‘Squid Game 2’: Masterful sequel or not so much?

Usually, it’s not worth holding your breath for sequels or second seasons that follow a genius debut on screen.

But despite mixed reviews for Squid Game 2, the show serves up a luscious feast and at the end of the seven episodes, there’s a small note that critics of the show clearly did not read.

Audiences waited almost two and a half years for the follow-up to Squid Game, the Korean television phenomenon that had everyone baking Dalgona cookies and dressing up like the square, circle, and triangle masked soldiers over Halloween.

White Van’s slip-on sneakers were impossible to purchase for a while because a retail stampede followed the first instalment of the show. Everyone wanted a piece of its action.

Squid Game followed a standard storytelling recipe, but the secret was in the method.

It was so un-Hollywood that an emerging post Covid-19 world fell in love, hook, line, and sinker.

Slow start, but intriguing

The second instalment of Squid Game revisits protagonist and winner of 45.6 billion won, around R 578 million, Gi-hun.

He is in semi-hiding in a dilapidated old hotel called the Pink Hotel. It’s where he stores his pile of cash, and where he plots to overthrow the game, to take down the people, the shadowy organisers who host the brutal murder and wager spectacle for the rich.

Lee Jung-jae’s plays Gi-hun grittier, more jaded and hardened than the somewhat naïve and gambling-addict everyman we saw in the first season.

Squid Game 2 sees Gi-hun eventually getting himself back into the game. And this is where we get introduced to the stereotypes that peppered the first season.

Critics of the show forget that a fresh set of archetypal personalities on the gaming floor would simply alienate authenticity. It would seem completely out of place.

So, Gi-hun’s back in the game. And he’s trying to dismantle it from within. And just like in Season 1, Player 001 is not who he seems.

In Squid Game 2, it’s the dark lord himself, Front Man, played menacingly well by Lee Byung-hun.

Action is relentless

There are a few sub-plots in the second season too.

There’s the relentless police officer, shot in the first show, who has been in search of the mystery island where the games take place for two years. There’s the two-faced captain of the ship he charters in the pursuit.

For the first time, we also get a peek into the life of a masked guard, a North Korean defector whose own narrative of desperation landed her with a rifle and a kill-shot duty.

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It’s at this point that many of the new season’s naysayers get stuck. Because while some of the subplots and characters within these threads are not fully developed or feel like they fizzle out, everyone’s missing something.

Four large words right at the end of the seventh episode. It reads: Final Season Coming 2025.

It would be natural to expect that the setups in the second season would spill over to a final sprint, and that unfinished business would roll out in the third instalment. That’s where critics fall on their swords.

Squid Game 2 makes for fantastic viewing. It is somewhat addictive and binge-worthy. And while there are several reflective moments introduced, that Gi-hun as well as a few other characters go through, it aids in building tension rather than detracting from it.

The pace of the show is start-pause, accelerate and pause. Then all over again. Instead of disruptive, it’s a different approach to managing emotion from director Hwang Dong-hyuk. And it’s fun to sit through it.

There is also no shortage of eye candy in the show. The beautiful sets, and imaginative candy-coloured contrasts with extreme violence.

The kid’s games, of which several new challenges are introduced, and the subtext of social commentary does not disappoint.

It dazzles. It enchants. Squid Game 2 delivers on the anticipation of its release and tsunamis the story forward.

Now, for it all to run full circle, we’d have to wait for the final season.

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