Squid Game

Boasting several mind-blowing twists, these seven episodes advance the story to what will undoubtedly be an electric conclusion when Season 3 debuts in 2025. Additionally, the show is a reminder that it is not radical to protest injustice. After all, dissent might be the only thing to save us.

The seven new episodes of Squid Game are stunning, shocking, heartbreaking, and even exhilarating. Squid Game Season 2 is good! It isn’t quite as good as the spectacular first season, but coming up a smidge short of utter genius means Squid Game is still pretty great.

It’s not just the violence; it’s not even the desperation. It’s the way the villains endlessly remind their victims that they chose to be there; that what’s happening to them is happening with their own consent, and is their own fault. That ugly paternalism, which arrives here primarily through Gong’s nigh-unflappable grin, has always been the true horror of Squid Game, and it’s what has me hooked again after so long away from its black and bitter charms.

Hwang puts aside writing a cluster of dramatic types to surround Lee and Wi to build memorable portraits. .... This season allows us to get to know more of them beyond a few quirks or twirls of the figurative mustache, although there’s a share of that. But more are developed amply enough to give their performers something to sink their teeth into.

This is a story of revenge and redemption: more layered, more nuanced and more complex than the original series. Tense games of Russian roulette give way to thrilling action chases;.

All things considered, the good vastly compensates the bad, and season 2 of Squid Game is fated to ensnare the public’s imagination just like the first season once did.

But with a season finale which asks more questions than it solves, this very much feels like the middle act of Squid Game. Those who want answers will have to wait for its final season, due in late 2025. For now, there are still these seven episodes to enjoy: a dystopian treat for people who still all live in a country called capitalism.

While this season of Squid Game successfully stretches beyond the confines of the first, it excels for many of the same reasons as before, namely its ability to portray our worst qualities – and to really twist the knife when it counts.

Squid Game finds its second wind by exploring the complex layers of a deadly system. Storytelling continues to be the series’ strongest asset, and a leaner season helps to focus energy on a more nuanced approach to this expanding fictional universe. Season 2’s framework is a natural breeding ground for new characters and deeper backstories with Gong Yoo, Kang Ae-shim, Park Sung-hoon, and Choi Seung-hyun joining Lee Jung-jae and Lee Byung-hun as cast standouts. Most importantly, these seven episodes continue to be a cleverly gripping reflection of the world around us – one with plenty left to say.

While this latest run of Squid Game feels like it would have been better served if it was cut down and combined with the upcoming third and final season, the series is still full of incisive commentary, well-founded rage, and fleeting moments of camaraderie. Its pacing may leave much to be desired, but at least its central rebellious spirit is alive and well. That said, it would be nice if it still had both.

Sure, Squid Game 2 gives us a satisfying roster of new games and twists, populated by a fresh cast of well-conceived contenders. However, the format loses some of its impact as we explore similar conflicts motivated by greed, betrayal, and the perils of buying into a sunk cost fallacy.

We always know what’s coming next—kind of. Squid Game 2, then, manages to effectively provide both familiar pleasures and a whole bunch of devious new twists.

Season 2’s biggest flaw is ultimately that it’s an incomplete story — these seven episodes certainly take you on a journey, but it’s all setup for the third and final season, which has already been greenlit and is set to premiere in 2025. By the end of the seventh episode, you’ll be craving that conclusion, while continuing to wonder at the forces which keep you watching.

The Netflix hit delivers a satisfying kick of visceral excitement with its brutal contests and a clutch of compelling new characters.

The show’s bleakness has always been quite torturous to absorb, even if I couldn’t help but keep watching. But in Season 2, the gloom comes not only from the violence. It comes from the show’s overindulgence in proving its own protagonist wrong.

The art direction this year is consistently engaging, including some new games that once again turn childhood joys into adult nightmares. Some of it echoes last season thematically and visually, but when it’s good, which is often, it’s very good. The writing in the back half of the season struggles when it has to check in with characters outside of the Squid Game compound, but it hums in-game, introducing new ideas and bouncing these new personalities off each other.

Yes, it can get repetitive. But it’s also effective, with shocking cliffhangers and ghastly heel turns that pull you even tighter into Squid Game’s bloody, cynical worldview: Hope is for suckers.

Yes, Squid Game Season 2 will undoubtedly spawn an obnoxious number of think pieces about various modern parallels, but it really doesn’t have anything to say it hasn’t already said in Season 1.

Although we see a ton of the Front Man this season, his plans or motivation remain frustratingly opaque. It’s hard to love a show so claustrophobically submerged in trauma. Even star Lee Jung-Jae recently said of returning to his role as Gi-hun, “it was almost like I was being pulled back to hell.” This season of Squid Game doesn’t really get us anywhere new— which may just be the point.

Too often, though, it forgets what makes it tick—and, just as frustratingly, fails to resolve its many storylines by the conclusion of its too-short seven-episode run.

The new episodes are still well-crafted in many ways, even if they’ve succumbed to streaming bloat, with them essentially functioning as half a season, whose story will be completed sometime next year. But they never argue forcefully enough for their need to exist, unless you understand that Hwang deserves some compensation for the suffering he went through last time, and for all the money that he made for Netflix without previously getting to share in nearly enough of it.

I was more than ready to give Squid Game season 2 an enthusiastic four-star recommendation based on the early episodes, but a loss of momentum towards the end and a strong sense of incompleteness has brought that down a notch...Nevertheless, I do believe that fans of the original series should go a few rounds with this follow-up and I remain optimistic that Hwang's brutal saga can stick the landing when its concluding episodes drop next year.

Ultimately, Squid Game season 2 ends up feeling like it's trying to do one thing, and one thing only: get you excited for "Squid Game" season 3. And I guess on that front, it's successful — I want to see how this story ends. But I can't shake the feeling that too much of season 2 feels like it's spinning its wheels. Sure, it's entertaining and highly-watchable — don't be surprised if you binge through the entire thing in a day or two. But whereas season 1 felt like earth-shaking entertainment that came out of seemingly nowhere, season 2 is both too familiar and too inconclusive for its own good.

Netflix’s biggest drama returns with little interest in surpassing, much less subverting, its predecessor.

For all of its unevenness, particularly as it is warming up to the proper action, there is one big twist that really works, though whether it is distinct enough from what happens in the first series is unclear. And when you think you know where it is going, it turns away from its trajectory, upping the ante and finding its feet. What a shame it takes so long to get there though. Series three has some cleaning up to do.

Season 2 bleeds from several wounds, but mostly it feels unnecessary and contrived.

The show still feels like it's constantly wagging its finger about morality and money in the arena, rather than actually building on the most interesting plots. Squid Game can't shake the desire to reiterate the same exhausting lessons about greed and human nature, and that does more to weigh down the narrative than lift it up.

As with most sequels, it is — almost by definition — less essential than the original, whose conceits and M.C. Escher by way of Fisher-Price settings it repeats. .... Thematically, it’s pretty straightforward, even conventional: kindness is better than selfishness, community trumps isolation, however much the deck is stacked against it or how depressing the outcome can be.

It's a huge shame, and it's unclear what went wrong and who's to blame. Did Hwang really want to continue the story, or did the success of Season 1 force the show to last longer than it should have? Will it all make more sense when Season 3, due in 2025, is released? Or will we find ourselves as trapped in a doomed "Game" as Gi-hun is?

While that first series was imaginative and unlike anything we’d seen before, this new series is a derivative exercise in squeezing every last bit of ingenuity out of a concept that should have been left alone.

The conceptual novelty has worn off and you’re left with a more action-packed, mechanically violent thriller (akin to a series such as Money Heist). Squid Game 2 is still nicely made and perfectly watchable, but compared with the first series, strangely ordinary.

But now, as the long-awaited second of three planned seasons premieres, it’s clear that the Squid Game-industrial complex has undermined Squid Game the work of political art, in ways both tangential to Hwang’s storytelling and intrinsic to it.

Oddly paced and narratively inert, Season 2 of Squid Game delivers some gorgeous set pieces but not much else.

The second season of Squid Game is a thorough letdown.... It’s lacking in the fun and whimsy that kept the first season from wallowing in its backdrop of misery, and entirely lacking in new details or insights on the nature of the Game.