[HanCinema's Drama Review] "Squid Game - Season 2" Episode 7

At this point, anyone who's wanted to watch "Squid Game - Season 2" has probably already done so, and there's no real reason to tiptoe around spoilers anymore. The final episode of this season is about the "special" game that's prompted by last episode's tie in the vote to go home. Now that everyone is aware of the fact that there's no penalty for killing other contestants, well, what happens next is fairly predictable. Poor Thanos.

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He probably deserved it more than anyone else, but still. This season has been pretty good about showing the more unlikeable characters as products of perverse incentive than their actually being outright bad people. Notably, when Gi-hun's improbable attempt at revolution apparently succeeds, none of the competitors who stay behind try to sabotage the ones who choose to fight. They actually come off as surprisingly grateful that Gi-hun didn't just try to kill them, since it's what they would have done.

Elsewhere, for those who missed the few scenes in the early episodes where we saw Front Man's face, Lee Byung-hun, or player 1, is indeed Front Man, and finally stages his inevitable portrayal. One of the interesting implications of "Squid Game - Season 2" is that these games may well have been deliberately structured under the presumption that Gi-hun would participate in them again. Although really, even granting that, there were a lot of uncontrollable coincidences to get everything to go Front Man's way.

And the silliest such coincidence of all will likely be his undoing. There's not much going on with No-eul and the organ donation subplot, but with Oh Dal-soo's Sea Captain Park finally confirmed as a traitor, I found myself wondering how the organ donation conspirators were planning to smuggle the organs out of the game. Captain Park is the only obvious answer, and his greed seems likely to bring him back to the island eventually even as his main job is to keep Joon-ho as far away from it as possible.

That's entirely speculative, though. As I've noted from the first episode, the power of the game is so ludicrously broadly defined there's no plausible way Gi-hun could defeat it short of a contrivance like that. Front Man certainly makes a decent point at how the action-packed final episode didn't really accomplish much of anything. Frankly, I was surprised that it worked as well as it did. The editing didn't make it clear whether we were looking at flashbacks or speculative flash forwards.

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, Lee Byung-hun, Yim Si-wan, Kang Ha-neul, Jo Yu-ri, Wi Ha-jun. Broadcasting information in Korea: 2024/12/26, Thu on Netflix.