Reviews of Squid Game: Season Two range from ‘thrilling’ to ‘a letdown’

Season two of The Squid Game has received mixed reviews, as has the Christmas selection box, with TV critics calling it everything from “thrilling” to “a disappointment”.

The Guardian said that after a fairly slow start, the comeback eventually turned into “TV that will make you really thirsty for blood”.

While the Telegraph described it as “a layered and nuanced tale of revenge and redemption”.

Netflix’s most popular original show returns for more on Boxing Day, three years after its triumph in the deadly children’s sports series with protagonist Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) – aka Player 456 -.

*This article contains spoilers*

The first season of the South Korean drama featured a group of 456 people, desperate and in debt, fighting to the death for a huge cash prize.

This time, the previous winner is joined by hundreds of new rivals that he tries to guide to safety.

The new episodes see the main character “hell-bent on revenge against the very wealthy puppet masters who engineered his deadly spectacle”. Rebecca Nicholson of the Guardian, who awarded three stars.

But the early episodes “feel like delay tactics”, he added, “and considering it’s a Squid game, that’s all too common”.

“When we get into the actual games, the devastating K-drama takes over,” he noted. “But it spends too many episodes dragging its heels in the most painful way.”

Series three, which has already started for 2025, “should do better”, he concluded.

Nicholson wrote, “For all its unevenness, especially when it’s warming up to the action proper, there’s one big twist that really works, though it’s not clear what happened in the first series. It’s quite different,” Nicholson wrote.

“And just when you think you know where it’s going, it goes off its pace, ups the ante and finds its feet. What a shame it took so long to get there. It seems.”

The first series, which Tim Glanfield of The Times noted was seen as “a dystopian commentary on the evils of late-stage capitalism”, became Netflix’s biggest series launch ever – its first 111 million users streamed in 28 days.

The Times critic offered four stars for season two.Saying: “The key to the success of this sensational comeback is a clever and deliberate move, combined with hints of light within the haunting shadows.

“The obvious temptation, though, is to throw the viewer straight into the realm of horror, with 456 new breathing players being manipulated and distorted in ever more creative ways (don’t worry, there’s more remains), the first few episodes confidently explore life outside.”

He added: “It’s a story of revenge and redemption: more layered, more delicate and more complex than the original series.”

Ed Power of The Telegraph gave season two only three stars. However, he compared it to “an overnight pop star’s difficult second album”.

“It has a lot of the things you loved about the pre-2021 Squid game, but little interest in surpassing its predecessor.”

Another series wasn’t always on the cards. At one point director Hwang Dong-hyuk swore against making another one, given the strain of the first one that had seen him lose a lot of teeth.

Like the characters on the show, he seems to be in season two mainly for the money.

“Even though the first series was such a huge global success, I honestly didn’t make much,” He told the BBC. “So doing the second series will also help me compensate for the success of the first series.”

“And I haven’t completely finished the story,” he adds.

His dark commentary on wealth inequality struck a chord with audiences around the world.

But after killing almost every character, Huang had to start from scratch, with a new cast and set of games, and this time with much higher audience expectations.

Annabelle Nugent of The Independent said she believed the director inspired her with his approach, Awarding the new series four stars.

“The Squid Game Season 2 is nowhere near as surprising as the first – but isn’t that the point?” He wrote

“It’s impossible to replicate the shock of the first season, and writer Hwang Dong-hyuk would do well not to try.”

Among the new characters, Nugent noted “No Evil, a North Korean defector forced to leave his child behind”, “Gyeongseok, a theme park cartoonist who needs money to treat his daughter’s cancer; ” and “Myung Gi, a former YouTube star and crypto bro who lost his money in a scam”.

Also “a young pregnant girl who hides her growing belly under her baggy tracksuit” and “a transgender ex-military officer hoping for a new, more accepting life in Thailand”.

“Where the first series relied on the shock of horror, with each death landing like a sharp blow to the back of your head, season two gets the terror from what we as returning audiences know, Gay.” positions Hun as his surrogate once again,” Nugent wrote.

“He also knows what will happen next and yet even with that knowledge he is powerless to stop it.”

He added: “Removing the trauma and peeling back the mystery that anchored the first season is a risk, but one that allows Huang to deliver his show’s fiercely anti-capitalist message.”

The Hollywood Reporter’s Daniel Feinberg Season two has been called “a complete debacle”.

“It’s not some basic level that Squid Game is broken, but season two just doesn’t work.”