Throughout Squid Recreation Season 2’s Mingle recreation, contestants stand on a rotating platform as an unsettling kids’s tune performs. “Spherical and spherical, spherical and spherical,” kids sing. “Let’s go round in circles and dance.”
The tune could also be an apt approach to kick off one in all Squid Recreation‘s many lethal kids’s video games, but it surely additionally proves a reasonably correct description of the viewing expertise of Season 2. Regardless of all of the hype — three years of it — for the return of Netflix’s largest collection ever, Squid Recreation Season 2 is frustratingly recursive, characterised not by Season 1’s propulsive do-or-die stakes, however as an alternative by repetitive, borderline uninspired storytelling.
That downside of repetition hangs over the entire season, however nowhere extra so than within the return of Squid Recreation‘s voting mechanic, which takes on a bigger position this season (a lot to the present’s detriment).
What’s Squid Recreation Season 2’s voting mechanic, and why does not it work?
The gamers of “Squid Recreation” Season 2.
Credit score: No Ju-han / Netflix
In Season 1 of Squid Recreation, as soon as the gamers expertise the horrors of Crimson Gentle, Inexperienced Gentle, they’re provided a alternative. If the vast majority of them vote to finish the video games, they will all go residence. They do (by one vote). But when the gamers re-enter the true world and are confronted as soon as once more by the complete weight of their debt, most of them select to return to the video games for the slim likelihood that they could be capable of win a life-saving amount of cash.
When Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae, The Acolyte) returns to the video games in Season 2, he experiences the post-Crimson Gentle, Inexperienced Gentle vote once more. Solely this time, issues are totally different. Now, gamers get the selection to finish the video games between each problem. In the event that they do select to depart, they get to separate the present prize pot, which fits up with each demise.
This modification to the video games’ voting mechanic is a captivating twist. It checks whether or not gamers are keen to outlive and stroll away with a relatively smaller (however nonetheless vital) amount of cash, or in the event that they’d somewhat threat their very own lives and people of the individuals round them for a shot at more cash within the subsequent spherical. “Yet another recreation,” they inform themselves, calling to thoughts the playing addictions that landed them in debt.
The additional voting additionally additional stokes tensions between those that want to go away and people who want to proceed. Lastly, it serves as a message from the Entrance Man (Lee Byung-hun) to Gi-hun: Regardless of Gi-hun’s tried heroics, there’ll at all times be individuals who will select to play at the price of others. That is a part of why the Entrance Man and the opposite individuals who run the video games view gamers as “roaches,” despite the fact that they’re disregarding the injustices of the capitalist system that put them there within the first place.
With all this nuance in thoughts, the repeated voting works in concept. However in observe, it falls flat. There are three voting scenes in Season 2, and every drags greater than the final. In spite of everything, there are solely so some ways you can also make individuals lining as much as push a button fascinating. To not point out that after each vote, individuals should apologize or clarify themselves. These scenes really feel a lot like RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars contestants justifying whose lipstick they pulled that you simply may wonder if you turned on the actuality present Squid Recreation: The Problem as an alternative.
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Squid Recreation tries to play with its personal method by having “surprising” switch-ups in who votes for what. It is a straightforward approach to chart the place individuals stand on the video games, but it surely’s robust to deal with the non-public arcs of individuals selecting to depart or keep when the result is so apparent. The meat of Squid Recreation is the video games themselves, so we all know going into every vote that there is no approach it may go. By design, the present has to remain on this hellish playground.
Actually, the repeated voting solely provides us the phantasm of distinction, simply because it provides gamers like Gi-hun the phantasm of escape. What might have been an fascinating recreation mechanic turns into dreaded padding in an already irritating season. So by the point the third vote ends in a tie, I am much less intrigued by what’s going to occur subsequent and extra horrified on the promise of but one other voting sequence. (A minimum of the collection avoids spherical 4 because of Gi-hun’s finale rebel.)
Squid Recreation Season 2 is rather like its voting mechanic: uninteresting and repetitive.
Choi Seung-hyun in “Squid Recreation.”
Credit score: No Ju-han / Netflix
Squid Recreation‘s overemphasis on voting is only one symptom of Season 2’s overarching downside: Recycling Season 1 plot factors with twists that run themselves into the bottom.
Let’s begin with an apparent one. As soon as once more, the video games’ participant 001 is a plant from the individuals controlling the video games. This time round, it is none aside from Entrance Man Hwang In-ho, who’s snuck into the video games to look at over Gi-hun, and who finally ends up changing into one in all his closest allies. All the higher to interrupt his spirit as soon as he finds out his true identification! The one downside is, Gi-hun does not be taught who 001 actually is that this season, so we lose the sensation of brutal catharsis we received with the Oh Il-nam (O Yeong-su) reveal from Season 1.
(That element is only one of many unsatisfying arcs Squid Recreation leaves dangling on the finish of Season 2. No surprise, on condition that creator Hwang Dong-hyuk informed Leisure Weekly that he initially envisioned Seasons 2 and three as one story.)
Elsewhere, Squid Recreation appears so as to add a brand new perspective with the character of Kang No-eul (Park Gyu-young), a North Korean defector — like Season 1’s Kang Sae-byeok (Jung Ho-yeon) — who’s change into a soldier within the video games. What might have been an illuminating look into what pushes somebody to take that position rapidly turns into a remix of the organ-harvesting plot from Season 1, with little or no thought given to No-eul’s inside battle as soon as she acknowledges somebody she is aware of from the skin within the video games.
Even the video games themselves change into rote. The Six-legged Pentathlon is a mishmash of too many video games, to the purpose that watching it turns into a slog. Mingle overstays its welcome after a couple of rounds. It feels such as you’re watching Squid Recreation beat itself into the bottom. Add within the overlong subplot of Detective Hwang Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon) puttering round, misplaced, on a ship, and that turns into doubly true. We’re going spherical and spherical, dancing in circles, with not a lot to point out for it.
Squid Recreation Season 2 is a step down — however that is not solely its fault.
Park Gyu-young in “Squid Recreation.”
Credit score: No Ju-han / Netflix
When Squid Recreation Season 1 first hit, it felt like a contemporary tackle the “demise recreation” style. It spoke on to anxieties about debt and inequality that spring from residing below late-stage capitalism. Plus, the youngsters’s recreation components provided a fiendish aesthetic twist, full with pastel playgrounds and the now-iconic form masks the troopers put on.
Since then, although, the idea of Squid Recreation has been performed to demise. Past Netflix’s ill-advised actuality spin-off, YouTuber MrBeast recreated the video games for his channel in 2021, then principally ripped them off once more for his Beast Video games recreation present. In the meantime, Netflix has continued to launch numerous tie-in merchandise, a cell recreation, and even a real-life expertise. Squid Recreation mania and a protracted wait time between seasons has solely elevated expectations, but it surely’s additionally diluted what as soon as felt particular. Season 2 additional dilutes Squid Recreation, even ending with a generic gunfight that is miles faraway from the claustrophobic, nearly intimate stakes of Season 1.
With each effort to dial up a component from Season 1, be it the voting mechanic or the Entrance Man’s position, Squid Recreation Season 2 weakens its personal mystique and enchantment. It is proof that an excessive amount of of a very good factor can completely damage a present’s momentum, and that generally, some nice collection simply do not want a second season.
Squid Recreation Season 2 is now streaming on Netflix.
