Squid Game Season 2's Five Biggest Changes From Season 1 Will Shock You

After more than three years of waiting, today the new season of Squid Game is finally on Netflix for our masochistic viewing pleasure. After season one ended with Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae), also known as Player 456, choosing to search for the people behind the game instead of boarding a flight to Los Angeles to reconnect with his daughter, we catch up with him two years later as he’s contracted a group of people to search for The Salesman (Gong Yoo), the man who recruits people into the game. The formerly naive Gi-hun is now a radicalized vigilante with a makeshift shooting range and illegal guns in his hotel room. But, that’s not the only change this season.

Over seven episodes, Squid Game introduces its first transgender character, shows us someone being recruited to be a guard, and turns more children’s games into chaos creators. It’s not all good, as some of the second season’s changes left us yearning for more. But one thing is for sure: these changes make it abundantly clear that we are entering the final episodes of Squid Game as a series. Let’s cherish them while we can.

The central tension of the show has always been rooted in the deadly consequences of playing the show’s twisted versions of children’s games. In the past, Squid Game has turned Red Light, Green Light into a massacre machine, throwing marbles into a breeding ground for lethal deception, and literally put lives in people’s hands with Tug of War. The new season gives still more traditionally harmless games a murderous twist.

Before the season gets to the island for the start of the competition, the Salesman merges double-handed Rock, Paper, Scissors with Russian Roulette. After capturing Woo-seok (June Suk-ho) and Mr. Kim (Oh Dal-su), two of the men tasked by Gi-hun to find him, he forces them to each throw out a choice in Rock, Paper, Scissors with each of their hands before taking one choice back and determining the winner based on the final selections. The loser got a gunshot to the temple, with the chance that the hammer could come down on an empty chamber. As we saw, the split-second nature of having to observe what your opponent played and choosing which of your hands to take back led to Mr. Kim acting on instinct alone, instincts that convinced him to spare his younger flunky.

Later, the season introduced a six-legged pentathlon in which six contestants each tie one of their legs to another’s while moving through a course that has them playing five games—Ddakji, Flying Stone, Gongi, Spinning Top, and Jegi. Outside of Ddakji, the other four were all new additions. But none of those produced heart-wrenching results like the final new game introduced in the second season: Mingle.

In Mingle, contestants stand on a spinning platform surrounded by a number of open rooms. When the platform stops spinning, the announcer speaks out the number of people that must be grouped together and in one of the rooms by the time the timer stops. Anyone left out of a room when the timer is out gets shot dead, along with contestants in a room with the incorrect number of (alive) players. Alliances are formed and broken within minutes, depending on what is asked of them to survive, and the mad dash to doors turns into contestants physically trying to keep others out of their rooms, effectively killing them. This was the first game of the season that made it abundantly clear to the contestants that teamwork is a survivalist illusion, and saving yourself ultimately will come down to killing others.

Following the death of game creator Oh Il-nam (O Yeong-su) at the end of Season 1, it looks like the head of the games In-ho (Lee Byung-hun) took what he learned from last season and expanded it. In the first season, contestants were only given one opportunity to vote on whether the games should continue or stop without any compensation. While the majority voted for the games to stop, they all returned back to the murder lottery after spending a day in their depressing realities. In true Squid Game fashion, one of the few parts of the competition that had any sort of moral fiber was twisted into another opportunity for those working the game to engineer more competition.

In the second season, players get to vote on the game’s continuation after every competition. To make the decision even harder, players receive an equal share of the prize money if the majority votes to leave. It grows deadlier the deeper into the competition the contestants go, especially when players wear a patch of their choice. The people who vote to stay typically feel as if more money is the only way to save their lives from the debt that could lead to their deaths. The people who vote to leave believe they’d rather be alive and broke than risk their lives for the hopes of a little more money. Even though their decisions are conflicting, they’re both rooted in survival, which inherently puts anyone voting against their decision in opposition to them living. What results from that is one of the bloodiest group fights in Squid Game history.

This is either blatant foreshadowing of the next winner in Squid Game, or Netflix is about to venture into a dark place of no return. In this season, Player 222, Kim Jun-hee (Jo Yu-ri), is revealed to be pregnant with the child of fellow contestant Player 333, Myung-gi (Yim Si-wan) after he ghosts her. She’s in the competition because she lost her money due to following Myung-gi’s terrible investment advice. Regardless of why she’s there, she’s officially the first pregnant woman in Squid Game history, which means her death could be unprecedented in the worst way.

Outside of the young guards who get killed in both seasons, Squid Game has pretty much excluded children from risking their lives. Given that Jun-hee’s pregnancy wasn’t overtly visible, it’s possible the organizers of the game were unaware of her bringing a fetus into a warzone. However, a child’s life being decided by their parent’s desperation is the type of social experiment Squid Game has come to be known for. Luckily she survives Season 2, but that doesn’t mean she or her child are in the clear just yet.

Gi-hun has had a one-track mindset since winning the 45.6 billion in the first season of Squid Game: stop the people running the game. His first plan fails after the organizers remove the tracking chip implanted in the molar of one of his teeth meant to guide former police officer Jun-ho (Wi Ha-jun) and his team to the remote island that has eluded him for two years. Well, if you can’t bring them to justice, take them to hell. That, or some version of that mentality, was clearly at play when he staged the first attack on the guards by the contestants.

He doesn’t only remember the games he played in his first go-around, but also the human dynamics that often had depraved results. Once the contestants’ voting reached its first draw, requiring votes to be cast again the following day, Gi-hun knew those who voted to stay would see bedtime as a golden opportunity to take out dissenters from the other side of the voting aisle. He acknowledged that his plan would require fellow contestants to lose their lives, giving him and his collaborators the chance to play dead themselves before attacking guards coming out check their vital signs.

Even though his plan led to mass casualties, and was ultimately thwarted by In-ho secretly playing as Player 001, Gi-hun now knows the game’s once-impenetrable fortress has exploitable vulnerabilities. Hopefully his attack destabilized their defenses enough for his cavalry to come in and save the day.

We should’ve seen this coming when show creator Hwang Dong-hyuk told Entertainment Weekly that he envisioned the second and third seasons as one season until he realized there were too many episodes. Let me speak for the rest of us binge warriors who have routinely dedicated 30 hours of streaming to watch an entire 30-episode series in one weekend: there can never be too many episodes. As a result, the second season of Squid Game is good, but not as satisfying as the first season, which Dong-hyuk also admits was as far as he originally planned for the story to go.

The primary issue with the truncated season is that the stakes aren’t high enough for viewing interest to be guaranteed much longer. As of now, the third season will show what ramifications will be levied against players for threatening to kill the organizers, how voting on the game’s continuation will change after the bloodbath, whether Gi-hun’s backup arrives in time, and who ultimately will win the competition. Outside of the mutiny, we’ve experienced these stakes in the first season, but they all felt a bit higher because it was our first time. Plus, Squid Game is less of a mystery-style thriller and more of an action thriller that derives its suspense from us clicking to the next episode and finding out how else this show will depict the survival of the fittest.

While Squid Game’s third season will arrive sometime in 2025, cutting the final season into two parts wasn’t a smart move. Still, if it helped Dong-hyuk get more money (and lose less teeth), then job well done. See you back on the island.