Let the torture porn games begin again

The story behind Play octopus Season two feels like it should be a story in the long-delayed return of the South Korean thriller. The making of the series’ first season – an ultra-violent satire of late-stage capitalism in which financially desperate people compete in a series of children’s games and the lone surviving player will go home with billions in cash – was so difficult and stressful that its creator , Hwang Dong-hyuk, claims he lost “eight or nine” teeth during the first shoot. It was an experience that unsurprisingly left him wary of continuing the series, though he did end things on a cliffhanger back in 2021.

So why did Hwang agree to do more? “Money,” he told the BBC bluntly. “Even though the first series was such a huge global success, I honestly didn’t do much. So doing the second series will also help compensate me for the success of the first.”

Think about this for a moment. We know that streaming ratings are still a black box to some degree, and Netflix has made an art of coming up with inscrutable, completely useless ways to target audiences for various “hit” shows. But by any account — including the streaming giant’s own — Play octopus Season 1 was a massive, massive sensation not only in South Korea but around the world. Yet Hwang earned such a relatively paltry sum that he felt compelled to return to a job that was so miserable, it made his teeth fall out of his mouth. That’s how completely dysfunctional the TV industry has become, like pretty much every other industry at the moment.

Hwang’s circumstances are not quite as dire as those of the players in either season Play octopusback today with seven new episodes. Yet these circumstances are so darkly comical that they are more interesting than many of the backstories given by Hwang and his collaborators to the unfortunate souls who come to the mysterious island. The new episodes are still well-rounded in many ways, though they’ve succumbed to streaming bloat, essentially serving as half a season whose storylines will finish sometime next year. But they never make a strong enough case for their need to exist, unless you understand that Hwang deserves compensation for the suffering he went through last time and for all the money he made for Netflix without previously getting nearly enough of you.

When we last left Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae, who won an Emmy for the role in 2022) — aka Player 456, the winner of the first season’s competition — had decided not to live a life of luxury with his prize money, and instead decided to take down the game by any means necessary, even if it cost him every last penny to do so. The story picks up two years later, and Gi-hun has progressed no further in his quest, failing even to track down the mysterious salesman (Gong Yoo) who recruits potential contestants by challenging them to a game Ddakji on metro platforms. Meanwhile, police officer Hwang Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon), who went undercover on the island in search of his missing brother In-ho – was stunned to discover that In-ho (Lee Byung-hun) was the masked host of the game , The Front Man – conducts a search of the island in parallel with Gi-hun’s investigation. In the end, the two men – and the small army of gangsters and mercenaries Gi-hun has hired with her vast cash reserves – team up.

It takes two whole episodes just to get back to the island. Some of that time is devoted to introducing a new character, No-eul (Park Gyu-young), a North Korean defector who will of course also be involved in the game. Mostly, though, it’s a cat-and-mouse game between Gi-hun’s strengths and the frontman’s. This is not a fair fight, both logistically and dramatically. There’s no point in the show continuing — or at least continuing to follow its original hero — if Gi-hun doesn’t end up back in the game, and Front Man’s operation is inventive and ruthless enough to put your average supervillain to shame. So much of this just plays as a throat-clearer with an extra layer of sadism, like a scene where the salesman forces two prisoners to play a mash-up of Rock Paper Scissors and Russian Roulette. The first season wasn’t exactly kind and gentle, but there was a baroque, caricatured nature to the games that often made their excesses palatable. This, on the other hand, feels like torture porn. (A later episode adds rape threats.)

And once Gi-hun finds herself back in a familiar green tracksuit, the season presents minor variations on the show’s past contestants. Gi-hun ends up playing again with an old friend, Jung-bae (Lee Seo-hwan, who appeared briefly in season 1). There’s another aggressive thug, but this time he’s a wannabe rap star who calls himself Thanos (and is played by an actual South Korean music star, Choi Seung-hyun, aka TOP), and one of the players shows up again to hide their true identity and agenda from the rest. Some of the character types are new to the series, like Hyun-ju (Park Sung-hoon), a trans woman trying to pay for the rest of her gender-affirming surgeries, but almost all of them serve a similar plot function as someone who died in the first season.

Even after we get to the island, the story continues at a relatively leisurely pace, with frequent breaks to show Jun-ho and his team trying and repeatedly failing to reconnect with Gi-hun. A specific game spans multiple episodes. The first season paused the competition once so contestants could conduct a majority vote on whether to go home or continue playing. This season is practically about the vote, and one vote isn’t even resolved in the episode where it’s introduced. Despite the frequent threat of death, season two does not share the relentless quality of the first year.

Still, Lee Jung-jae’s performance is as powerful and charismatic as before, as is the production design. (In some ways, the latter is even more impressive: The seemingly endless day-glo Lego staircase the players use to get from their dorm to the game rooms is somehow bigger than before.) And the games themselves are still remarkable set pieces . Some are familiar because how could the show go on without the iconic red light/green light giant robot girl? Some are new. All of them work as an impressive combination of excitement and underdog sports history. (Hwang very cleverly puts all the most likable contestants on a few teams when there’s a group activity, and also deftly balances skill and confidence levels.) But only three matches in seven episodes — not counting extra-curricular action like the aforementioned Rock Paper Scissors /Russian Roulette — doesn’t seem like enough.

Among the arguments in favor of a second season was the chance to get a better idea of ​​how the game works behind the scenes, and of what has motivated In-ho to become this monster whose entire existence is all his brother wanted stand against. But despite having a new protagonist working on the island, despite a significantly expanded role for Lee Byung-hun, and despite the new season having plenty of padding, we don’t get much further insight into either the operation or its top manager.

Neither does it, for that matter Play octopus has a lot to say on the subject of income inequality, which is the whole point of this macabre story. It’s a social problem that’s only gotten worse since the first season debuted, but the closest the new season comes to acknowledging any sort of shift is the fact that one of the players, the disgraced YouTube influencer Lee Myung-gi (Im Si-wan), bankrupted himself and several of the other contestants by endorsing crypto.

At one point, Gi-Hun and the front man get into an argument about whether the game reflects the worst aspects of modern life or contributes to making things worse. “The game won’t end unless the world changes,” the frontman insists. World hair changed. But Play octopus is more or less quiet Play octopusjust slower and better equipped to supply its creator with any emergency dental work required.

All seven episodes of Play octopus Season two is streaming now. I’ve seen it all.