously hold their breath in fear and beg for more.
Of the new faces, Jo and Kang come close to making their characters memorable.
How does the show look this season?
Ace cinematographer Kim Ji-yong’s dynamic and kinetic camerawork adds a thrilling edge to the show’s many pulse-pounding set pieces.
Hwang Dong-hyuk, who has written and directed all of the show’s sixteen episodes, remains a master at twisting screws at just the right moment, keeping his camera observant, but ready to strike with sudden pans and push-ins when it’s most appropriate.
What Squid Game still has going for it is its visual imagination. Its themes of class struggle are rendered with flair, and not just in the pastel abattoir of the game sets.
Are there any problems?
Squid Game Season 2’s only flaw is how it ramps up… The pacing in the first two episodes could be better.
Perhaps the biggest issue with this latest run is that its pacing is frequently lethargic, extending circumstances that could have been conveyed in four or five episodes into a seven-episode season.
The only problem? The painful wait for the simultaneously shot Squid Game season 3, due out in 2025.
83% Squid Game: Season 2 (2024) premiered on Netflix on December 26, 2024.
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