In an early episode of Squid Game 2, the series’ working-class hero Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) is summoned to a dance club on Halloween night. Weaving among revelers dressed as sexy nurses, cops, and skeletons, he eventually spots the masked figure he’s been pursuing, clad in the hot-pink tracksuit of a Squid Game guard. The scene may well be a nod on the part of creator Hwang Dong-hyuk to the ubiquity of Squid Game Halloween costumes in 2021, when the holiday fell roughly six weeks after Netflix’s Korean megahit debuted and quickly became the platform’s most-watched series of all time. Regardless of Hwang’s intentions, the immediate connection that fans will surely make between this moment and the show’s instant commodification speaks to how drastically the latter phenomenon has shifted its meaning.
Squid Game—you know, the blood-spattered thriller about how capitalism pits desperate people against one another in a battle royale for the entertainment of depraved elites—has been a brand for as long as it has been a global sensation. Viewers buy Squid Game merch, pay to participate in Squid Game simulations, and tune in to Squid Game spin-off reality competitions. When you consider that the show is a product of the world’s biggest streaming service, this trajectory is as predictable as it is ironic. But now, as the long-awaited second of three planned seasons premieres, it’s clear that the Squid Game-industrial complex has undermined Squid Game the work of political art, in ways both tangential to Hwang’s storytelling and intrinsic to it.
When we last saw Gi-hun, the guilt-ridden victor had been en route to the airport to reunite with his young daughter in the U.S. when he spotted Squid Game’s recruiter (Gong Yoo) approaching new victims in a subway station and realized he couldn’t just walk away with his 45.6 billion won. So much for a fresh start. In a brief intro to the Season 2…
