Squid Game's fourth episode toys with expectations—and twists the knife

[Editor’s note: The recap of episode five publishes December 30.]

One of the reasons Squid Games‘ Games work so well as a storytelling device is the profound compressing effect they have on narrative. I can expound in this space all I want about the show’s wider goals—its thoughts on the eagerness with which people pass off personal responsibility, the quiet desperation of economic need. But eventually, that timer is going to start to tick. And when it does, some of these people are going to be standing at the line with a rock in their hands, watching the seconds of their life evaporate with each agonizing, awful missed throw. When the time gets short, it’s not going to matter anymore whether you have an X or an O slapped on your chest, why you’re standing there, how much money you owe: The arc of your life, your story, can only extend as far as that next lethal tick.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, because “Six Legs,” the fourth episode of Squid Game‘s second season, is interested in slowing the show right the hell back down, after the frenetic pace of “001.” Most of the episode is spent fleshing out characters who aren’t Gi-hun, giving us more insight into folks like Geum-ja—whose experience as a midwife allows her to spot the pregnant Jun-hee almost instantly—and Jung-bae, who reveals a surprisingly gung-ho attitude after he finds a fellow former Marine to bond with. And most especially that means our infiltrator Front Man, Hwang In-ho, who quickly insinuates himself into Gi-hun’s inner circle with a soulful portrayal of a despairing husband and father. After spending a season and a half stuck in a mask, Lee Byung-hun (a huge star in South Korean TV and film) gets to cut loose here, and his scenes with Gi-hun—which seem to walk back and forth across the line between manipulation and sincerity—are the most riveting parts of the episode. In-ho seems to be genuinely fascinated with Gi-hun’s decision to reject his own victory, even as he’s working to undermine his ability to unite the other players. That’s to say nothing of the fairly brutal thrashing he dishes out to Thanos and his hench-guy Nam-gyu when they start picking another fight with crypto bro Myung-gi, and make the mistake of invoking the Front Man’s kid for an insult: The absolute fury In-ho unleashes on the nihilistic rapper suggests that not everything he’s saying to Gi-hun this episode is absolute bullshit.

Meanwhile, “Six Legs” is also running a series of games with expectations, using a clever dream sequence to dispense with the idea that we’ll be watching the same games as last time get played over again, just with nastier twists. (As is often the case when Squid Game tackles capital P Plot, the show lays it on a little thick with all the feints surrounding the possibility that players will be stuck lick dalgona again, but the reveal of Gi-hun’s nightmare triangle, and the eventual game we do get, are smart enough that I can mostly give it a pass.) “001” got away with repeating a game because it radically altered Gi-hun’s position within it, moving his goal from survival to protection of others. But as the show asks us to once again start caring about other characters—revealing human elements even to shitheads like Myung-gi—it needs to put them all on a more even playing ground. (To say nothing of giving all of us in the audience a new game to get freaked out over, rather than another retread.)

Not that we aren’t still dealing with returning threads from the show’s first season: The soldiers’ organ-harvesting ring, which has been continuing in a more clandestine fashion since it got all those masked dopes strung up three years ago, is still apparently going strong. Not as strong as it could be, though, thanks to No-eul, who knows exactly why some of her fellow soldiers are only shooting to maim when they dispense their eliminations—and is all too eager to hand out the killing blow herself. When she gets called out by her immediate superior—who both recruited her, and is apparently running the ring—No-eul reveals herself to be an apparent true believer in the Games’ nihilistic philosophy, reminding him that she took the job because it’d be a chance at “helping those who feel hopeless by putting them out of their misery.” It’s not every day that a guy looking to steal dead poor people’s organs and sell them off to the highest bidder can come off as the less cold person in a conversation, but, hey: That’s Squid Game for you. No-eul remains the most fascinating of the show’s new characters, and finding out whether her position is one of genuine principle, or just barely-masked sadism, is one of several reasons to keep watching this season.

Speaking of: When game time actually comes, it’s with the reveal that we’ve already gotten to the “divide yourselves into teams” portion of our six-day event. What follows is a familiar series of negotiations, as players jockey with each other for more “valuable” players, and outcasts find themselves united. In-ho sticks himself to Gi-hun, of course, while Hyun-ju ends up on a team with Geum-ja and Yong-sik, plus the bizarre #044, who reveals herself to be a “shaman” named Seon-nyeo. All of whom then get sidelined, as we watch a set of sacrificial lambs utterly fail to complete a six-legged race that requires players to complete a series of childish mini-games in sequence. It’s an interesting meditation on the episode’s themes of blame and passing the buck: Because each player takes on just one of the mini-games, its easy for an individual to kill, not just himself, but four other people, something we watch play out in real time as the hapless #198 continually fucks up a game of Flying Stone. You watch the horrible moment when the knowledge tips over in each player’s mind: “We’ve wasted too much time. We’re going to die.” The shots of piss running down #198’s leg are practically superfluous.

As ever, Squid Game shoots these events with ruthless clarity, a necessity when a game has this many moving parts. In the West, we might not be as familiar with some of the specific tasks on the docket here, but the show lays out the rules swiftly, communicating everything you need to know clearly, and never letting the mechanics get in the way of the drama. Even if you can’t follow every flip of gong-gi, you can follow the faces of the players, the sweat accumulating with each toss and catch. This trial run sets the stakes, and ensures we won’t get bogged down in questions when the characters we actually care about get run through the same gauntlet next episode—while the show’s ability to milk tension out of these incredibly simple tasks remains a huge part of what makes it so compulsive.

Similarly, it speaks to how well-drawn the drama that’s come before worked on me that I was genuinely shocked when “Six Legs” ended on a mid-game cliffhanger, as Hyun-ju’s team prepares to survive the ordeal that just saw ten people get brutally killed. (At least, once No-eul pops in to deliver a couple of helpful finishing blows.) “An hour already? Really?” I thought as the episode-ending cut to black kicked in… followed by the realization that we’re somehow already past the halfway point of Squid Game‘s second season. Partly, that’s just a factor of the show spending two full episodes on setup, but it’s also a consequence of that compression effect I mentioned up top: These last two episodes, which look and feel like platonic Squid Game, get a ton of mileage by allowing character work to play out, and then focusing everything down with the application of life-or-death stakes.  There’s still too many characters around for everyone to get a full layer of depth—a self-correcting problem, natch—but Squid Game doesn’t shirk its responsibility to get us to take these people seriously as people, and the cast is steadily growing on me past the built-in affection for Gi-hun. It has to, after all: The show needs us to care about the cattle when it inevitably starts winnowing the herd.

Stray observations

• • Oh, also: Jun-ho quits his cop job and Woo-seok tells the boat captain all the details of their plan that we in the audience already know about and don’t care about and christ every second away from the Games is interminable; this constitutes the one sentence per review I feel obligated to cover What Jun-ho And Woo-seok Are Up To While The Show Is Busy Happening Somewhere Else.
• • You’re on a short leash, too, “Jung-bae and his new Marine buddy” comedy. Nothing good ever happened with a comical horn soundtrack.
• • It’s been so long since I watched the first season, I’d genuinely forgotten what the crosses on the coffins meant.
• • In-ho wastes no time twisting the knife on Gi-hun, telling him he only cast the final “O” vote because of his confidence in the survivor’s guidance. Between that, Lee byung-hun’s general look, and the casual way he absolutely demolishes Thanos in the fight, In-ho keeps giving me “Mads Mikkelsen as Hannibal” vibes.
• • In case it wasn’t obvious from the failed phone call back in “Bread And Lottery”: Myung-gi is the father of Jun-hee’s baby.
• • I have no idea what jegi is, and refuse to look it up until I’ve watched the next episode, but it clearly involves Lee Jung-jae doing some pom-pom work.
• • #044: Still genuinely unsettling, even now that she has a name.