Season two reviews range from ‘Sensational’ to ‘a disappointment’

Season two of Squid Game has received reviews as mixed as a Christmas selection box, with TV reviewers calling it everything from “sensational” to “a failure”.

The Guardian said that after a rather slow start, the returning series eventually turns into “TV that will really make you uncomfortably bloodthirsty”.

While the Times described it as a “layered and nuanced story of revenge and redemption”.

Netflix’s most popular original show returned to our screens on Boxing Day with main character Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) – aka Player 456 – back for more, three years after his victory in the deadly series of children’s games.

*This article contains spoilers*

The first season of the South Korean drama followed a group of 456 people, desperate and in debt, fighting to the death for a huge cash prize.

This time, the former winner is joined by hundreds of new competitors, whom he tries to guide to safety.

The new episodes find the protagonist “hell-bent on seeking revenge on the super-rich puppeteers who engineered its deadly spectacle,” according to The Guardian’s Rebecca Nicholson, who awarded three stars.

But the early episodes “feel like delaying tactics”, she added, “and given that this is Squid Game, it’s all pretty common”.

“When we get into the actual games, the grand K-drama finds its feet,” she noted. “But it spends far too many episodes dragging its heels extremely painfully.”

Series three, which is already in service for 2025, “must do better”, she concluded.

“For all its unevenness, especially as it warms up to the real action, there’s one big twist that really works, although it’s unclear if it’s separate enough from what happens in the first series,” wrote Nicholson.

“And when you think you know where it’s going, it veers off course, ups the ante and finds its feet. What a shame it’s taking so long to get there.”

The first series, which the Times’ Tim Glanfield notes was billed as a “dystopian commentary on the ills of late-stage capitalism,” became Netflix’s biggest series launch ever — streamed by 111 million users in its first 28 days.

The Times critic offered four stars for season twoand said: “The key to the success of this sensational return is the careful and thoughtful pace, combined with hints of light in the gruesome shadow.

“While the obvious temptation is to throw the viewer straight back into the horror arena, with 456 new breathless players being manipulated and mutilated in increasingly creative ways (don’t worry, there’s plenty to come), the first few episodes confidently explore life on the outside.”

He added: “This is a story of revenge and redemption: more layered, more nuanced and more complex than the original series.”

The Telegraph’s Ed Power gave season two just three stars however, comparing it to “the equivalent of a difficult second album from an overnight pop star”.

“It has much of what you loved about the first squid game, from 2021, but has little interest in surpassing, much less subverting, its predecessor”.

Another series wasn’t always on the cards. At one point, creator Hwang Dong-hyuk swore off making another, as the stress of the first had seen him lose quite a few teeth.

Like the characters on the show, he seems to be in season two primarily for the money.

“Even though the first series was such a huge global success, I honestly didn’t earn much,” he told the BBC. “So doing the second series will also help compensate me for the success of the first.”

“And I wasn’t quite done with the story,” he added.

His dark commentary on wealth inequality struck a chord with audiences across the globe.

But after killing off almost every character, Hwang had to start from scratch with a new cast and set of games, and this time high audience expectations.

The Independent’s Annabel Nugent said she thinks the director got it right with his approach, gives the new series four stars.

“Squid Game season 2 isn’t nearly as shocking as the first – but isn’t that supposed to be?” she wrote.

“It’s impossible to repeat the shock of the first season, and writer Hwang Dong Hyuk would do well not to try.”

Among the new characters for the game, Nugent noted, are “No Eul, a North Korean defector forced to leave her baby behind,” “Gyeong Seok, an amusement park cartoonist who needs money to pay for his daughter’s cancer treatment,” and “Myung Gi, a former YouTube star and crypto bro who lost his money in a scam”.

Squid Game stalwart Seong Gi-hun tries to help them, as well as “a young pregnant girl hiding her growing belly under her baggy tracksuit” and “a transgender ex-military officer hoping for a new, more accepting life in Thailand” .

“Where the first series relied on shock for terror, with each death landing like a heavy blow to the back of your head, season two derives terror from what we know as returning audiences and places Gi Hun once again as our surrogate,” Nugent wrote .

“He also knows what’s coming next, and even with that knowledge, he’s powerless to stop it.”

She added, “Removing the shock and removing the mystery of anchoring Season 1 is a risk, but one that allows Hwang to lay bare his show’s stark anti-capitalist message.”

The Hollywood Reporter’s Daniel Feinberg called season two “a thorough letdown”.

“It’s not a basic level where the Squid Game is broken, but season two just doesn’t work.”