To feel compassion for humanity without lying to yourself about human nature is one of the hardest things you can do. Also one of the most necessary. Compassion tends to make you overlook the worst in people so that you run the risk of caring for them without understanding them; seeing people as they really are, on the other hand, tends to put you face-to-face with their cruelty, their hypocrisy, and their greed so that you run the risk of understanding them without caring for them. This is why it’s hard to combine compassion and a clear view. But to make it through life without sacrificing either your mind or your soul, you have to understand people and care for them at the same time. This is why it’s necessary.
The first season of Squid Game, the hit South Korean survival drama, was astonishing for many reasons; two of the biggest were how thoroughly it understood this difficulty and how deeply it was willing to explore it. The series, whose second season debuted on Netflix this week, has been widely, and correctly, interpreted as a sort of anti-capitalist allegory, a distinction it shares with a host of other acclaimed Korean works from the past decade. In Squid Game, people with debts they can’t pay off are half recruited and half kidnapped by a shadowy organization that whisks them away to a secret island guarded by masked soldiers who wear pink jumpsuits, like Stormtroopers from some misbegotten Star Wars–Barbie crossover. On the island, the debtors are required to play a series of children’s games, with the winners advancing toward an enormous cash prize and the losers being unceremoniously murdered. A secret ring within the shadowy organization then harvests the victims’ organs to sell on the black market. Rich people watch the games for entertainment.
That first season, which aired in 2021, was a merciless critique of an economic system that pushes people into poverty while exploiting them for every last atom of profit: In the world of the show, even the corpses of poor people are stripped for parts. What was most remarkable, however, was that Squid Game’s writer and creator, Hwang Dong-hyuk, managed to lodge this critique without either sentimentalizing or condemning the characters trapped in the games. They were victims, but they were also frequently liars, bullies, and even killers in their own right, and Hwang made sure to underscore both those facts for the audience.
The prize money—represented by a colossal, translucent piggy bank suspended from the ceiling of the prison, with the pile of cash inside growing larger whenever another contestant died—warped the contestants’ outlooks as surely as other fortunes had warped the outlooks of their captors. The system left no one clean. Squid Game’s protagonist, a hapless gambling addict named Seong Gi-hun, played by the extraordinary Lee Jung-jae, was in danger from the guards and the games, sure. But he was also in danger from his fellow prisoners, many of whom, the show made clear, would have enjoyed watching the games if they’d only had more money. And by the same token, the people running the games were just people. They acted like monsters, and in their masks, they looked like monsters, in a Fisher-Price meets the Museum of Modern Art sort of way. But those freaky-looking jumpsuits were just clothes, not super-suits; the guards kept their extra ammo clips in dorky Velcro cargo pockets. The Front Man, the mysterious figure in charge of the whole operation, liked to unwind with a Scotch at the end of the day. From their own perspective, the shows’ villains were just corporate employees, getting by like everybody else.
The focus of Season 1, inevitably, was on the oppressive and dehumanizing system that made people behave like this. In the seven episodes of Season 2, the focus shifts in a slight but significant way: Hwang is now taking a hard look at the complicity of the game’s victims in perpetuating that system. Which means that if you zoom out a little, the central question of the series looks even bigger and, potentially, darker than it did in Season 1. Before, Squid Game asked whether there was any hope of escape from the machine of relentless exploitation. Now, it’s asking whether people even want to escape—in other words, whether humanity can be redeemed at all.
At the start of Season 2, Gi-hun is a free man on a mission. Haunted by all the death he witnessed in the competition, he’s now living in a deserted fleabag hotel that he bought and turned into a command center. He’s set up an array of cameras. He’s stockpiled guns. His goal is to use the immense wealth he obtained by winning the games—an amount equivalent to about $30 million, which he keeps, Heisenberg-style, in a giant pile of cash on the floor—to track down the organization behind the games and destroy it. In the show’s allegorical system, where the island represents the world and the games represent the modern economic order, Gi-hun is now a revolutionary. After a long search in which he’s aided by Hwang Jun-ho (the undercover cop who infiltrated the island in Season 1, played by Wi Ha-joon), Gi-hun manages to locate the Front Man. Well, sort of locate him. Gi-hun winds up in the back of a long black vehicle where he sits across from a small statuette of a pig. The pig has a speaker in its mouth. The Front Man speaks through it. In the world of Squid Game, a high-stakes tête-à-tête with a golden pork chop is not a particularly unusual way to have a conversation.
The Front Man is also a former winner of the games, though that’s about the only thing he and Gi-hun have in common. Gi-hun believes in humanity’s innate goodness. His experience in the games has left our formerly feckless hero burning with a determination to achieve justice for his fallen comrades. “It’s not mine,” he says of the money he won. “It’s blood money for everyone who died.” The Front Man, by contrast, believes humanity is hopelessly corrupt, and his experience in the games has left him burning with a determination to, well, be the boss of the games. “Do you not see?” he asks Gi-hun. “The game will not end unless the world changes.” The implication being: Don’t hold your breath.
One thing leads to another, and, inevitably, Gi-hun ends up back on the island, competing in the newest edition of the competition. Only this time, armed with his knowledge of the true nature of the games, he thinks he can save his fellow players. After all, they’re allowed to vote about whether to go on playing after every round. They’re held as prisoners, forced to obey the guards, and slaughtered whenever they lose, but they can leave at any time with an equal share of the accumulated prize money. All they need is a simple majority vote. And who, knowing what Gi-hun knows—that in previous versions of the game, all but one player has wound up dead—would possibly vote to continue?
Given that the show is not called Squid Early Ride Home, it’s probably not a giant spoiler to say that the answer is more than half the players. Repeatedly, after multiple rounds. It turns out that even with Gi-hun’s knowledge of the games, the new set of contestants—deeply in debt, desperate for cash, trying to keep the unraveling threads of their lives together—would on balance very much like the chance to win all the money. Some of them do join Gi-hun’s cause. More invent reasons not to believe him, or else they believe him and want to keep playing anyway.
The voting scenes, which in Season 2 are almost as climactic as the scenes involving games, turn into extended exercises in group delusion. They start by saying, Just one more game, and then we’ll get out with our share of the money. Soon their eyes start to look a little swimmy when they glance up at the piggy bank, and before long they’re openly lamenting that too many people are surviving, because the more people die, the more the survivors stand to win.
There’s an outspoken older man who does everything he can to undermine Gi-hun’s pleading. There’s a rapper called Thanos who intimidates weaker players into voting to continue. There’s a disgraced crypto scammer. There are more sympathetic characters, too, including an old woman trying to pay off her son’s debt and a trans woman trying to fund a move to Thailand, and as in the first season, the new episodes use a delightful range of human specificity to keep the show’s allegories from becoming too heavy-handed. (It’s hard to view a character as a two-dimensional symbol when you know their favorite brand of noodles and what bus they ride to get home.) But more characters reject Gi-hun than accept him, to the point that his staunchest ally soon appears to be the Front Man himself, who’s entered the game in disguise. When Gi-hun finally cobbles together a strike force of players willing to launch an assault on the game’s command center, the most notable thing isn’t that the revolution is underway at last. It’s that most of the players refuse to participate, and rather than being inspired by the heroism of the revolutionaries, many of them seem to find it annoying.
The first season of Squid Game was conceived by Hwang as a complete nine-episode story, with no sequel in mind. When that season turned out to be a global phenomenon, Netflix wanted a second. Hwang wrote a continuation of the story, which, though it represents a single narrative arc, has been divided into two seasons—the seven-episode Season 2 and the still-to-be-determined Season 3, which will come out next year. It has to be said that this division doesn’t really work to Season 2’s advantage. There are story lines, including one involving the ex-undercover cop’s search for the island where Gi-hun has been taken and another involving a North Korean woman working as a guard in the games, that cut off before they’ve had time to go anywhere. The finale itself ends at a climactic moment, with nothing resolved. Reducing the episode count from nine to seven hasn’t helped, either. The overall pace is bumpier and more compressed than before. Less happens, and at the same time, there’s less room for character development and less room to let the story breathe.
Still, even a somewhat diminished Squid Game remains a wildly compelling TV show. Hwang has a rare commitment to taking the hardest questions his themes give rise to and putting them squarely at the center of the series. If the theme is market economics exploit vulnerable people, Hwang isn’t content to write a story that simply illustrates this idea. Instead, he challenges it. He gives us a set of vulnerable people who seem willing to exploit themselves. He asks: Are people being ground to dust because they’re trapped in a corrupt system? Or is the system corrupt only because it’s a reflection of something innate to human beings? Would any human system be equally brutal? Where do we look for an antidote if the poison was inside us all along? Season 2 of Squid Game doesn’t offer a definitive answer to these questions. But it understands them. It doesn’t sidestep them. It knows how high the stakes are and how difficult the solution is. Even in a world of loud pastels, Power Rangers masks, talking pig statues, and automatic weapons, to feel compassion for humanity without lying to yourself about human nature is one of the hardest things you can do.
