The second round of Squid Game takes a different, more divisive direction.

Nobody really expected lightning to strike twice. Squid Game’s first season was a cultural detonation – a bleak, brutal satire on late-stage capitalism disguised as a hyper-violent playground. Squid Game 2 arrives with the unenviable task of not just following a phenomenon but also living up to they hype accumulated during the near four-year wait. It does so by pivoting from greed and desperation to the even murkier waters of manipulation and systemic oppression.

Gi-hun, no longer a hapless pawn but a reluctant player in a bigger, nastier game, returns with vengeance in his heart and red dye in his hair. Lee Jung-jae carries the weight of survivor’s guilt and simmering fury as he infiltrates the sinister organisation from within, only to find it less a machine of cruelty and more a hydra of self-preserving corruption. The games are fewer this time around, but they’re more psychologically twisted – less about brute force and more about eroding trust, fracturing alliances, and weaponising democracy itself. The show’s real sadism lies in handing its players the illusion of choice, then punishing them for every decision they make.

Here, spectacle takes a back seat to something nastier. The downtime is where the real games are played, with paranoia infecting every conversation. A rigged democracy cleaves the players into factions, and the show has a wicked glint in its eye as it proves that freedom, in just the right doses, is the perfect poison. The permitted, even encouraged, coup is a masterpiece of malicious design – a slow-motion calamity that leaves you watching through your fingers. The final betrayal doesn’t gut-punch so much as confirm what you’ve suspected for hours: trust is just another commodity to be sold, traded, and ultimately discarded.

The Front Man (Lee Byung-hun) steps out from behind his mask as a ruthless manipulator, inserting himself into the game to steer events from the inside, in a far darker and more malicious way than season one’s Contestant 001. His shifting power plays with Gi-hun provide the season’s dark heart, two opponents locked in a game of brinkmanship and bluff, in a world where survival is just another transaction. Meanwhile, outside the blood-soaked playgrounds, police officer Jun-Ho’s investigation simmers back into relevance. His pursuit of the truth – and his brother is, like him, resurrected as he allies himself with Gi-hun in an attempt to bring down the games. But even this outside effort is dogged by setbacks and unseen interference, a quiet reinforcement that the gamemakers remain one step ahead, reinforcing the suffocating claustrophobia of the games and the creeping, systemic rot of the world beyond them.

There are missteps in Squid Game 2 though. In easing off the relentless pacing and primal stakes of the first season, this run sometimes meanders. The seven-episode count suggests precision, but it still sags in places. Some characters feel like they wandered in from a satirical editorial cartoon – the fallen crypto baron and the disgraced soldier never quite shake off their one-note origins. But the show’s commitment to escalation keeps things on track; it knows exactly when to twist the knife.

The ending doesn’t offer closure so much as a stacked game board, pieces arrange in preparation for a seemingly inevitable checkmate to come. It’s calculated, of course – Squid Game 3 is already locked and loaded, arriving in just six months. Squid Game 2 may lack the raw shock of its predecessor, but it’s shrewder, nastier, and far more unsettling. The real horror isn’t the blood on the floor – it’s the ease with which people become both pawns and predators when the rules are rigged and the stakes are survival itself.