Pros and cons of Squid Game 2

It probably took only a few minutes for Squid Game to reach the top of Netflix's most-watched TV series with the arrival of the second season. In 2021, when the show, which had been rejected for ten years by countless broadcasters, first landed on the streaming platform, it took twelve days to take off and enter the Top 10. Since then, nothing has been the same. It's hard to look at pink suits now without feeling panic. Yet, despite being aware of the brutalities and horrors awaiting the contestants in the deadliest games ever seen on screen - Takeshi's Castle aside - a huge portion of the audience has eagerly awaited the return of the series created by Hwang Dong-hyuk, featuring 456 contestants who, for a huge cash prize, must survive six challenges with six deadly games where they must avoid death. The curiosity and impact of Squid Game have been undeniable since its arrival on Netflix. And although, during those ten years, what the director and creator of the show heard most often was the improbability of believing in millionaires who enjoy watching people’s misfortunes - ah, isn't that the world of social media? - it is precisely in such absurdity that the series finds its strength. Both in the first and in this second season.

Even with the first two episodes set far from the game arena - another product with people who kill each other to entertain an upper-class audience? Hunger Games - the story quickly brings characters and viewers back to play games like Red Light, Green Light and discover new tricks to eliminate contestants. This is both the strength and weakness of the second season of Squid Game, just like the first. Driven by a dominant Korean cultural imagination, for a cinema and series production that has reached peaks of violence and perversion that are both fascinating and terrifying, the Netflix series sweetens for a mainstream audience a way of writing and thinking about audiovisuals that is characteristic of its home country’s production. Stories and settings where violence tends to erupt ferociously, breaking the screen and piercing the viewer, for a cinema and series with which not everyone can (or should) feel comfortable, something that Squid Game has managed to do.

Despite the unspeakable evils devised to eliminate as many people as possible, all to draw out the most selfish and animalistic sides of the participants, the show returns repeating dynamics and power relationships that are so evident, and thus easy to understand, precisely to make the viewing experience as simple as possible, while still being entertaining in depicting the massacre we face in each episode. So, this time, the protagonist Seong Gi-hun (played by Lee Jung-jae) arrives on the mysterious island not just to play, but to dismantle the organization that has turned his life upside down. Adding as an effective element of reflection is the possibility of a vote to leave or not to leave the game after each challenge, showing the fragile and selfish mechanisms of democracy, which, in a stressful and enclosed context as in Squid Game, expands the reflection begun in the first season and invites a deeper consideration of the issue.

As for the rest, there is little else to expect from a series whose dynamics and twists unfold in plain sight, even in a “closed” setting. Where anyone who tries to give advice is labeled a cheater, anyone who only thinks about their own interests will bring others to ruin, and where in small groups, the bigger problems of conditioning and bullying dictated by social conventions and insecurities are repeated. Squid Game 2, therefore, adds nothing and takes nothing away from the phenomenon that has been popular since 2021. The audience can choose whether to remain indifferent or be outraged by the violence of the series (too much for those who don’t appreciate the genre, too little for those who compare it to other Asian works), but one thing is certain: once the second season ends, everyone will be eagerly waiting for the third.