Squid Game Season 2 recycles the exact same twist from Season 1

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

U the long-awaited second season of the Netflix original series The Squid Game — a wildly popular South Korean drama centered around a deadly but highly profitable game that attracts vulnerable players — the first season’s game winner Song Ki-hoon (Emmy Award winner Lee Jung-jae) makes a surprising decision. Rather than walk away from the games and what’s left of his life in Seoul, Gi-hoon doesn’t board his flight to America, but comes up with a plan to re-enter the games and expose the entire enterprise. (The company, of course, gathers 456 players in a mysterious location and forces them to play child’s games, shooting anyone who falls short, and offers 4.56 billion won as a prize.) This is, at face value, a pretty solid gimmick for the second season of the show, that’s for sure could be mini-series. There is one huge huge question, however. Not only is the show bringing Gi-hoon back to the death games, but they’re repeating a twist from season one that feels lazy at best and creatively bankrupt at worst.

I’m blunt and maybe a little harsh, and to be honest, that’s on purpose! No matter how you feel about The Squid Game, you can’t deny that the first season is a very impressive creative adventure from writer-director Hwang Dong-hyeok. The return of the season 1 twist is almost at exactly the same form It’s an incredibly disappointing move for Season 2 of The Squid Game, so here’s how the show repeated itself and exactly why it’s so bad.

In the first season of “Squid Games” Gi-hoon—before he wins the game and all the huge cash prize—becomes another fool on the bus (so to speak), and pretty 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 for why he part of the game is simple and devastating at the same time: he basically tells Gi Hoon that he has a terminal brain tumor and would rather die in the game than in real life. It looks like he gets 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 killed, which is a twist in pretty much every single game on “Squid Game” “) because Gi-hoon takes advantage of the man’s apparently fading intelligence to trick him into losing. However, the fact that Il-nam is taken off camera says it all, and the next time we see him, he is definitely dying, but clearly no is dead It turned out that he was sick – it was true – but he too created the games themselves.

Guess what? In the second season of The Squid Game , the main man — Lee Byung-hoon’s Hwang In-ho, who we got to know in the season thanks to his detective brother Joon-ho (Wi Ha-joon) — infiltrates the game and plays under number 001. They don’t even change the number up. Same again! Squid Game fans deserve better exactly the same twist we’ve already seen!

Of course, you could make an argument – ​​and I imagine some will – that this twist is different because audience knows that Front Man is actually Player 001, but Gi-hoon doesn’t (in Season 1, the reveal to Gi-hoon and the audience only happens in the finale). That doesn’t make this repetition any better or easier to understand, because it’s not just lazy, it’s almost offensive just do the same thing in season 2 and…what? Think no one will notice? It’s actually surprising (in a bad way) that Hwang Dong Hyuk did this, mostly because the rest of the season has a lot promises. Several of the show’s new characters are really great, including the mysterious and troubled No-il (Park Kyu-young) and Hyun-joo (Park Sung-hoon), and the new mini-games are particularly creative in a very creepy way (such as the Mingle carousel game, from which I shudder to remember). The series deserved better than the same twist again, and this one thing brings Season 2 to a halt once you realize they’re just… do the same thing again.

Season 2 also ends on a cliffhanger; in the final moments of the season finale, In-ho uses a walkie-talkie to trick Gi-hoon into thinking he’s dead, then dons Front Man’s clothes so he can kill one of Gi-hoon’s closest friends right in front of him. Even this feels amazing knowing that every time The Squid Game Season 3 drops, Gi Hoon finds out that after the old guy cheated on him in Season 1, he’s hit on the same thing again.

The Squid Game Season 2 is now streaming on Netflix.