In 2021, Netflix’s miniseries Squid Game immediately established itself as one of the most upsetting television series ever made — and one of the best. The South Korean show’s new second season is a needless and unsatisfying, if sometimes interesting, coda to one of the most important television series of the streaming era. Three years after the original, which was not made with a sequel in mind, this season attempts to build out Squid Game’s world, both retreading — sometimes too much — and deepening it. 

The first Squid Game was gripping, creative, and unforgettable — an ultraviolent, even traumatic, refreshing of the tired dystopia genre, populated by three-dimensional characters and laced with sharp social critique. The series followed a down-on-his-luck Korean man, Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae), whose gambling problem had left him in hock to a scary gangster and fighting for custody of his daughter with an estranged ex-wife. One evening, a mysterious man dressed like a salesman (Gong Yoo) approached Gi-hun in the street and challenged him to a simple wager; the Faustian outcome saw Gi-hun drugged, kidnapped, and taken to a secret island complex.