Welcome back, my friends, to Midweek Movie Marathon. This week I’ll be discussing and dissecting Squid Game Season 2.

After racing through the first season I was excited for the second expecting the same tense thriller that I so enjoyed from the first and although it was there it couldn’t hold a candle to the emotional wreckage of the first season.

For those who haven’t heard of Squid Game, it’s a South Korean thriller/horror series released in 2021 to international success on Netflix. The story follows hundreds of people in crippling debt who receive an invitation to join the mysterious Squid Game to hopefully escape their financial struggles. What they don’t know is that this isn’t any normal competition, it’s a series of Korean childhood games where losing means death. 

When I started watching Squid Game I wasn’t sure what I was expecting, but the emotional connections to characters and the gripping nature of the show was surprising. As the characters traverse the horror of the games, you get to see their’ true colors shine through. At the beginning, everyone is fresh and naïve but as the show goes on their motives move beyond just the cash. I thought the plot and pacing was fantastic and aside from the main plot of the games there is the side plot featuring an undercover cop among the guards which may have been my favorite part of the show. 

The second season follows where the last season left off and the first few episodes are focused on setting the stage a few years after the events of the first season. Although I really enjoyed the second season, I didn’t think that it carried the same emotional weight. This was in part because the season felt incomplete. The first season was a complete story neatly packaged into 9 episodes while the second season is half a season. This is due to it being split to make a third season releasing this summer. Without the second half of the story everything felt too light. The characters still felt fresh and unaffected by the games and major characters from the first season have yet to make a reappearance. 

All of this isn’t to say I didn’t like the second season, I did, it was funnier and the team connections felt more genuine. I also greatly enjoyed the games chosen for the second season. Even though they aren’t all shown due to the aforementioned splitting of the seasons,  the ones that are were engaging and horrific. What the first season didn’t provide that the second season does is a guard perspective. I thought pulling back the curtain into the guard’s life was so interesting because it showed them as human rather than mindless murder robots and gave the audience a moral struggle to contend with. Because although they are part of the system, they were also picked out of debt. I hope that in the third season it elaborates more on the selection process for the guards. 

Overall I really enjoyed both seasons and I’m excited for the third but without it the second isn’t living to its full potential.