Squid Game screws up its season-two finale

Things Squid Game has proven that it’s good at, in what are now two “full” seasons on the air: Creating tension. Sketching in a ton of characters in succinct ways that nevertheless make them feel recognizably human. Crafting playroom sets that carry a genuine air of the unsettling. Serving human stories reliably in the margin of big marquee moments. Making a bunch of grown-ups in jumpsuits playing children’s games look thrilling, horrifying, and cool.

One thing Squid Game has not proven it is good at, during that same period: Being a half-hour-long action movie. Or maybe a video game? “Friend Or Foe,” the unlikely (and unwanted) action climax of Squid Game‘s second season, splits the difference between the two, with our heroes—accompanied by rah-rah action music serving as the nadir of the show’s love affair with distracting music cues—race down corridors, bark out questions about ammo, and dodge literally hundreds of bullets until a narratively required one comes flying at their heads. It’s not just that it’s artless, although it is, or that it goes on way too long, although it does. It’s that it’s silly.

I suspect it might be silly on purpose: That by framing his Empire Strikes Back All Is Lost cliffhanger as a Rambo movie, creator Hwang Dong-hyuk is thumbing his nose at people hoping stoic badass Seong Gi-hun will storm the halls of financial Valhalla and fire a giant bullet straight into Capitalism’s big, moneyed face. But the thing about creating the thing so you can make fun of it is that you’re still creating it, and making it part of your art: “Friend Or Foe” might serve the overall satirical point Hwang is building to across three seasons of Squid Game, but as the conclusion of a seven-episode season of television, it still contains 30 minutes of boring-ass gunplay that abandon pretty much everything that makes Squid Game great.

I’ve gotten ahead of myself, though, as I often do while irritated. We start way back in the men’s room, where Myung-gi is busy stabbing the fork out of Thanos, ultimately fatally. By the end of the brawl, five people will be dead, shifting the voting balance toward the X party by one well-skewered corpse. But the realization that murder is fair game in the Games has the exact same effect here that it had last time, as the already more-bloodthirsty O’s initiate a plan to gerrymander the necks and faces of their political opponents with ruthless efficiency the minute the lights go out for bedtime. (Interestingly, the addition of prize money with every death is almost an afterthought now; the need to beat down the enemy has superseded the desire for cash.)

Gi-hun’s playing a different game, though: Choosing a small strike force (including, critically, his good buddy In-ho), he launches a plan to sacrifice the weaker members of the O faction to the raids so that, when the guards come in to collect the bodies, Gi-hun and his team can seize their weapons and kick off a revolution in full. In-ho, clearly delighted to see his new friend sliding into an end-justifies-the-means mindset, is all for it, and the plan goes off without a hitch—if you don’t count the absolutely brutal murders of a ton of people as a “hitch.” As opposed to the later third-person shooter segments, the raid is classic Squid Game, an absolutely brutal expression of human violence. Notably, we get to see Min-su comprehensively fail to step up and redeem himself, making only a token effort to help Se-mi in a deadly duel with Nam-gyu, and hiding pathetically on his bunk as she bleeds out on the floor.

But Gi-hun and his team get their guns, killing the first few waves of guards, picking up a decent sized score multiplier, and recruiting a few more people to join their ragtag army. (Geum-ja and Jun-hee both stop their respective menfolk from joining in, possibly sensing how poorly this is all going to go.) Breaking out into the wider facility, they end up in a running gunfight with the goons, executing timed reloads, spamming dodgerolls, and hitting the stick-to-cover button as necessary. It’s not like there isn’t anything cool here: It’s interesting to see Hyun-ju in her element, and the sight of those gorgeous, familiar pink staircases being riddled with bullets isn’t without effect or impact. There’s even a tiny amount of room for character work, as the low-key thread of Jung-bae’s sidekick Dae-ho lying about his Marine background sees him ultimately be completely useless in combat, abandoning the revolutionaries in a critical moment as the cowardice overtakes him. If Hwang’s trying to illustrate a wider point here about the outcomes of revolutionary vanguardism—too few resources, too many unreliable souls, too susceptible to betrayal from within—he’s writing an interesting thesis statement; I’m just not convinced it’s good TV.

Because none of these grace notes can get me past the two most damning things about this sequence: The fact that it goes on so incredibly long—so many shots of people popping up or out, firing two bullets, and then dropping back down while a masked guard goes over a railing like an extra in a Wild West stunt show—and the fact that we in the audience know it’s fucked. Dramatic irony has a short shelf-life, and watching In-ho steadily maneuver himself into prime betrayal position, largely for what seems to be his own amusement, gets pretty rancid pretty quickly. We know what’s coming, right down the to final moment, when the Front Man (having suited back up, now that his game is over) points the gun at Gi-hun… and then turns, shoots, and kills Jung-bae to teach his pal a little lesson about what happens when he plays the hero. Lee Jung-jae does his best at selling Gi-hun’s anguish in the moment, but it was dwarfed by my own deep frustration that this was the cliffhanger we were leaving the show on.

Squid Game 2 had a couple of things it needed to do, in order to be considered a success. The baseline one—demonstrating that the core elements that made the first season work weren’t a fluke, and that this twist on the Battle Royale model has legs—is hard to deny. When this season focused on the things the series is undeniably good at (see above list), it was thrilling, emotionally engaging, and hard to look away from. The three games we saw play out were each gripping in their own way, twisting expectations, loading up the tension, and giving that particular mental satisfaction of watching people work out the rules on the fly. (To say nothing of the “Hey, I bet I could do that!” element that’s produced so much enriching reality television in the intervening three years.) The addition of the political angle also enriched the already good job the series has done of tying these action spectacles into the human dramas running all around them; the touch of making players constantly identify themselves with their affiliation visually, with the patches, was an especially strong add. In my last review, I noted that Hwang’s ambitions clearly extend much further than just crapping out a new set of murder games and characters to run through them every two years… But this season also proved that if he did want to do that, he’d be damn good at it.

The show’s more ambitious goals are a much more mixed bag, though. As an exercise in telling a more wide-scale story, of building out the show’s universe in proper sequel fashion… Yeah, not so much. I’ve made a running joke in the Stray Observations out of Choi Woo-seok and Hwang Jun-ho’s boat adventures, traveling around in the outside world trying to find their kidnapped friend and accomplishing absolutely nothing once per episode. But these tension-sapping side stories really do demonstrate how poor the show’s pacing can be when it doesn’t have the rock-solid structure of the Games to keep it in place. “Bread And Lottery” got by on pure disorientation and excitement, but spending two full episodes before bringing Gi-hun back into the Games feels like a major misstep, especially when a series only has seven episodes to work with. (It probably makes more sense when you take season 2 and season 3 as a whole, but, well… Here in 2024, we can’t do that just yet.) As to the effectiveness of the critical or satirical truths Hwang is trying to illustrate, those were also hampered by the bifurcated structure. There are compelling ideas in here, about politics, identity, and the despair that can happen at their intersection; the moments the show got me hardest were when it replicated the feeling of having the political moment slip out from under your feet, realizing that some lurching shift in the brains of the people around you has pulled you (and the people you care about keeping safe) well past the point of no return. Hwang has a potent critical weapon here, and he knows it, and Squid Game’s willingness to directly invoke the horrors of the world it was created in remains one of the best things about it.

But as to a wider statement, well… Who the fuck knows? Gi-hun is still screaming on that blood-stained concrete, and we won’t know what these changes will do to him until 2025. That’s the problem with only telling half a story, when you really have something to say: There’s no way for the full message to get through.

Stray observations

• • BOAT INTRIGUE: Captain Park is a bad guy! Drone guy is dead! Woo-seok is still stupid! Better watch out, next time… on Boat Boys!
• • We get exactly 10 seconds of screen time with No-eul tonight, although a betting man might suggest she’s the one who shot(?) #246 at the climax of the gun battle. Alas, another plot line with no resolution. Again, I’m sure Hwang knows where this story, and this character, are going, it just makes for an unsatisfying season of TV.
• • Genuinely thrilling to hear Gi-hun remind his fellow players who the real enemies are (and later, to see him stop some of the X’s from gunning down the O’s).
• • The shots of the O’s moving through the neon-lit darkness to start the raid are gorgeous.
• • I appreciate that the show never lays out Dae-ho’s faked military history explicitly, but allows the viewer to pick it up through various hints.
• • Games guards are some Stormtrooper-ass marksmen when someone’s shooting back at them, apparently.
• • If I just sat here and listed all the really silly moments in the gun fight, we’d be here all day, so I’ll just highlight Gi-hun running into gunfire to scrounge ammo, hiding behind dead bodies while bullets land all around him, and getting exactly one graze to his arm for his troubles. (It’s possible they were under orders not to hit him, since that would wreck the game, but it’s still very goofy in the moment.)
• • I’m not made of stone, though: Watching In-ho coldly reload his rifle—with the magazine Gi-hun entrusted to him, no less—before finishing off his teammate was pretty good.
• • This being a modern media property in 2024, we end on a mid-credits scene that shows some of our survivors…apparently being forced to play “Red Light, Green Light” again, but now with two dolls? Underwhelming!
• • And that’s a wrap on season two of Squid Game. Despite some problems with its start and stop, I still had a hell of a time tearing into the show’s return: When it’s good, it remains an incredibly compelling blend of high-concept spectacle and human feeling. I’m still excited to see how it sticks the landing…some time later this year.