[HanCinema's Drama Review] "Squid Game - Season 2" Episode 6

The third game, called Mingle here, is straightforward enough. There are fifty rooms, and competitors need to organize themselves into groups of a certain number of people before hiding out in a room within a very short time limit. If the second game was about teambuilding, the third game is about team destroying. There's no good way to form new teams so quickly, and the best move is to abandon people as quickly as possible for the sake of hitting the right number.

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Mingle's a great game in large part because it's so much harder than it sounds. Negotiating new groups takes time and energy that noone has. It's a game where psychotic antisocial behavior isn't just rewarded, it's actually beneficial to other players. This episode did a lot to warn me up to Thanos, or 230 (played by Choi Seung-hyun), an obnoxious drug-addicted rapper who isn't really evil so much as impulsive, and the game brings out all his worst impulses.

Incidentally, by the time "Squid Game - Season 2" has moved on to the next vote, we can see Gi-hun fighting a mounting sense of dread because there's one aspect of "Squid Game" he dares not tell anyone. It's not actually against the rules to murder other players, and the enforcers won't move to stop anyone who tries to do so. In a perverse way, the increased democracy of "Squid Game - Season 2" is what's making the game so much worse than it was in the first season.

It doesn't help that many characters continue to learn entirely the wrong lessons from each round, with survivorship bias leading them to increased feelings of invincibility. It's not just the players stubbornly insisting on continuing the game who do this. It's no longer a spoiler for me to discuss how 333 is 222's ex-boyfriend and the father of her child. But he blows a chance for rapprochement by talking to her about money, a topic she is surely sicked and tired of even thinking about at this point.

Compelling as all this is, there's not very much that's going to be resolved by the next episode and "Squid Game - Season 3" next year is going to have to actually complete the story. Outside the games, nothing much is happening, as is to be expected at this point. I'm just hoping the last episode is going to have a better plot twist about the search team than the one that already seems way too painfully obvious.

Written by William Schwartz

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"Squid Game - Season 2" is directed by Hwang Dong-hyuk, written by Hwang Dong-hyuk, and features Lee Jung-jae, Yim Si-wan, Kang Ha-neul, Jo Yu-ri, Yang Dong-geun, Kang Ae-shim. Broadcasting information in Korea: 2024/12/26~Upcoming, Thu on Netflix.