‘Squid Game’ Season 2 reviews are in: ‘Smart, provocative, and twisted,’ but some bemoan ‘excess of narrative’
More than three years after becoming a global sensation on Netflix, Squid Game finally returned for Season 2 on Dec. 26. Did all that anticipation pay off? According to many critics, yes. But not all reviewers are enthusiastic about returning to the game.
As of Thursday, the Korean drama series, about a deadly game to win a fortune, has a generally favorable Metacritic score of 61 based on 23 reviews. Of those, 11 are positive, 11 are mixed, and one is negative. Over on Rotten Tomatoes, where reviews are classified simply as positive or negative as opposed to Metacritic’s sliding scale from 0 to 100, Season 2 is rated 89 percent fresh based on 19 reviews. That disparity between scores suggests that most of the response is favorable but a shy of the first season: 69 on Metacritic and 95 percent fresh on Metacritic.
A few TV journalists are effusive in their praise, though. Michael Ordoña (San Francisco Chronicle) says, “It doesn’t disappoint. Season 2 is smart, provocative, and twisted. It deepens characters, steps up the action and moves the story forward while retaining the first season’s dark absurdity.” Aramide Tinubu (Variety) argues that the second season “mostly thwarts repetitiveness by finding new angles to examine what seemingly ails modern-day Korea: capitalist exploitation, the erosion of morality, and class inequities.” And Meghan O’Keefe (Decider) calls the new episodes “stunning, shocking, heartbreaking, and even exhilarating,” while admitting that it “isn’t quite as good as the spectacular first season.”
Ben Travers (IndieWire) has a more mixed take: “Squid Game Season 2 sure feels like the standard sequel to a Hollywood blockbuster … but there’s fun to be had among the tiring repetition and elongated story arcs.” Rebecca Nicholson (The Guardian) says, “For the first three of these seven new episodes, it struggles to find its purpose. … For all of its unevenness, particularly as it is warming up to the proper action, there is one big twist that really works, though whether it is distinct enough from what happens in the first series is unclear.” Alan Sepinwall (Rolling Stone) says, “Lee Jung-jae‘s performance is as powerful and charismatic as before, as is the production design,” but the new season doesn’t “have much new to say on the subject of income inequality, which is the whole point of this macabre story.”
Judy Berman (Time) is less kind: “The Squid Game-industrial complex has undermined Squid Game the work of political art, in ways both tangential to [creator Hwang Dong-hyuk]’s storytelling and intrinsic to it. … There’s no separating this excess of narrative from the glut of Squid Game derivatives we’ve been sold over the past three years.” And James Poniewozik (The New York Times) claims, “There’s a lot more misery than delight as the season returns us to the games, repeating the bloody spectacle with new twists but the same crabs-in-a-barrel personal dynamics.”
But there’s a good chance Squid Game will be critic-proof. The first season of Squid Game was a worldwide phenomenon, becoming Netflix’s “biggest ever series at launch” according to the streamer’s metrics. And it broke new ground at the Emmys, earning a Best Drama Series nomination and collecting six trophies, a revolutionary feat for a program entirely in a language other than English, an achievement comparable to the Korean-produced film Parasite winning Best Picture at the Oscars. Time may be a disadvantage, though: three years is a long time to wait for new episodes, so the initial thrill might have worn off. And the been-there-done-that feeling expressed in some of the reviews may not bode well the Squid Game‘s awards prospects.
We have seen some drop-off, in fact, in the early awards results for the new Squid Game episodes. The show was nominated for Best Drama Series again at the Golden Globes, for instance, but Lee was left out of the Best TV Drama Actor race. Likewise, the series picked up another Best Foreign Language Series bid at the Critics Choice Awards, but it was snubbed for Best Drama Series this time around. However, those nominations were announced before the new episodes were available to the public.
That said, the Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes scores for Season 2 aren’t that far off from Season 1. Let’s not forget it wasn’t primarily critics who fueled the show’s rise in the first place, so some discontent among TV reviewers may not affect the show’s reception. And if the show is able to capture the zeitgeist again like it was in Season 1, there might be more enthusiasm from awards voters as we head into Emmy season.