Sequel ‘Squid Game’ less surprising but equally entertaining and relevant

It was the TV sensation of 2021. Without significant marketing, the Korean thriller series Squid Game unexpectedly Netflix’s biggest world hit, with 1.65 billion viewing hours in the first four weeks alone. The second season, which starts on Boxing Day, is broadly a successful continuation. But the impact of 2021 cannot be repeated.

The immediately recognizable Squid Game seems like an ideal ‘franchise’ for Netflix, which still has few classics to milk and repackage, as Hollywood’s older studios like to do. But there are snags. In season one, 456 destitute and desperate Koreans exterminated each other in deadly children’s games for the amusement of an anonymous elite. Squid Game was set in a pastel-colored Escher maze with numbered participants in green tracksuits and guards in pink uniforms and black masks. Mozart and Viennese waltzes sounded from the loudspeakers, while macabre children’s songs played during the bloody games. The bodies of the losers were cremated in coffins with a cheerful bow.

It was obvious to adapt this dystopia into a reality game show, but Squid Game: The Challenge received a poor press last year due to manipulation behind the scenes and poor treatment of participants. Netflix turned itself into a light version of the twisted game masters, which was a bit too cynical given the bleak socially critical undertone of Squid Gamea metaphor for hyper-capitalism as an all-or-nothing game with only one winner and countless losers.

The losers of Squid Game only discover that it is serious when in the first game, Annemaria Koekoek, about 200 participants are shot down without sight. It then turns out that each dead participant earns the survivors 1 billion won, more than 663,000 euros. They can vote: continue or go home empty-handed? A narrow majority wants to leave, but after a renewed confrontation with their hopeless existence, decides to finish the lugubrious game.

Only one player survives: number 456, Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae). Traumatized and filthy rich, he meets an old gaming friend in the epilogue, the very elderly player 001, who did not really die, but is a billionaire who joined for fun. On his deathbed, 001 and 456 – first and last, conservative and progressive – bet whether man is good or bad. Specifically: whether anyone will help a freezing homeless person on the street below. 456 believes that most people are good and he is proven right: someone helps the homeless. But it turns out that 001 is already dead: 456 is right, but he doesn’t get that.

Grotesque conspiracy theories

Quite a bit to chew on. This genocide of haves on have-nots came on TV at an ideal time in 2021: more than a year after the start of the Covid pandemic, when lockdown and curfew led to grotesque conspiracy theories. ‘Wappies’ and the players of Squid Game have a lot in common. They live in a world ruled by a demonic elite that wants to exterminate them. Democracy is a wash, the majority consists of sheep who, misled by mind games and propaganda, turn against each other. But curiously enough, the players of the Squid Games do believe that the same twisted elite keeps to agreements and pays out 302 million euros to the winner. Despite all the cards they have played, they rely on the rules of the game: a mental short circuit comparable to wappies who attribute the most blood-curdling conspiracies to the elite, but at the same time shout it from the rooftops without a care in the world. Either they don’t really believe themselves, or they inhabit a universe that is not only sadistic but also absurd.

When cultural philosophers look back in fifty years’ time on the state of mind of our populist era Squid Game probably the series with which they illustrate this.

Massive marketing

How do you continue something like this? With massive marketing, Netflix seems to think: Amsterdam is full of Squid Game posters and in early December the anticipation was further fueled with a Squid-Game maze in Amsterdam’s Kromhouthal.

Fortunately, the series itself remains up to standard. In Season 2, resentful player 456 voluntarily returns to the game island. To stop the game and expose the puppeteers, he tells himself. The elite spectators sometimes appeared in season one, predominantly Anglo-Saxon, with gold masks and expensive whiskey. Those ‘VIPs’ now remain out of the picture and that is wise. Like monsters in horror films, such an elite is only sinister in the shadows. If it turns out to be Klaus Schwab or Bill Gates, it quickly becomes laughable.

At all, the focus in season 2 is more psychological than sociological. We follow player 456 who uses his prize money to build an organization from his headquarters, a dilapidated love hotel Squid Game to roll up. He recruits mercenaries, but also Inspector Hwang Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon) who is now a traffic cop. In Season 1, he almost died trying to infiltrate the game.

It’s all about gambling addiction. Gambling promises the poor a highway out of their misery and is an adrenaline rush that adds color to drab lives. Risking everything, the gates of heaven beckon: Squid Game is gambling between life and death. Is 456 really out for revenge or does he long for the rush of danger? The person who recruited him for the game now appears to be offering homeless people in Seoul the choice between a sandwich or a scratch card as a kind of field research. The homeless invariably choose the scratch card. And player 456 is also immediately tempted by a completely unnecessary game of Russian roulette.

The games are different, the structure is equal: perversely bloody children’s games that test everyone’s morals to the limit

Casino logic

No wonder 456 for a second round Squid Game go. On the island, a new group of debtors and gambling addicts are preparing for the deadly game, including a crypto influencer, a drugged rapper, a religious fanatic and a transgender soldier. The first round of the game is again Annemaria Koekoek, the new thing is that the players can vote after each round whether they want to continue playing. If the majority wants to quit, they can divide the prize money earned so far among themselves. So an inexorable casino logic kicks in: why not one more round to grow the prize pool and thin out the number of people to share that amount with? After all that danger to life, you don’t want to leave with a measly 15,000, 52,000 or 237,000 euros.

The games are different, the structure of Squid Game is the same: perversely bloody children’s games that test everyone’s morals to the limit, voting rounds where the stakes are high and panting in the dormitory, with its rivalries and coalitions. The major contrast is between the proponents and opponents of continuing to play; once again outsiders are trying to invade the game; Moreover, there is a subplot surrounding a North Korean defector who does not fit in with capitalist South Korea and prefers to be losers of Squid Game then executes himself to humiliate himself as a mascot in a children’s amusement park. However, she refuses to participate in a lucrative side business of guards, who do not kill but injure losers in order to harvest their still warm organs behind the scenes.

Season 2 ends in rebellion; Squid Game will continue for another season. It’s a testament to the talent of the makers that they keep things entertaining and relevant despite the lack of surprise. But you can only touch the zeitgeist like you did in 2021 once.

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