(MENAFN- The Peninsula)
The Washington Post
This article includes spoilers for Season 1 of "Squid Game” and some mild spoilers for Season 2.
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Dystopian satires are tough to sustain, especially when they're powered by twists. That might explain "Squid Game's” peculiar sophomore season, which dropped Thursday and ends so abruptly I initially assumed Netflix had simply withheld the finale from critics. It hadn't; I'd received all seven episodes.
This sequel to the gorgeous, stylized 2021 megahit - in which Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae), a compulsive gambler, gets recruited to an annual gladiatorial "game” in which desperate debtors risk their lives playing children's games to win a jackpot - feels stylistically continuous but thematically flaccid.
Having neglected to develop a number of storylines enough to generate much momentum, suspense or philosophical complexity, the series simply breaks off, and does so at a moment that feels less like a cliff-hanger than a commercial break.
The new season opens precisely where the last one ended, some years after Gi-hun has won the contest. Once he realizes the Game's twinkly recruiter in the suit (Gong Yoo) is still tempting desperate people to play, inviting them to the competition, Gi-hun abandons his plan to visit his daughter and resolves to hunt down the Game's creators.
Gi-hun goes off the grid, settling into a motel where he tries to evade detection and relocate the salesman. He even hires the loan shark who once threatened to harvest his organs to lead the search.
As for Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon), the police officer last seen getting shot in the shoulder by In-ho (Lee Byung-hun), the mysterious Front Man in the black mask who turned out to be his long-lost brother: He survived.
Shortly after waking up from a coma, he abandons the Major Crimes Division and starts working as a traffic cop, searching for the island in his spare time.
Neither plan seems plausible. It's a bit of a problem for the season that this never changes.
There's something to be said for making your quest-driven protagonists relatably incompetent, of course, but "Squid Game” fails to make their flailing efforts interesting or meaningful. The contest is too unequal.
There's a laxity to all this, plotwise, a baseline lack of cunning that makes it hard for tension to build. It's hard to overlook how dead they would all be in short order if their antagonists - who seem to be virtually omniscient - cared to stop them. Whatever progress they make they are to make by the Game's bemused overlords.
That poses a conundrum the season teases but doesn't come close to addressing: that the folks behind the Game, some of whom are characterized as malicious ultra-capitalists who like watching the poor die for sport, labor under an overdeveloped sense of fair play that prevents them from simply eliminating an obvious threat.
The ennui, boredom and meaninglessness one villain cited, in Season 1, as his reasons for starting the Game, clash with the way other villains this season behave. Some seem to be operating under a principled (if warped) sense of integrity.
Eventually, as shown in trailers, Gi-hun returns to the Game.
The new crop of players includes a dedicated old mother (Kang Ae-shim) with her underachieving and undeserving son (Yang Dong-geun), a young influencer (Yim Si-wan) who championed a worthless cryptocurrency, his pregnant ex-girlfriend (Jo Yu-ri) and a transgender woman (Park Sung-Hoon). There are some exciting and terrifying new games.
But there are more reprises than new ingredients. Contestants include yet another disaffected North Korean woman (Park Gyu-young), a volatile woman of middle age (Chae Kook-hee), and a thuggish, violent loudmouth (Choi Seung-hyun).
If Gi-hun struggled over his longtime friendship and rivalry with Sang-woo (Park Hae-soo) in the first season, he turns out to have a pal in the Game this time too: Jung-bae (Lee Seo-hwan), the fellow gambler who encouraged Gi-hun to rob his mother in the pilot. If Player 001 wasn't quite what he seemed in the first season, guess what ...
These repetitions aren't as rich or resonant as one might hope. If anything, they retroactively taint the rewarding specificity of those earlier characters, reducing them to types that seem to be resurfacing for no particular purpose - or simply because the story (or the Game) requires them.
As for the world outside the Game, it's somewhat baffling that virtually all the standard-issue bad guys from the first season - including the loan shark, his minion and the agent desperate North Koreans hire to help them find their families - get retconned into better sorts than they initially seemed to be.
No one, this time, is doing it for the money. Perhaps that's a concession to Gi-hun's comparative optimism about human nature, as showcased in his final showdown last season with Player 001, Oh Il-nam (O Yeong-su). It's nevertheless a surprising turn in a show crafted to skewer a universe built on human greed.
"Squid Game” creator and director Hwang Dong-hyuk's announcement that he initially envisioned the second and third seasons as "a single story” no doubt influenced the season's truncated shape; this feels like a Part 1.
But the pacing is uneven and odd throughout, especially for an adrenaline-packed show as conversant in tension-generating maneuvers as this one. (Manipulation is, after all, what the Squid Game architects specialize in!)
Instead of building, Jun-ho's plot languishes. Gi-hun's arc gets blurry. Worst of all, the antagonist remains a cipher. It isn't remotely clear what the final showdown will be about, or why it's happening.
The first season did the opposite: It delivered a tragic, technically perfect resolution and then dedicated a ninth episode to the project of undoing any satisfactions that particular form of catharsis might deliver.
The first season could have concluded with Gi-hun's horrible victory. Sure, that ending would have risked aligning the show's stakes (and viewers like us) with the contemptible, megarich VIPs watching the game for sport. But it would have made for an easy and tidy conclusion.
Instead, "Squid Game” chose mess.
The series followed Gi-hun for a long depressive period after he won, touching lightly on his inertia, depression, and grief. And when he finally discovers that Player 001, Oh Il-nam (O Yeong-su) is not only alive but his main antagonist, a strikingly unsatisfying philosophical showdown ensues, with Il-nam literally dying seconds before learning that he "lost.”
The show's open-endedness in this respect - its calculated refusal to deliver the cathartic highs Gi-hun loved when gambling, and which the players felt whenever they survived a game - felt pointed.
And interesting. As a critique of capitalism, "Squid Game” was more gestural than rigorous, but the show was artistic enough that one could forgive a number of loose ends that could less charitably be called plot holes.
The particular the show withheld (or undid) narrative satisfaction enhanced a message that's gotten muddled in the interim - not just by this new season but also by campy, semi-ironic spin-offs like "Squid Game: The Challenge” (a reality series based on the show) and the "Squid Game” Yule log stream. Here's hoping that Part 2 - or Season 3 - returns to its roots.
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