Squid Game season 2 is nowhere near as shocking as the first – but isn’t that the point?

When Squid Game hit our screens back in 2021, it did so without fanfare or ado – a blood-soaked bolt from the blue that set a new benchmark for TV. Within weeks of its release on Netflix, it became the platform’s most-viewed title in 90 countries. Seemingly everyone everywhere was obsessed with this Korean-language TV show about a deadly game that pits financially struggling people against one another for a shot at ungodly wealth.

This second series, though, is being released under very different circumstances. Not only have three years passed – an eternity in TV time – but the conveyor belt of themed installations, spin-offs and merchandise has stirred up some Squid Game fatigue. Only last year did Netflix itself release a game show based on the fictional tournament, lifting its candy-coloured palette and monochromatic jumpsuits, but leaving behind the whole real-life murder part.

So, can Squid Game capture lightning in a bottle for a second time? Well, yes and no. It is impossible to replicate the shock of that first outing, and Hwang Dong Hyuk does well not to try. Instead, his script finds the horror in witnessing the brutality again, through the eyes of Lee Jung Jae who returns in his Emmy-winning lead role. As reluctant hero Seong Gi Hun, he is easy to root for – all weary-eyed empathy and straight-arrow justice.

It’s been two years since Gi Hun won, and during that time he has devoted his life (and his winnings, kept in piles of cash on a dirty mattress) to taking down the games and the silver-masked Front Man who runs them: an ominous figure we now know to be the brother of Hwang Jun Ho, the detective shot in the chest last season who, it turns out, is not dead and who teams up with Gi Hun early on in this series.

It’s not a spoiler to say their mission takes Gi Hun back inside the arena where he is met with a new and superb ensemble cast. Among them is No Eul, a North Korean defector forced to leave her baby behind; Gyeong Seok, a theme-park caricaturist who needs money to pay for his daughter’s cancer treatment; Myung Gi, a former YouTube star and crypto bro who lost his money (and that of his followers) in a scam; a braggadocious, blue-haired reality TV rapper by the name of Thanos; and a young pregnant girl who hides her growing belly beneath her baggy tracksuit; and a transgender ex-military officer hoping for a new, more accepting life in Thailand. The sob stories here are conventional but sold by compelling and understated performances.

This second season titrates the winning formula of the first: splitting the plot into two narrative strands. There is Gi Hun inside the games, and there is Detective Hwang and his team on the outside searching for them. It is without a doubt inside the arena that the most compelling action unfolds, as Gi Hun watches in sheer disbelief as people choose money over life.

Where the first series relied on shock for horror, each death landing like a brisk whack to the back of your head, season two derives terror from what we know as returning audiences, positioning Gi Hun once again as our surrogate. He also knows what comes next and yet even with that knowledge is powerless to stop it.

Crucially, the series broadens its scope – affording viewers a more prolonged look behind the game’s curtain from the perspective of a guard (or soldier, as we learn they’re called). What is most terrifying of all, Hwang seems to be saying, is how human this whole evil enterprise is. Villains are unmasked, revealed not to be moustache-twirling masterminds but average people themselves.

Stripping away the shock and peeling back the mystery that anchored season one is a risk, but one that allows Hwang to lay bare his show’s stridently anti-capitalist message. Through the weary eyes of Gi Hun, Squid Game doubles down on its damning portrait of unfair economic systems, class stratification – and the illusion of choice. (It is painfully ironic that Hwang said he only returned to make a second series because, for all its success, the first did not make him much money.)

There are surprises along the way. The games are different for one thing and twists abound – the details of which will, with any luck, make it through this weekend unspoiled on (X) Twitter. But mostly series two does not introduce new mysteries as much as it does delve deeper into old ones – not always giving answers, but bringing us along for the ride.

This brings us to the controversial subject of violence of which there is plenty – either to shirk at or relish in depending on your taste for such things. This is, after all, the type of show that takes a game like Russian roulette and asks, how do we make this more tense? But while this season of Squid Game successfully stretches beyond the confines of the first, it excels for many of the same reasons as before, namely its ability to portray our worst qualities – and to really twist the knife when it counts.