Like winter, season 2 of Squid Game is coming, and the newly-released first trailer suggests it’s going to up the ante on season 1 — a difficult thing, given the first season’s life-or-death stakes and brutal body count. And it’s going to be just as difficult to live up to the first season’s tremendous promise.
When creator, writer, and director Hwang Dong-hyuk’s Korean import series launched on Netflix in 2021, no one had it pegged as Netflix’s future most popular TV series of all-time, a viral phenomenon that would account for more than 2.2 billion hours of viewing around the world, and for the first-ever Emmy wins for a non-English-language series. The show’s success prompted everything from merch to memes to a reality-series spin-off to a way-too-addictive Saturday Night Live music video.
The trailer for season 2 shows Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) back in the game, literally, after his difficult decisions at the end of season 1 — he re-enters the contest to try to bring it down from the inside, not realizing how hard it will be to get the participants to listen to him, or trust his motives for trying to stop the proceedings.
The themes of distrust, greed, and inability to cooperate or work collectively toward survival were significant and central in season 1. They all contribute to Hwang’s symbolic critique of global capitalism, and the desperation and sense of destructive competition it engenders. He’s made it clear that those ideas will continue through season 2 — and on to his planned series finale, a third season planned for 2025.
And there’s a bit more mystery being teased in Netflix’s summary of Squid Game season 2:
The teaser also shows the return of Lee Byung-hun as the mysterious Front Man, whose true motivations remain cloaked in secrecy, while Wi Ha-jun’s Hwang Jun-ho is back, driving the narrative forward as the relentless detective on a mission of his own.
Squid Game season 2 will launch on Netflix on Dec. 26, 2024. If you’re looking for something to fill the hours until then, though, remember that Hwang Dong-hyuk is also a filmmaker, and Netflix has three of his movies available for streaming.
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