Squid Game Season 2 Recycles The Exact Same Twist From Season 1

The following contains spoilers for “Squid Game” season 2, so proceed at your own risk.

In the long-awaited second season of the Netflix original “Squid Game” — the massively popular South Korean drama centered around a deadly but wildly lucrative game that lures in vulnerable players — the winner the first season’s games, Seong Gi-hun (Emmy winner Lee Jung-jae) makes a surprising decision. Instead of walking away from the games and what’s left of his life in Seoul, Gi-hun doesn’t board his flight to America, and concocts a plan to re-enter the games and expose the entire enterprise. (The enterprise is, of course, gathering 456 players in a mysterious locale and forcing them to play children’s games while shooting anyone who falls short and offering 4.56 billion won as a prize.) This is, at face value, a pretty solid gimmick for the sophomore season of a show that definitely could have been a miniseries. There’s one huge, huge issue, though. Not only does the show stick Gi-hun back into the deadly games, but they repeat a twist from the first season, which feels lazy at best and creatively bankrupt at worst.

I’m being blunt and perhaps a little harsh, and frankly, that’s on purpose! Whatever your feelings about “Squid Game” may be, you can’t deny that the first season is a seriously impressive creative venture from writer-director Hwang Dong-hyuk. Bringing a season 1 twist back in almost the exact same form is an incredibly frustrating move for season 2 of “Squid Game,” so here’s how the show repeated itself and precisely why that feels so bad.

In the first season of “Squid Game,” Gi-hun — before he wins the game and the entire enormous financial prize — is just another bozo on the bus (so to speak), and pretty early in the game, he meets an old man named Oh Il-nam (played by O Yeong-su), who’s player 001. Il-nam’s explanation for why he’s a part of the game is simple and yet devastating: basically, he tells Gi-hun that he has a fatal brain tumor and would rather die in the game than in real life. It seems like he gets his wish during the third minigame, where the players team up to play a marble game of their choice (the twist here is that the loser gets shot, which is the twist in pretty much every single game on “Squid Game”), because Gi-hun takes advantage of the man’s apparently fading mind to trick him into losing. The fact that Il-nam gets shot off camera, though, says everything, and the next time we see him, he’s definitely dying, but conspicuously not dead. Turns out he was sick — that part was true — but he also created the games themselves.

Guess what? In the second season of “Squid Game,” the Front Man — Lee Byung-hun’s Hwang In-ho, who we met in season thanks to his detective brother Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon) — infiltrates the games and plays as number 001. They don’t even change the number up. It’s the same thing all over again! “Squid Game” fans deserve better than the exact same twist we’ve already seen!

Sure, you can make the argument — and I imagine some will — in that this twist is different because the audience knows that the Front Man is actually Player 001, but Gi-hun doesn’t (in season 1, the reveal for both Gi-hun and the audience doesn’t happen until the finale). That doesn’t make this repetition better or any easier to take, because not only is it lazy, it’s almost insulting to just do the exact same thing in season 2 and … what? Think nobody will notice? It’s actually astounding (in a bad way) that Hwang Dong-hyuk did this, largely because the rest of the season has a lot of promise. Several of the show’s new characters are real standouts, including the mysterious and troubled No-eul (Park Gyu-young) and Hyun-ju (Park Sung-hoon), and the new minigames are particularly creative in a really gruesome way (like that carousel game Mingle, which is making me shudder just remembering it). The series deserved better than the same twist again, and this one thing brings season 2 to a screeching halt once you realize they’re just … doing the same freakin’ thing again.

Season 2 also ends on a cliffhanger; in the final moments of the season finale, In-ho uses a walkie talkie to trick Gi-hun into thinking he’s dead and then dons his Front Man apparel so that he can murder one of Gi-hun’s closest friends in front of him. Even this feels underwhelming knowing that, whenever season 3 of “Squid Game” drops, Gi-hun is going to learn that after an old guy tricked him in season 1, he fell for the exact same schtick again. 

“Squid Game” season 2 is streaming on Netflix now.