Squid Game, a caustic satire of capitalistic excess about people so deeply in debt they put their lives at extreme risk for a chance of financial security, became the most-watched show in the history of Netflix when it debuted in 2021. Obviously, Netflix capitalized on its popularity by making a reality TV version, completely missing the point of the series, but now the original is back with a second season. What fresh hell awaits?
We've gotten a few teasers before, but this is the first one that gives us an idea of what Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) will actually get up to since he won the last Squid Game events. To start, he's lost the neon orange-red hairdo he inexplicably sported at the end of the first season, which I'm all for. Second, he's somehow finagled his way back into the Squid Games, again bearing number 456, but this time he's come with a mission: convince his fellow contestants to stop this madness and save themselves.
The hitch is that they don't listen to him, so desperate are they for the grand prize even though all but one of them is doomed to die trying to get it. Capitalism satire detector says ding. At the end of the first season, Seong Gi-hun promised to take down the bored billionaires who had constructed these games so they could watch a bunch of poors die for their amusement, but overcoming them won't be easy. Dismantling an unjust system is a bitch of a job.
Squid Game has always been compared to The Hunger Games, another story about people fighting to the death in an arena for the amusement of the upper class. Once again, there are some structural similarities; the second Hunger Games book, Catching Fire, sees the surviving characters returning to the games, just as Seong Gi-hun returns in the second season of Squid Game. Catching Fire is also widely considered the best of The Hunger Games series. Let's hope Squid Game season 2 also delivers when it drops on Netflix on December 26. A third and final season will wrap up the story the year after.
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