Season 2 of Netflix’s Squid Game delivers a brutal backstory for recruit Gong Yoo

Major spoilers for Season 2 of “Squid Game” follow.

One of the most Unforgettable characters From the shocking first season of “Squid Game” there was a mysterious, nameless character played by Gong Yoo. Some people colloquially refer to this man as “The Salesman,” but the official translations of the series call him “The Recruiter,” so we’ll call him here.

The Recruiter is a man who searches for people to play deadly games that could earn them millions of dollars or lead to their violent demise. To find players, a recruiter hangs out in the subway system and challenges strangers to a game Dakjiwhich involves trying to flip one heavy-colored envelope into another. The recruiter tells the players that if they can flip his envelope, he will give them 100,000 won. If they lose, they have to give him 100,000 won. If they don’t have money (which they certainly don’t), he slaps them in the face. However, if a player wins, not only does he get 100,000 won – he’s also offered the chance to play the Deadly Games and win a much bigger prize (or, you know, die horribly).

As played by Gong Yoo, the recruiter is an unforgettable character: a tall, elegantly dressed man with a creepy smile on his face and a vague aura of menace. He was only a bit player in the first season, but he made a big impression. Certainly enough, The Recruiter returns in the first episode of Season 2 of “Squid Game.”and this time we learn more about him, including his dark, disturbing and tragic background.

The events of the second season of “Squid Game” take place two years after the first season, and we know that during these two years, Seung Ji Hoon (Lee Jung Jae) Winner of the games from the first seasonwas trying to find a recruiter. Gi-hun wants to use Recruiter to find a way to get to the people running the Games and shut them down once and for all, but even though Gi-hun has a whole team of people working for him trying to locate Recruiter, the Recruiter has proven to be a deceiver. However, in the end, the recruiter showed up, leading to a big confrontation in the climax of the first episode of Season 2, titled “Bread and the Lottery.”

Ji Hoon used some of the money he won to buy a hotel, which he now uses as his base of operations. As the episode approaches its end, Ji Hoon finds the recruit waiting for him in a hotel room, a gun in his hand. After some back and forth, the recruiter reveals his backstory. He explains that before he got the job of recruiting people to play games, he worked in games himself. He was one of those responsible for burning the bodies of the players who died. He says that when he burned bodies, he would say to himself regarding dead players: “These things are not human. They are just rubbish… useless… they have no purpose in this world.”

Eventually, the recruit worked his way up to become one of the games’ masked armed guards. The recruiter reveals that one year during games, he went to shoot one of the players who had lost, and something surprising happened. “I recognized his face,” he says. “Guess who it is? My father.” “I was pointing my gun at my father, and he begged me with tears in his eyes to spare his life. Do you know what I did? I shot him, hard, in the middle of the forehead. Then I knew, ‘Oh, I’m really ready for this.’

It’s a dark and twisted story, with the implication that the recruit is a complete psychopath. Maybe you could say that years of working in games, burning bodies, and shooting people turned him into a psychopath. Or maybe you could say it’s always been that way. In fact, we don’t know much about him, and that’s a good thing: if we learned more, it would rob the character of some of his power. Although this is a tragic backstory, the tragedy is the death of the recruit’s father. The recruiter himself appears to be quite upset about committing the act. He keeps smiling as he tells the story, much to Ji Hoon’s annoyance.

Ultimately, this scene has an impact because although it reveals more about the recruit’s backstory, it doesn’t weaken him or even make him sympathetic. If anything, it makes him even more annoying and annoying than he was in the first season.

Season 2 of “Squid Game” is now streaming on Netflix.