The most interesting character in Squid Game is not the one you think

Raise your hand if you’ve personally been a victim of Gong Yoo—or better yet, if you still want to be after watching the first episode of Play octopus Season 2. Fans of the first season of Play octopus—Netflix’s nonviolent South Korean drama series that became a global phenomenon—may remember the character known as the salesman or the recruiter—he’s the smart guy in the suit, played by famed South Korean heartthrob Gong Yoo, who embodied the first glimpse of the brutal anti-capitalist metaphor in the heart of the show by cracking down on their lucky losers ddakji in metro stations. The Recruiter (and Gong Yoo) quickly became the Internet’s new “problematic favorite”—a natural conclusion for a character who uses physical violence to test the limits of future Squid Game players’ desperation while resembling, and embodying, the charisma of one. of today’s most swoon-worthy actors. Although he only had a few minutes of screen time in Season 1, The Recruiter went on to inspire articles with iconic headlines like Vulture’s “So you want Gong Yoo to beat you. Now what?” To answer that title question, you can now watch Gong Yoo’s acting chops sparkle as the recruiter in an even bigger role in the first episode of Play octopus season 2, “Bread and Lottery.”

Season 2 of Play octopus picks up right where we left off, where player 456, Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae), chose to use his newfound fortune to go after the organizers of the games instead of reuniting with his daughter. Now Gi-hun is back in the games, but this time he joins an attempt to kill the leader known as the Frontman, theoretically chopping off the head of the Squid Games hydra and ending the games forever. During his pursuits we meet another cast of desperate characters competing for money to help them out of their predicament. Meanwhile, our good cop from season 1, Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon), joins Gi-hun in his plan to take down the organization, but without revealing that he actually found the frontman in the season 1 finale – which coincidentally is Jun-ho’s long-lost brother, In-ho. Where season 1 grappled with the corruption caused by capitalism, season 2 considers whether one man can lead a revolution to stop it. But because the show was renewed for a second and third season early on, it’s clear that we’ll have to wait at least season 3 to see if Gi-hun successfully manages to be the hero he always saw himself as.

However, we don’t get to all of this without first meeting our favorite colorful, game-loving villain again. The Recruiter is Gi-hun’s only lead in gaining an audience with the frontman, so Gi-hun spends the two years since he won the matches tracking down the Recruiter by hiring the same loan sharks he was in debt to in the first season to search every subway station, every single day, for a man in a suit with a fancy briefcase who beats people while playing a child’s game. That is, until the leader of the loan sharks, Mr. Kim (Kim Pub-lae), and his second-in-command, Woo-seok (Jeon Seok-ho), finally find him.

This time we see the Recruiter walking across the ground and buying some bread and lottery scratch cards. He then goes to a park and offers the homeless and poor a choice: the lottery ticket or the bread. As the dozens pick the lottery cards, the Recruiter—in a great moment of recklessness played so casually by Gong Yoo it sounds like dark humor—offers each a coin to scratch their card, but demands it back when they all lose. Then he stands in the middle of the park and dumps all the unclaimed bread on the ground. In a high-angle shot showing the six-foot-tall actor towering over those he considers lesser than, he tells them, “I’m not the one who threw these away. It was you, ladies and gentlemen,” before stomping on the pile of bread Han jumping on it, throws what looks like a tantrum, his fancy shoes nearly slipping on the glutinous mush as he screams with exertion. This is the first time we’ve seen him lose his cool, before slicks his hair back and rearranges his suit with Joker-like glee when he’s done. Don’t worry though. Soon he becomes a complete clown.

The recruiter ends up apprehending both Mr. Kim and Woo-seok, tie them up and force them to play a game of course. The game is one modified version of rock paper scissorsand the loser must then face their odds on the other end of the Recruiter’s revolver in a game of Russian Roulette. It is not until the recruiter finally gets his kill – when Mr. Kim sacrifices herself for Woo-seok – that he seems content. He quickly finds Gi-hun’s hiding place, where he waits for the vengeful winner while nonchalantly drinking banana milk. It is upon Gi-hun’s arrival that we get the backstory of this psychotic villain, which surprisingly is Gong Yoo’s first time playing the type. He started out as a worker in the games, removing and burning the bodies of those who lost, seeing them as “just trash, completely useless in this world.” After working hard for a few years, he was promoted to masked executioner. Then, while killing people during the games, he came face to face with his father, who had lost, begging him to spare his life. He brags to Gi-hun about shooting his father without hesitation when he realized he was “cut out for this job.”

What angers the recruiter, who seems unmoved by Shakespearean-level tragedies, is Gi-hun, who believes that he is special, or more generally, that human life is special at all. When Gi-hun constantly refers to the recruiter as a dog, Gong Yoo skillfully portrays a man whose favorite place to be is on the verge of losing his mind. The recruiter challenges our hero to another game of Russian roulette, this time without turning the revolver and resetting the odds. Each man passes the gun between them and pulls the trigger. One of them will die within six tries, even though the recruiter looks like he’s on a high.

The thrilling face-off between Gi-hun and the Recruiter that ends the first episode isn’t about who wins (we know star actor Lee Jung-Jae is in the season for an extended period), but about the kind of humanity that that can exist in these systems – the kind that keep the systems going. Play octopus is about regular-regular people with morals who either stick to them or give them up for cash or power—or who have left their morals behind for so long that they’ve forgotten them entirely (like the frontman, In-ho. ) It’s a story about how capitalism creates these kinds of people and scenarios, amplified even more this season by the presence of a former crypto-influencer YouTuber who convinced his followers to invest in a cryptocurrency that crashed down, leaving him and many of his followers (some of whom are stuck fighting him) in massive debt.

But the show benefits from having characters whose morals are governed not by understandable circumstances or character development, but by a different set of rules: chaos for chaos’ sake. Or, in the case of the recruiter, just the opposite: someone who loves clarity– winners and losers that are considered with simple, adjustable terms that cannot be argued, discounted or misunderstood. He loves the odds, even if they are stacked against him.

When it’s clear that the recruiter will lose, Gi-hun repeats the suited man’s taunts back to him, giving him a release if he’ll admit that he’s “nothing more than their dog.” Instead, the recruiter just smiles, the satisfaction of an insane job well done playing out on Gong Yoo’s face, before hastily and shakily placing the gun under his chin and firing. The recruiter isn’t just the most captivating character because he’s handsome or because he’s Gong Yoo—though those two things play a crucial role in his ability to get people to trust him enough to play his silly game—but because his character’s motivations are less complicated. Ruled by chaos, villains with codes are exciting even if they are destructive. There is something so striking about a person with a different sense of ethics who was not bullied, beaten and broken into like that, but born under a different understanding of the accepted parameters of life.

Kicking off the season with the Recruiter’s story is also poignant for the show’s central metaphor. It gives the show the chance to initially emphasize Gi-hun’s point that they’re all still slaves to the game and its organizers, whether they’re holding a gun or an invitation to play. As a metaphor for capitalism, the Recruiter’s story reminds us that no matter how far we work our way up the system’s ladder, we are exploited if we are not in the VIP room. Gi-hun reminds the Recruiter that in the end they will all be taken advantage of –to is the great equalizer. It’s just a shame we had to lose Gong Yoo to see the.