The political is personal—and deadly—in a fantastic Squid Game

[Editor’s note: The recap of episode six publishes December 31.]

If anyone tries to tell you that Squid Game isn’t a political show—and I do remember people trying to float that particular lead balloon, back when the series premiered in 2021—feel free to have them re-watch the election sequence in Squid Game 2‘s fifth episode, “One More Game.” If watching the votes tick up on the big board, with the louder, more aggressive side clearly outpacing the other, doesn’t flash you back to moments in your own life when you realized “Oh fuck, the crazies are actually going to win this thing,” well, you’ve had a much less stressful political life than the rest of us.

“One More Game,” with its various callbacks to last season’s “A Fair World,” is full of political allusions, both major and minor. There are the subtle dog whistles the Game Organizers thread into their announcements, most notably when they counter anger about the current state of the prize payout with “We always keep the door open for you to pursue new opportunities”—a vague statement only Gi-hun is primed to recognize as an allusion to the night-time murder sprees that broke out in his previous game. There’s the way players on both sides deploy language like “traitor” to describe people who switched their votes. And most especially there’s the sense of powerlessness that comes from being on the wrong side of a majority-rules democracy, trapped in the passenger seat of a car now barreling straight off a cliff.

At the center of it all is Hwang In-ho—or perhaps I should say “Oh Young-il,” the false name the Front Man gives as he continues to insinuate himself deeper into Gi-hun’s life. It’s In-ho who deliberately tanks his team’s winning run during the Six-Legged Pentathlon, presumably so he can then engineer a later moment where he saves Gi-hun. It’s In-ho who subtly undercuts Gi-hun’s very real warnings that the next game may be deliberately designed to break the team’s newfound sense of solidarity, or pooh-poohs his warnings about the violence the Games can provoke in people. And it’s In-ho who speaks up as a leader of the X faction during the pre-election debate, covertly goading the O party to rally and sweep the board. All of it comes in the voice of reasonable discourse, because that language is one of the weapons the Organizers use to keep their victims in line. But it becomes clearer, with every episode, that this version of the Games has one overarching goal: To allow In-ho to break Seong Gi-hun utterly of his belief that other human beings are worth saving from the systems they create.

And yet, despite all, “One More Game” is also the warmest, and most human, episode of Squid Game‘s second season to date. There are the obvious highs of the conclusion to the Pentathlon, as teams begin genuinely cheering on other players’ survival. (That’ll curdle later, of course, when they’re reminded there’s a direct financial incentive to see other players die, but in the moment, even shitheads like Thanos get in on the joy.) And there are the moments that play out between individual team members, both before and after the voting. This is an especially remarkable episode for actor Kang Ae-shim, whose Jang Geum-ja navigates her complicated feelings about both her son, and Hyun-je’s identity as a trans woman, and becomes one of the only people to ever successfully browbeat a Games guard into some level of shame. It’s a funny, nuanced, heartfelt performance, and a reminder that Squid Game excels at least as much because it works hard not to let the violence and the Games overshadow actual character work as for its grislier elements.

See also the reconciliation between Gi-hun and Jung-bae, after the latter gets seduced by the call for “One more game” and votes O. Deliberately invoking the strike conversation from “A Fair World”—i.e., the moment the audience learned why Gi-hun seemed so willing to slack his way through a world happy to crush him like a bug the moment he tried speaking truth to power—it’s a mixture of funny and genuinely sweet, as we watch Lee Jung-jae let Gi-hun’s mask of world-weariness slip at last. We watched this character mature throughout the first season of Squid Game, but we simultaneously watched him become horrifically traumatized. Two years of obsession have done nothing to untangle those two threads, and watching the irritating but kind goofball hiding under all those dour stares feel safe enough to emerge from his shell for a moment is shockingly sweet. Ditto the moment when Hyun-ju’s teammate Young-mi provokes her to tears by telling her she’s beautiful, or the way Geum-ja comforts the pregnant Jun-hee in a moment of terror. It’s easy to paint Squid Game with the “cynical” brush, but the fact is that this is a show that likes, and loves, human beings. It’s just the mass—the scared, stupid, venal mass—that it gets worried about.

Because part of the reason that the kinder moments of “One More Game” work is because there’s a palpable sense of dread hanging over everything we see. After all, we (and Gi-hun) know that, last time, the Organizers followed the big friendship-forging team game with the marble game, a 50/50 kill rate contest that deliberately pitted friends and loved ones against each other. (We’re also more privy to the cruelty running through many of the guards, highlighted when two of them threaten to rape, mutilate, and murder No-eul if she keeps interfering with their organ-harvesting scheme.) Like Gi-hun, we’ve been trained to be hyper-vigilant, to the point that “One More Game” can feel like an extended exercise in waiting for the other shoe to drop. The horror of knowing that violence could break out at any moment is part of what makes the moments of humanity that happen here land so well—and why I’m genuinely terrified to hit “Play next episode” and see what horrors the Mingle game has in store for us all.

Stray observations

• • Boat report: Jun-ho and Woo-seok now have two boats. What could happen next, in this most riveting of plotlines? Three boats?
• • I think I just need to resign myself to the fact that Squid Game finds goofy music selections much funnier or more interesting than I do; the faux-Jock Jams song and video poker anthems that play during the Pentathlon are a bridge too silly, personally.
• • I could maybe manage ddjaki or Flying Stone, but I’d absolutely die if you made me play gong-gi on a timer; that looks hard as hell.
• • For all that he’s a psychopathic, drug-addled bully, Thanos is remarkably good at managing inter-group dynamics; his cultivation of wallflower player Min-su—who I can only assume is going to turn out to be completely deranged, given how much his “innocence” has been highlighted—is really interesting to watch.
• • The current per-player share: 78,823,530 won, roughly $54,000.
• • Subtle twist: The votes are now mandatory, instead of being called for by the players. Wouldn’t want any of that pesky player unity to build up, right?
• • O leader Im Jeong-dae evolves some interesting new tactics for the latest debate, including pitching the idea that the Games are a meritocracy, so nobody good at them needs to worry: “We’ve all played the games well and are still standing!”
• • Myung-gi votes X this time, presumably because he would like his ex and unborn child not to be brutally murdered. Growth!