Squid Game season 2 brings a little Star Wars, Survivor, and Lost and sets up for a big finish
Somehow Squid Game season 2 holds up as almost as well as season 1. It seemed it might suffer just because of the lack of newness, but the show remains new alright. And that’s with accompanying high expectations. Here’s what I wrote about season 1 in 2021, and I don’t think it was simply from a case of the covid boredoms:
This is a classic show. It has it all: humor, drama, deep character story points, and a good bit of bloodshed. But it really is an epic story of a chauffeur who falls hard on his luck and faces the ultimate tests of his bodily and emotional strength. It is so ultimately watchable that I put it amongst the greats Mad Men, Lost, and Breaking Bad. 5 out of 5 stars
Season 2 is a wild ride, picking up four years after Seong Gi-hun, playing Player 456, won the first Squid Game. He has inexplicably decided to go back into another round to try to expose the criminal organization running the game.
For those who somehow don’t know the goal of the game, it’s to make it through a range of childhood games (unknown to most of us in the U.S.) without being brutally slaughtered by the guards in order to win a huge bag of money that hangs ominously overhead the prison-like barracks where the contestants scheme their plans and alliances at night. The contestants have been recruited by the organizers and are the dregs of society who have nowhere to go but up. Squid Game is supposed to give them a lifeline, albeit a very thin one.
Squid Game reminds me of a combination of Lost and Survivor, with a twist of the wild 2019 South Korean hit movie Parasite. Some of the battle scenes in the M.C. Escher-like hallways as the players attempt to overtake the guards also remind me of Star Wars.
The third and final season has apparently already been filmed and will be released later this year. Some fans and critics have said season 2 probably suffers from “in-between syndrome,” lacking some of the emotional depth of the first season and leaving all of us hanging a bit in anticipation of what will likely be a big conclusion. I’m definitely glad that the creators have decided to end it this year and not drag it on endlessly like Lost, which had one of the best first seasons ever before going off the rails of sensibleness.
4.5 out of 5 stars