Squid Game

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.