Given that Hwang lost teeth due to the stress of making Squid Game’s first season, it’s completely understandable that he would want to break up the story into more manageable chunks. But at the same time, it is a shame that more than seven episodes is considered “too many” in today’s TV landscape.
How Does Season 2 of Squid Game End?
After convincing some of the other players to join him in taking the fight to their wealthy overlords upstairs, Gi-hun gets closer than he ever has to getting justice for those he lost. He and Jung-bae (Lee Seo-hwan) find themselves in a stand-off with pink-suited soldiers – and things aren’t looking good.
The entire group is running out of magazines for their guns, and decide it’s ultimately better to split up. They send Young-il (Lee Byung-hun) and a couple others after Gi-hun and Jung-bae for support while Dae-ho (Kang Ha-neul) and then Hyun-ju (Park Sung-hoon) go to scavenge more magazines from the first wave of soldiers in the players’ quarters. It doesn’t take long for Young-il – who we know is the masked man from season 1, Hwang In-ho (Lee Byung-hun) – to betray them. After killing the men he’s with, and an impressively-quick costume change, the man in the mask shoots Jung-bae point blank, but lets Gi-hun live to deal with the consequences of his uprising.
Don’t get me wrong. This ending is far from anti-climatic. But after how beautifully the first season was able to begin and end a chapter of this story, this ending feels awfully abrupt. Things were left open enough at the end of season 1 for the story to continue, but at the same time season 1 didn’t end mere moments after an epic shootout with a lot of characters’ futures still up in the air.
Thankfully, we won’t have to wait quite as long between seasons 2 and 3, as the final chapter of Squid Game is set to drop in 2025. Hopefully season 3’s beginning will justify this abrupt stopping place in the story, and give us a moment to catch our breath as we find out what fresh hell, punishments, new games await Gi-hun and the surviving players.
