As we await the final season of Squid Game later this year, The Path does a deep-dive into the South Korean mega-hit from start to finish and finds it…a bit mid.
Score: Season 1, 7.5, Season 2, 6.5
The premise is simple enough. In South Korea, 456 deeply indebted individuals are recruited annually by a shadowy organization to play Battle Royale-style children’s games to the death. The sole survivor earns 45.6 billion won [about $31 million]. Since 2021, Squid Game has become a global sensation, reaching number one on Netflix in 94 countries at its launch and winning six Emmys, 3 SAG awards, and one Golden Globe. It’s first season still holds the overall record for most-watched show on Netflix by minutes watched 3 and a half years later, and its second season has enjoyed comparable levels of success, rocketing to number one in 92 countries despite a mild drop-off in critical approval coupled with a more than three-year gap between seasons.
Prior to Shogun, Squid Game was the first foreign language drama to win the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series, and its lead actor, Lee Jung-jae, the first Asian to win Outstanding Lead Actor at the Emmys for a non-English-speaking part. It spawned a mockumentary, a reality tv spin-off, and one of my all-time favorite sketches of Saturday Night Live [ see first link above]. That said, having never actually watched Squid Game till now and binging all sixteen hours of both seasons for this review, I’ve gotta say it’s…okay, I guess?
Good, Not Great
And massively overhyped. Originality is not mandatory for any decent piece of fiction. Complete originality is never entirely possible anyway, and so the most common charge among Squid Game haters, “We’v’e seen this before”, means nothing to me. A story can be familiar, almost beat-by-beat, and still resonate, in much the same way that everyone who watched Cyberpunk Edgerunners knew where the series would end by episode 4, but still arrived at their destination satisfied. The genius of Squid Game 1 was its ability to execute the familiar tropes of the death tournament well by giving tension and weight to the carnage with unexpected outcomes and memorable characters. It did so imperfectly, with the first season often crying out for more extensive world-building and greater insight into the backstories of characters like Kang Sae-byeok, Jang Deok-su, and Han Mi-nyeo, but these figures were sufficiently realized and their lives and deaths sufficiently poignant that I came away from season 1 basically respecting the accomplishment of the series, even if at its most overt attempts at philosophizing, it didn’t work.
At times, such as the arguments over the ethics of survival between Seong Gi-hun and Cho Sang-woo near the end of the games, the dialogue clearly faltered, devolving into petty tough-guy insults where a more explicit debate about the principles at stake was needed. Even the most brutal event of season 1, Cho Sang-woo’s murder of Kang Sae-byeok as she lay dying from a glass wound, was underutilized. The power of Sang-woo’s turn towards full-on villainy was that his reading of the games was basically correct. Faced with the impossibility of multiple winners, Sang-woo’s willingness to kill even his friends was a rational response to his situation, one Gi-hun didn’t so much refute as deny up to the minute Sang-woo bled to death in the mud from multiple stab wounds Gi-hun had inflicted on him in the final round.
Diminishing Returns
With the second season, it seemed inevitable that as in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire we’d begin to see writer/director Hwang Dong-hyuk expand beyond the narrow lens of the games themselves to a more in-depth look at their parent organization and the confluence of moneyed interests, Korean and otherwise, that have kept them running for over thirty years in this universe. But much as with it’s critique of capitalism, that often seems about as profound as an “Eat the Rich” poster at a Democratic Socialists of America rally, season 2 of Squid Game never builds us a remotely convincing picture of precisely who runs the games and to what end. Notice I say convincing, because while Squid Game has piled up explanation after explanation over two seasons for the games, their backers, and the philosophy that holds them together, they’ve been mostly bullshit.
Led by Hwang In-ho, the Front Man and winner of the in-universe 2015 games, as well as the brother of police detective and longtime Gi-hun ally Hwang Jun-ho, the games are a decadent horserace for the ultra-rich, founded by the disguised season one contestant Oh Il-nam to amuse himself and his billionaire friends after money apparently made them too bored to derive any meaning from life.
Evil Without Autotune
Setting aside the ridiculousness of this premise (nobody suddenly loses the will to live in the absence of financial stress, and rappers do not write troubled odes to their own affluent ennui), when we actually see some of the VIPs sponsoring the games in the back-half of season 1, it’s basically the same old crowd of obese middle-aged white dudes (and one random Chinese? Russian? Accent?) in bathrobes and tiger masks one would expect in a show like this. Faced with this unimaginative, essentially 20th century poor person’s perspective of what supervillain wealth looks like in the 21st century [rhymes with “tusk”], I never had much hope or interest in the “big picture” elements of Squid Game, and as season 2 went on it was easy to get annoyed at some of the newly stone-faced Gi-hun’s talk-offs with the Recruiter, the Front Man, and anyone else who defended the games as merely a useful outlet for eliminating societal “trash”.
In a system where those who fund and administer the games are conspicuously trash themselves, the doggedness with which the villains, notably Hwang In-ho, attempt to justify their actions’ blatant hypocrisy fell flat for me again and again in the latter season. Men lie to each other and lie to themselves when they’re hellbent on doing evil, and at its most successful, Squid Game represents this with vigor, at no time more so than in Seong Gi-hun’s Russian roulette stand-off with the Recruiter in season 2 episode 1, one of the best set pieces in the entire series. Yet while the Recruiter’s psychopathic decision to commit suicide rather than kill Gi-hun and admit defeat is shocking, we rarely get this level of clarity.
The Front Man
Even once its revealed that Hwang In-ho originally entered the games to save his wife from cancer and that he seems to be lashing out in disgust at society after being fired on false accusations of bribery, this seems far too flimsy a premise, or at least an insufficiently articulated one, to explain his choice to manage and defend a system of mass murder for years on end.
If Oh Il-nam was simply bored, Hwang In-ho’s motives remain unclear to me even this far into the series. Does he view himself as defending society, “cleansing” it of corrupt elements, or does he want to watch it burn? It’s a testament to Lee Byung-hun’s gravitas as an actor and the sense of power and restraint that he finds in the role that the Front Man never devolves into a cartoon villain despite remaining more obscure or one dimensional than he should at this point in the story. Besides, “people are scum, society is scum, the degenerate, oppressed gamers deserve a free shot at success (but also deserve to die)”, the entire ideology of the games still feels like a storyboard. It’s largely due to Lee’s sense of decorum—his ability to depict a calm, reasonable, and even empathetic exterior, something like a no-nonsense high school math teacher harboring a capacity for brutal violence, that the character coheres.
Ultimately, Squid Game feels more of-the-moment than for all time, a franchise that blew up partly due to novelty and partly due to weak competition when it arrived in the middle Covid-19 pandemic. At its best, it’s been capable of gripping drama, but besides providing prove of concept for the success of better foreign-language shows like Shogun, its legacy is likely to be ephemeral. The Path will return with an episode-by-episode review of. Squid Game 3 when it drops later this year.
Photo credits: Netflix
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