Squid Recreation Season 2 Recycles The Precise Identical Twist From Season 1

The next incorporates spoilers for “Squid Recreation” season 2, so proceed at your individual danger.

In the long-awaited second season of the Netflix unique “Squid Recreation” — the massively common South Korean drama centered round a lethal however wildly profitable sport that lures in susceptible gamers — the winner the primary season’s video games, Seong Gi-hun (Emmy winner Lee Jung-jae) makes a shocking determination. As an alternative of strolling away from the video games and what’s left of his life in Seoul, Gi-hun would not board his flight to America, and concocts a plan to re-enter the video games and expose all the enterprise. (The enterprise is, after all, gathering 456 gamers in a mysterious locale and forcing them to play youngsters’s video games whereas capturing anybody who falls brief and providing 4.56 billion gained as a prize.) That is, at face worth, a reasonably strong gimmick for the sophomore season of a present that positively may have been a miniseries. There’s one large, large problem, although. Not solely does the present stick Gi-hun again into the lethal video games, however they repeat a twist from the primary season, which feels lazy at finest and creatively bankrupt at worst.

I am being blunt and maybe just a little harsh, and albeit, that is on function! No matter your emotions about “Squid Recreation” could also be, you may’t deny that the primary season is a critically spectacular artistic enterprise from writer-director Hwang Dong-hyuk. Bringing a season 1 twist again in nearly the very same type is an extremely irritating transfer for season 2 of “Squid Recreation,” so here is how the present repeated itself and exactly why that feels so unhealthy.

Within the first season of “Squid Recreation,” Gi-hun — earlier than he wins the sport and all the huge monetary prize — is simply one other bozo on the bus (so to talk), and fairly early within the sport, he meets an previous man named Oh Il-nam (performed by O Yeong-su), who’s participant 001. Il-nam’s rationalization for why he is part of the sport is straightforward and but devastating: principally, he tells Gi-hun that he has a deadly mind tumor and would quite die within the sport than in actual life. It looks like he will get his want throughout the third minigame, the place the gamers staff as much as play a marble sport of their selection (the twist right here is that the loser will get shot, which is the twist in just about each single sport on “Squid Recreation”), as a result of Gi-hun takes benefit of the person’s apparently fading thoughts to trick him into shedding. The truth that Il-nam will get shot off digital camera, although, says every thing, and the following time we see him, he is positively dying, however conspicuously not useless. Seems he was sick — that half was true — however he additionally created the video games themselves.

Guess what? Within the second season of “Squid Recreation,” the Entrance Man — Lee Byung-hun’s Hwang In-ho, who we met in season because of his detective brother Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon) — infiltrates the video games and performs as quantity 001. They do not even change the quantity up. It is the identical factor another time! “Squid Recreation” followers deserve higher than the very same twist we have already seen!

Positive, you may make the argument — and I think about some will — in that this twist is totally different as a result of the viewers is aware of that the Entrance Man is definitely Participant 001, however Gi-hun would not (in season 1, the reveal for each Gi-hun and the viewers would not occur till the finale). That does not make this repetition higher or any simpler to take, as a result of not solely is it lazy, it is nearly insulting to only do the very same factor in season 2 and … what? Suppose no one will discover? It is truly astounding (in a nasty approach) that Hwang Dong-hyuk did this, largely as a result of the remainder of the season has a lot of promise. A number of of the present’s new characters are actual standouts, together with the mysterious and troubled No-eul (Park Gyu-young) and Hyun-ju (Park Sung-hoon), and the brand new minigames are notably artistic in a extremely grotesque approach (like that carousel sport Mingle, which is making me shudder simply remembering it). The sequence deserved higher than the identical twist once more, and this one factor brings season 2 to a screeching halt when you understand they’re simply … doing the identical freakin’ factor once more.

Season 2 additionally ends on a cliffhanger; within the ultimate moments of the season finale, In-ho makes use of a walkie talkie to trick Gi-hun into considering he is useless after which dons his Entrance Man attire in order that he can homicide considered one of Gi-hun’s closest mates in entrance of him. Even this feels underwhelming understanding that, at any time when season 3 of “Squid Recreation” drops, Gi-hun goes to study that after an previous man tricked him in season 1, he fell for the very same schtick once more. 

“Squid Recreation” season 2 is streaming on Netflix now.