‘Squid Game’ Season 2 Episode 2 Recap: Back in the Game

For a director whose signature achievement is capturing claustrophobically cheery sets, Squid Games‘ Hwang Dong-hyuk has a hell of an eye for exterior shots. An amusement park, a hospital, a bridge underpass, even Gi-hun’s run-down Pink Motel: They’re all given a real sense of scale, color, drama by Hwang’s camera. Even given how gorgeously creepy all the interiors are once we get to the island and its game complex, I’ll still miss the view.

At this point, we seem to be headed back to the island sooner rather than later. Following the suicide-by-game of the Recruiter, Gi-hun deals with his two other visitors, concerned cop Jun-ho and terrified loan-shark henchman Woo-seok, whom the Recruiter kidnapped and stashed in a motel room while he conducted his lethal business with Gi-hun. 

Woo-seok, who never met Gi-hun in person before and only sort of believed the whole story about the island and the Game, becomes a true believer after his encounter with the Recruiter and seeing Gi-hun’s massive, Walter White–style stack of cash. Devastated by the death of his boss, Mr. Kim, a close friend who gave his own life to save him, Woo-seok is now as dedicated to the cause as Gi-hun.

Jun-ho, who nearly arrests Gi-hun for murdering the Recruiter until Woo-seok brains him from behind with a fire extinguisher, reminds Gi-hun they met in that brief interlude between games last time. He also reveals he was undercover on the island itself, in search of his brother In-ho. He does not reveal that In-ho is the same black-masked Front Man for whom Gi-hun is searching, for obvious reasons. 

But Gi-hun isn’t out to kill the Front Man — he wants the men the Front Man is a front for, the so-called VIPs for whose entertainment the games exist. To this end, he has Woo-seok hire a team of ex-military mercenaries to support himself and Jun-ho in the hunt. They conduct target practice in a cavernous series of rooms hollowed out for this purpose by Gi-hun, the reveal of which is one of the episode’s most fun moments. And they’ll track his movements via a device implanted in a fake tooth in an act of unauthorized dentistry, another of the episode’s most fun moments. (For certain definitions of fun, anyway.)

Everything does not go according to plan. Gi-hun and Woo-seok go to a nightclub to which the mysterious game masters send them on Halloween night, with Jun-ho and the mercenaries close behind. But all the surplus masked and costumed revelers make it easy for pink jumpsuited game minions to take Woo-seok down and lead Gi-hun to a waiting limousine that whisks him away. Jun-ho and the mercs pursue, but between a sniper and a small explosive device, the tires of their vehicles get taken out, preventing them from continuing the chase. 

This leaves just Gi-hun, locked in a stretch limo, talking to a voice emanating from a speaker in the shape of a golden piggy bank. (This show is not subtle, but neither is the world, so who am I to complain?) He verbally spars with the disembodied voice of the Front Man, who indeed congratulates him on improving his way with words in the two years since last they spoke. The games will continue, says the voice from the pig, until the world that has created the class disparities that drive the game changes. Gi-hun vows he’ll make it do so…if they put him back in the game. 

Knockout gas spreads through the limo, and the divider rolls down, revealing the Front Man in the passenger seat. This is all done through a haze of pink — again, it’s very Nicholas Winding Refn, and again, that’s a high compliment in my book.

Here’s where things get really interesting from a conceptual perspective. Much of Jun-ho’s time this episode is spent reckoning with the dilemma that landed In-ho in the Game in the first place: insurmountable medical debt incurred by attempting to treat his sick wife, who wound up dying anyway. How do you go from being a guy willing to sacrifice anything to save the woman he loves, to the guy who serves up those human sacrifices in the first place?

We may be about to find out. Half of this episode is dedicated to a new character, No-eul (Park Gyu-young). Much like Sae-byeok, one of last season’s standout characters, she is a North Korean defector, though she went the extra mile of fragging her commanding officer in the process. She left behind a one-year-old daughter, but the same broker who worked with Sae-byeok last season — and who’s now trying to help Gi-hun get her mom across the border too — says there’s really no hope that the infant son of a traitor is still alive without her parents. (What happened to the dad is unclear, though he was in the military, which makes me wonder if he was the commanding officer she killed.)

No-eul now works at an amusement park as a costumed character, sleeping rough in her car in the parking lot at night and occasionally making half-hearted suicide attempts. Despite her chilly demeanor to the other employees, she’s a delight to the children there — especially to little Na-yeon (a preposterously adorable Park Ye-bom, the breakout star of the year), the cancer-stricken daughter of a fellow employee. The little girl loves the pink bunny so much that she bursts into the dressing room (there’s a hilarious shot where they all quickly put their masks back on so as not to freak her out) and gives her a little drawing of the two of them together. It’s beyond cute, for real.

But when Na-yeon becomes gravely ill, No-eul accepts a mysterious invitation extend to her by a mystery man, in the form of a familiar brown business card. She arrives at a bridge underpass, and steps into a changing room in the trailer of an 18-wheeler…where she puts on an equally familiar pink uniform. 

So the game masters prey upon the poor and desperate when they need both players and killers. That tracks with what we’ve already seen: Remember the subplot last season about the pink guys who were in cahoots with a crooked doctor to sell organs and make extra cash? It’s clear that while there may be people like the Recruiter for whom sadism is its own reward, at least some of the pinks are in it for the money, at least at first. Rich people, pitting the working class against itself, training some to kill others in order to consolidate their own ill-gotten gains? Thank goodness this is only make-believe.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.