Summary of Squid Game: Season 2 Episode 2

(Editor’s note: Recap of episode three will be released on December 28.)

How far can Play octopus come without the games?

It’s a question that’s far from academic for “Halloween Party,” an episode that turns the already slow-burning tension of the show’s second-season premiere down to “positive ice age.” I can and will argue for that Play octopus is much smarter than the simplistic murder games that Netflix’s own treatment of the series so often boils it down to. But it does need them: Need the sense of stakes and structure they provide, the brutal cleverness and, above all, the awful, rising tension of people who know they’re just one mistake from death. Without it, we get, well, this: A few engaging character moments on the sidelines, and a bunch of guys running around predictably while we all wait for the real drama to begin.

Where “Halloween Party” works, it does so from two angles. One is the story of newcomer No-eul, clearly positioned parallel to the first season’s Kang Sae-byeok: Both are North Korean defectors desperate to find people they left behind—even hiring the same broker to try to find them – and both have hardened exteriors that hide a deeper kindness. (No-eul, played by Park Gyu-young, works as a costumed mascot for an amusement park and has a soft spot for an employee’s terminally ill child.) But while Sae-byeok tried to find her parents, No-eul is searching for her own abandoned child and ties into a recurring interest in motherhood that “Bread And Lottery” started with its glimpses of pregnant future contestant Jun-hee. And while Sae-byeok was cleared for inclusion in the Games as a player, “Halloween Party’s” one truly outstanding twist reveals that ex-soldier No-eul is being recruited as one of the organization’s masked guards. (And possibly not for the first time, if her familiarity with the procedures and lack of surprise at being offered a card is anything to go by.) Play octopus hinted that it might be looking more closely at the game organizers’ foot soldiers in the premiere focusing on the recruiter (a former guard himself). It’s a natural outgrowth of the show’s interest in how the game bends all at their service and provide endless justifications for monstrous actions, and it’s a thread I’m excited to see the show pursue.

Our other bright spot is, unsurprisingly, Seong Gi-hun, who we quickly learn has become just a tad paramilitary in his two-year pursuit of the Games’ organizers. The biggest laugh of the episode—despite the sometimes irritating efforts of surviving henchman Choi Woo-seok—comes when Gi-hun takes her new team (which also includes a quickly convinced Jun-ho) through a tour of the dingy motel that became The Batcave, including Gi-hun’s Giant Pile Of Money, his rather massive arsenal, and the live-fire course he’s made out of several unused rooms. But despite both his newfound stoicism and his descent into obsession, Lee Jung-jae hasn’t lost touch with Gi-hun’s inherent humanity. We get glimpses of it throughout, including showing that he has served both of his final contestants’ memories by having Sae-byeok’s little brother happily adopted by Park Hae-soo’s mother, doing the right thing for each of his friends surviving relatives. And the frontman isn’t just bullshitting when he tells his opponent that he’s found new eloquence in shooting down the games’ self-serving rhetoric when the two come (almost) face to face at the episode’s climax. But Lee’s best work comes shortly before Gi-hun embarks on his (very stupid, if we’re honest) plan to try to force a confrontation with the organizers when he calls his estranged daughter and finds himself unable to to speak. For the first time since the show’s return, we see the stone-faced badass persona fall away, and get a real glimpse of the scared, sweet guy it was so easy to root for. Play octopus‘s first electric race.

Outside of those two bright lights, though, “Halloween Party” is mostly just, well, Plot Shit: A lot of time and energy spent on a plan we know isn’t going to work, all so the show can maneuver Gi-hun back into volunteering for another game. It’s interesting to contrast this episode with “Hell,” the seminal second episode of the series first season, which ends in almost exactly the same way: There, the sense of inevitability surrounding everything only added to the dread as the world’s system effortlessly pushed the players back into the waiting arms of the Games. But there’s a weird softening of the show’s world here that takes a bite out of all this, as loan sharks and people-brokers all bend over backwards to do right by Gi-hun. (It’s possible that this is meant as satire on how our hero is inherently treated better by the universe now that he’s rich, but we get standout scenes in both this episode and the previous one of previously changing characters who nobly rejects excess money). The genius of “Hell” was to make a seemingly genuine case that the Games were better than the outside world; sure, you had a 455/456 chance of dying, but at least you had that slim chance, supposedly judged fairly. “Halloween Party” doesn’t have the hook to stick with it, or the ugly sharpness of despair that made the characters’ nihilistic decisions make a grim kind of sense: It just has Gi-hun’s borderline suicidal need to make things. right. And while I’m not immune to the heroism of his sacrifice here – or the way he invokes that little sliver of light the first Play octopus found itself in its final moments — the episodes still lack the satirical bite that this show can muster at its best.

And of course it has no game – not even the temporary ones the recruiter played with in the last episode. “Hell” didn’t have any deadly contests either, but it used that absence to make the real world feel duller and duller, serving the episode’s larger goals. To episode was the Rosetta Stone that made the rest of the series make sense; this one feels, more often than not, like it’s pointless to kill time and make us sit before the show, we all actually logged in to watch can finally begin.

Stray Observations

• • Despite a rough start, the Gi-hun-Jun-ho alliance comes together surprisingly quickly – although Jun-ho still holds back that he knows exactly who Front Man is.
• • Although he has thrown around plenty of money in pursuit of his vendetta, Gi-hun has barely made a dent in his winnings.
• • Choi is mostly just a little annoying, but he gets a good line when Gi-hun considers teaming up with Jun-ho: “You can’t trust the police.”
• • Really funny moment where all the costumed theme park workers instantly throw back their heads and get into character when a kid wanders into their dressing room – contrasted with darkness as the little girl notices No-eul’s scarred wrist.
• • We have a story about Jun-ho and In-ho’s relationship, and the way both he and his mother are still wracked with guilt over In-ho’s disappearance.
• • A small dose of visceral horror as Gi-hun gets a tooth bloody ripped out so he can replace it with a tracking device.
• • I refuse to care about the members of Gi-hun’s goofy private army until the show makes me, and the show isn’t made for me yet.
• • The conversation between Gi-hun and the front man is easily the most riveting part of the episode, but it still gets pretty deep into Just Spelling Out The Subtext Territory at points: “The game won’t end unless the world changes.”
• • “Have you seen The matrix?” is a segue I really didn’t expect from this show.