The second season of Squid Game repeats the same development that happened in the first season

The following contains spoilers for Season 2 of “Squid Game,” so proceed at your own risk.

in The long-awaited second season of the Netflix original series Squid Game – The widely acclaimed South Korean drama centered around a deadly but highly lucrative game that lures weak players – The winner of the first season’s matches, Seung Ji-hoon (Emmy Award winner Lee Jung-jae) makes a surprising decision. Instead of walking away from the games and the rest of his life in Seoul, Ji-hoon takes his flight to America, and hatches a plan to re-enter the games and uncover the entire project. (The organization, of course, gathers 456 players in a mysterious location and forces them to play children’s games while shooting anyone who fails and offering 4.56 billion won as a prize.) This is, on the face of it, a pretty solid gimmick for the show’s second season to be sure. It could have been Short series. There’s a huge one, huge The issue, anyway. Not only does this bring the series back to the killer games, it also repeats a twist from the first season, which feels lazy at best and creatively bankrupt at worst.

I’m being honest and maybe a little harsh, and honestly, that’s on purpose! Whatever your feelings about Squid Game, you can’t deny that the first season is an impressive creative project from writer-director Hwang Dong-hyuk. Almost a re-development of the first season Exactly the same shape It’s a very disappointing move for Season 2 of “Squid Game,” so here’s how the show repeated itself and specifically why you should feel bad.

In the first season of “Squid Game” Ji Hoon – before he wins the game and the entire massive prize money – is just another bozo on the bus (so to speak), and very early in the game, he meets an old man named Oh Il Nam (played by Oh). Yeong-su), who is player 001. Il-nam’s explanation of Why It’s a simple but devastating part of the game: basically, he tells Ji-hoon that he has a fatal brain tumor and would rather die in the game than in real life. He appears to get his wish during the third mini-game, where players team up to play a marble game of their choice (the twist here is that the loser gets shot, a twist that happens almost every single game in the “Squid Game”), because Ji-hoon He exploits the man’s seemingly deteriorating mind to trick him into losing. However, the fact that Il-nam appears off-camera says it all, and the next time we see him, he will definitely, but obviously, die. no dead. It turned out he was sick – that part was true – but… also They created the games themselves.

guess what? In Season 2 of “Squid Game,” the front man — Hwang In Ho played by Lee Byung Hun, who we met in the season thanks to his brother Detective Joon Ho (Wee Ha Joon) — sneaks into the games and kills. He plays with the number 001. They don’t even do that Change the number up. It’s the same thing again! “Squid Game” fans deserve better than this The same development we have already seen!

Sure, you could make the argument – ​​and I imagine some will – that this development is different because public He knows that Front Man is actually Player 001, but Gi-hun is not (in the first season, it is not revealed to Gi-hun and the audience until the end). That doesn’t make this iteration any better or easier to deal with, because it’s not just lazy, it’s almost lazy insult To do the exact same thing in Season 2 and…what? Think no one will notice? It’s really amazing (in a bad way) that Hwang Dong Hyuk does this, largely because the rest of the season contains… a lot From the promise. Many of the new characters in the series are really standouts, including the mysterious and troubled No-eul (Park Gyu-young) and Hyun-ju (Park Sung-hoon), and the new minigames are particularly iconic in a truly shocking way (like this one). Mingle’s carousel, which makes me shudder just remembering it.) The series deserves better than the same twist again, and that’s the only thing that brings Season 2 to a screeching halt once you realize they’re just… Do the same weird thing again.

Season 2 also ends eventually. In the final moments of the season finale, In-ho uses a walkie-talkie to trick Gi-hun into thinking he’s dead and then dons his Front Man outfit so he can kill one of Gi-hun’s closest friends in front of him. until this Ji Hoon is frustrated to learn that when Season 3 of “Squid Game” drops, Ji Hoon will learn that after being tricked by an old man in Season 1, he fell for the exact same trick. once again.

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