Lee Jung-Jae returns as Player 456 in the second season of Squid game.
The 2021 Korean series Squid game was a huge hit for Netflix, with 1.65 billion hours watched in its first four weeks and fourteen Emmy nominations. Fans have been craving a second season ever since, and we're finally getting it for Christmas this year. Netflix just released the official trailer.
(Spoilers for S1 below.)
The first season followed Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-Jae, seen earlier this year in The acolyte), a hapless gambler who has little left to lose when he agrees to play children's playground games against 455 other players for money. The twist? If you lose a game, you die. If you cheat, you die. And if you win, you might die too.
“The grotesque spectacle of Squid game is where it gains the most traction, but it resonates because of how recognizable Gi-hun and the rest of the game's participants are,” wrote Ars Senior Technology Reporter Andrew Cunningham in our late 2021 TV roundup. “Alienated from society and each other, driven by guilt, shame, pride or despair, each of the players we get to know is inevitable humanand therefore Squid game is more than just a gory afterthought.
In the S1 finals, Gi-hun faced off against fellow finalist and childhood friend Cho Sang-woo (Park Hae-soo) in the titular 'squid game'. He won their fight, but refused to kill his friend and begged Sang-woo to stop the game by invoking a special clause in their contract that allowed them to live but not get the prize money. Sang-woo stabbed himself in the neck instead and asked Gi-hun to take care of his mother. Wracked with guilt, Gi-hun was about to fly to America to live with his daughter when he saw the game recruiter trying to seduce another desperate person. He didn't get on the plane and instead decided to try to re-enter the game and take it down from the inside.
