Squid Game Season 2

Although Korean cinema and television have really taken off in the Western media tradition over the past decade, it was Bong Joon-Ho's Parasite in particular that marked the country's arrival on the wider international stage. Well, maybe not quite. Sure, Parasite drew huge audiences to cinemas around the world and even won crucial Academy Awards, but when it comes to popular culture, it's hard to compete with Netflix's sheer reach and status as a kind of digital commons.

That's why Squid Game is just as important, if not more so, and why this second season is a gigantic milestone for the streaming service, for its international standing and of course for fans around the world.

Those are big words, and the debate that raged especially around the premiere of the series a few years ago was mainly about whether the actual quality of the series scene by scene justifies its status as a national phenomenon. Squid Game was by all accounts a solid suspense series with an innovative premise that was just clear enough in its metaphors, where the whole showdown between rich and poor, privileged and unprivileged seems a bit imprecisely delivered - but it's hard to look away as Seong Gi-hun goes up against terrible odds and defeats the game.

So that leads us to this follow-up season, which once again, almost magically, is both written and directed by the same one man - Hwang Dong-hyuk - and which will only be followed by a single additional season, because Dong-hyuk has decided that the Squid Game narrative has ended.

The second season picks up a few years after the end of the version of Squid Game where Gi-hun won, but as the last few seconds of the first season reveal, he doesn't want to enjoy a life of luxury for all his millions, but instead use the resources to bring the game to its knees, to destroy the people behind it. As the trailers have already revealed, it also involves competing again, and here we get to know both new 'players' while there is much more focus on an intense manhunt behind the curtain.

In many ways, this second season is a remix of sorts of the first, and it's a pretty effective way to draw on the same iconography without directly forcing the series to pull the same rabbit out of the hat. Gi-hun is still in the game, a battle is still being fought behind the curtain through his cronies tracking him down and trying to save him before it's too late, and the mysterious Front Man will continue to run the game at all costs. The setting is the same, but it never becomes a drag as intensity, suspense and well-constructed drama are built into the expected.

Lee Jung-jae is still downright scintillating here, commanding every scene he's in, although his character, Gi-hun, undergoes a rather drastic arc that simply knocks the goofy, the naive and the silly out of him. He's more raw, more serious, but it suits him, and he's generally flanked by pretty believable performances all round.

It's worth stopping here, because like the first season, Squid Games' main weakness seems to be that knife-edge balance between clever satire saturated in black humour and caricature and something more believable, grounded and realistic. This season is in every way darker, meaner, and focuses more directly on the desperation of the participants, leading them to embrace a self-fulfilling prophecy designed to prove that that very desperation makes them 'trash'. But in the midst of this mix, the show again sticks to cartoonish archetypes and messy caricatures, and while most grow stronger as the show exposes them, the first few episodes can be a bit of a turn-off, such as with contestant 'Thanos'. Not all characters are equally strong, and they are weakened by Dong-hyuk's sometimes too imprecise set-ups. They are simply either too evil, too good, too unspecific, too brutal - there is a lack of nuance.

That said, this second season's remixes of the famous games are masterful, and Red Light Green Light, for example, is extremely intense, well-constructed and a study in well-built suspense. There are many scenes like this in the second season of Squid Game, combined with great music and solid set design. Does the series deserve to put the world to sleep? Maybe not, but at the same time, it's worth praising Dong-hyuk here for an extremely personal vision that has led to a well-crafted narrative. Squid Game is still worth watching.