Throughout Squid Sport Season 2’s Mingle sport, contestants stand on a rotating platform as an unsettling kids’s music performs. “Round and round, round and round,” kids sing. “Let’s go around in circles and dance.”
The music could also be an apt solution to kick off one among Squid Sport‘s many lethal kids’s video games, however it additionally proves a fairly correct description of the viewing expertise of Season 2. Regardless of all of the hype — three years of it — for the return of Netflix’s greatest collection ever, Squid Sport Season 2 is frustratingly recursive, characterised not by Season 1’s propulsive do-or-die stakes, however as a substitute by repetitive, borderline uninspired storytelling.
That downside of repetition hangs over the entire season, however nowhere extra so than within the return of Squid Sport‘s voting mechanic, which takes on a bigger position this season (a lot to the present’s detriment).
What’s Squid Sport Season 2’s voting mechanic, and why would not it work?
The gamers of “Squid Game” Season 2.
Credit score: No Ju-han / Netflix
In Season 1 of Squid Sport, as soon as the gamers expertise the horrors of Crimson Mild, Inexperienced Mild, they’re supplied a alternative. If nearly all of them vote to finish the video games, they will all go dwelling. They do (by one vote). But when the gamers re-enter the actual world and are confronted as soon as once more by the complete weight of their debt, most of them select to return to the video games for the slim likelihood that they could be capable of win a life-saving amount of cash.
When Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae, The Acolyte) returns to the video games in Season 2, he experiences the post-Crimson Mild, Inexperienced Mild vote once more. Solely this time, issues are completely different. Now, gamers get the selection to finish the video games between each problem. In the event that they do select to go away, they get to separate the present prize pot, which matches up with each loss of life.
This transformation to the video games’ voting mechanic is a captivating twist. It checks whether or not gamers are prepared to outlive and stroll away with a relatively smaller (however nonetheless important) amount of cash, or in the event that they’d somewhat threat their very own lives and people of the individuals round them for a shot at more cash within the subsequent spherical. “One more game,” they inform themselves, calling to thoughts the playing addictions that landed them in debt.
The additional voting additionally additional stokes tensions between those that want to depart and people who want to proceed. Lastly, it serves as a message from the Entrance Man (Lee Byung-hun) to Gi-hun: Regardless of Gi-hun’s tried heroics, there’ll all the time be individuals who will select to play at the price of others. That is a part of why the Entrance Man and the opposite individuals who run the video games view gamers as “roaches,” though they’re disregarding the injustices of the capitalist system that put them there within the first place.
With all this nuance in thoughts, the repeated voting works in idea. However in follow, it falls flat. There are three voting scenes in Season 2, and every drags greater than the final. In spite of everything, there are solely so some ways you can also make individuals lining as much as push a button fascinating. To not point out that after each vote, individuals should apologize or clarify themselves. These scenes really feel a lot like RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars contestants justifying whose lipstick they pulled that you just would possibly wonder if you turned on the actuality present Squid Sport: The Problem as a substitute.
Mashable High Tales
Squid Sport tries to play with its personal method by having “shocking” switch-ups in who votes for what. It is a simple solution to chart the place individuals stand on the video games, however it’s powerful to deal with the non-public arcs of individuals selecting to go away or keep when the result is so apparent. The meat of Squid Sport is the video games themselves, so we all know going into every vote that there isn’t any method it is going to go. By design, the present has to remain on this hellish playground.
Actually, the repeated voting solely provides us the phantasm of distinction, simply because it provides gamers like Gi-hun the phantasm of escape. What might have been an fascinating sport mechanic turns into dreaded padding in an already irritating season. So by the point the third vote ends in a tie, I am much less intrigued by what is going to occur subsequent and extra horrified on the promise of but one other voting sequence. (At the very least the collection avoids spherical 4 because of Gi-hun’s finale riot.)
Squid Sport Season 2 is rather like its voting mechanic: boring and repetitive.
Choi Seung-hyun in “Squid Game.”
Credit score: No Ju-han / Netflix
Squid Sport‘s overemphasis on voting is only one symptom of Season 2’s overarching downside: Recycling Season 1 plot factors with twists that run themselves into the bottom.
Let’s begin with an apparent one. As soon as once more, the video games’ participant 001 is a plant from the individuals controlling the video games. This time round, it is none aside from Entrance Man Hwang In-ho, who’s snuck into the video games to observe over Gi-hun, and who finally ends up turning into one among his closest allies. All the higher to interrupt his spirit as soon as he finds out his true id! The one downside is, Gi-hun would not be taught who 001 actually is that this season, so we lose the sensation of brutal catharsis we acquired with the Oh Il-nam (O Yeong-su) reveal from Season 1.
(That element is only one of many unsatisfying arcs Squid Sport leaves dangling on the finish of Season 2. No surprise, on condition that creator Hwang Dong-hyuk informed Leisure Weekly that he initially envisioned Seasons 2 and three as one story.)
Elsewhere, Squid Sport appears to be like so as to add a brand new perspective with the character of Kang No-eul (Park Gyu-young), a North Korean defector — like Season 1’s Kang Sae-byeok (Jung Ho-yeon) — who’s turn into a soldier within the video games. What might have been an illuminating look into what pushes somebody to take that position shortly turns into a remix of the organ-harvesting plot from Season 1, with little or no thought given to No-eul’s inside battle as soon as she acknowledges somebody she is aware of from the skin within the video games.
Even the video games themselves turn into rote. The Six-legged Pentathlon is a mishmash of too many video games, to the purpose that watching it turns into a slog. Mingle overstays its welcome after just a few rounds. It feels such as you’re watching Squid Sport beat itself into the bottom. Add within the overlong subplot of Detective Hwang Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon) puttering round, misplaced, on a ship, and that turns into doubly true. We’re going spherical and spherical, dancing in circles, with not a lot to indicate for it.
Squid Sport Season 2 is a step down — however that is not solely its fault.
Park Gyu-young in “Squid Game.”
Credit score: No Ju-han / Netflix
When Squid Sport Season 1 first hit, it felt like a recent tackle the “death game” style. It spoke on to anxieties about debt and inequality that spring from residing underneath late-stage capitalism. Plus, the kids’s sport components supplied a fiendish aesthetic twist, full with pastel playgrounds and the now-iconic form masks the troopers put on.
Since then, although, the idea of Squid Sport has been executed to loss of life. Past Netflix’s ill-advised actuality spin-off, YouTuber MrBeast recreated the video games for his channel in 2021, then principally ripped them off once more for his Beast Video games sport present. In the meantime, Netflix has continued to launch numerous tie-in merchandise, a cellular sport, and even a real-life expertise. Squid Sport mania and an extended wait time between seasons has solely elevated expectations, however it’s additionally diluted what as soon as felt particular. Season 2 additional dilutes Squid Sport, even ending with a generic gunfight that is miles faraway from the claustrophobic, nearly intimate stakes of Season 1.
With each effort to dial up a component from Season 1, be it the voting mechanic or the Entrance Man’s position, Squid Sport Season 2 weakens its personal mystique and attraction. It is proof that an excessive amount of of factor can completely break a present’s momentum, and that typically, some nice collection simply do not want a second season.
Squid Sport Season 2 is now streaming on Netflix.
