I Am a Masochist for “Squid Game”

The absolute grenade of a show just released its penultimate season full of slow-burning anxiety and a nagging sense of worse pain to come… and I love every second of it.

Let me be completely transparent. Squid Game takes whatever meal I just ate and runs it right through me. This is something no other show has quite the same capacity to do, although I will say that when I watched the finale of Severance season 1, I was violently shaking the entire time. This is the sort of mind-body reaction I crave in my art, as weird as it sounds since I mentioned diarrhea. When I saw Les Misérables for the first time in London ten years ago, I sobbed for two hours straight after, and when I didn’t get that same reaction seeing it in Chicago last December, I was disappointed. I want the overpowering emotion. It’s what makes me feel like I got my money’s worth.

I’ve rewatched The Office, Modern Family, and New Girl more times than I can count and why? Because the comfort these shows provide me stands up against the wild and thrilling discomfort I get from shows like Squid Game. The feeling of comfort is a worthy opponent of heart-racing terror or wholly enveloping emotional release. While these experiences may seem to be on completely different planes, they are actually equally essential in their own ways. Basically, we need the things that bring us peace, and we need the things that bring us excitement. It’s not a groundbreaking concept, but for me, it’s important that it be reflected in my television.

Season 1 of Squid Game utterly horrified me. I never expected a season 2; wondered how they were going to carry on. They set the bar almost comically high. But as many shows do when they suffer such predicaments, they implemented a notable time jump, and when we are thrust back into Seong Gi-hun’s frenetic and messy world we see him hiding out, his hair short and his pockets heavy, throwing money at private investigation teams trying to find and seek revenge on the people who run the games. Gi-hun was always a strong protagonist, but he had his moments of unlikability, specifically wild recklessness with money and quasi-abandonment of his daughter. In season 2, however, there is barely mention of his daughter so you kind of forget about her and he manages to burst beyond his previous flaws and become the courageous hero, simultaneously an underdog and a millionaire former winner and unbelievably lucky survivor. He aims to save the lives of all 456 (and dropping) players even when I personally like to think I would have said, “well fuck you then.” The iconic Red Light, Green Light game from season one returns as a backdrop for Gi-hun to play this hero, his elbow covering his mouth from view of the rapt electronic eyes of the massive doll. He screams behind it: “don’t move!” He even risks his life at the end of the game when a player who was shot in the leg has seconds to spare, dragging the man across the finish line. The man is ultimately shot in the chest and killed regardless, but Gi-hun’s integrity stands.

For TIME, Judy Berman wrote a more critical take than I had expected. She said: “it takes almost the entire season to break through various forms of monotony, and when interesting stuff finally starts to happen, you get the sense that you’ve just spent seven hours watching what amounts to a supersize teaser for Season 3.” Maybe I was giving the show too much credit, but I found the monotony to be masterful. First of all, the show needs slower moments. The games are so intense that in order to watch in over 20-minute increments, big babies like me need a little boredom in between to break up the terror. Secondly, the repetition creates a unique feeling of understated discomfort, almost imperceptible. It’s like in HIIT class when they lower your heartrate temporarily only to shoot it back up to the ceiling moments later. This unsettling up-down, up-down fosters an environment ripe for fear (the HIIT metaphor is over, by the way).

She is right in that much of the season does feel like a teaser for season 3, set to premiere sometime in 2025. I was struck with the feeling that it could have been released as one season in two parts because so much of it was just laying that groundwork. The creators have answered very few questions posed in season 1, and with season 3 being the last, they really have a lot to cram in. Additionally, I anticipated a lot more painful losses this season, possibly from an episode like the marble game from season 1 where we lost a handful of sympathetic characters in devastating ways. That episode made me absolutely sob. But we got through this batch of episodes with fairly few losses, at least in terms of characters we cared for. I still expect the last season to kill off everyone I’ve grown to love, but this season not doing that was kind of a twist in and of itself. And that again left me with an uneasy feeling, wondering why am I okay right now, why am I not so stressed out I feel like I might vomit? What the fuck are they going to do to me? It’s like Stockholm syndrome and Pavlov’s dogs had a baby and that baby is what Squid Game does to my brain.

We of course meet many new characters this season, one of whom is the star of the season’s first major twist: Guard 011, or No-eul. We see that she is a costumed employee at a theme park with a clear but guarded soft spot for the young sick daughter of one of her coworkers. We see that she is sleeping in her car. We see her appear to sign up for the games, but then it is revealed that she is not going to be a player but a guard. She ends up a sniper, shooting the man I mentioned earlier who almost survived Red Light, Green Light. At first she seems utterly cold, but it becomes clear fast that she shot him in the head to put him out of his misery, as those who are injured but not killed in the games are harvested for organs – alive. Unfortunately, Guard 011’s storyline tapers out pretty quickly, but with only one season left I have to assume they will wrap it up nice. She is our first guard, or soldier as they are more often called, with a backstory; our first real soldier (not counting the policeman Hwang Jun-ho who posed as a soldier in season 1) whose life inside the games we see play out. And I think we are meant to like her, and wonder about her.

There is so much more to dissect than I could ever get into but I wanted to reflect on some of what stuck out to me from “Squid Game – Making Season 2”. I was in such a fervor after watching the finale that I needed to ingest more Squid Game so I watched the half-hour documentary in Korean (a departure for me as I watch the show with the English voiceovers). The doc covers all three games played in this season and the choices that went behind them, which are actually pretty interesting, but they also get more into the character growth and those types of questions, including scratching the surface of what I believe is one of the most mind-boggling queries of the season – what is Front Man’s endgame? Why play along for so long and get so close to the other players, especially Gi-hun, only to devastate him in the end?

Lee Byung-hun, the actor who plays Front Man, shared some insight on the topic, saying, “I think the Front Man’s main goal is to shatter the conviction that Gi-hun holds.” Fair enough, but why? We know he has a connection with Guard 011 from the outside world, and we know his brother is a cop, and his wife passed away from a sickness. But lots of people, even bad people, suffer from such extreme pessimism and still lack the conviction to manipulate and deceive others by forming close bonds with them built on trauma and trust, only to send it all up in flames just to prove a point. It seems like a lot of work, and I can’t yet imagine the real why, but I trust the show to make good on its promises.

Ultimately, I really felt like the season held up to its predecessor and withstood the pressure of the fame and expectations it gathered over the last three years. Now, a lot of these expectations were quelled in faith that season 3 will be everything we’ve been hoping for, so sufficient grace was given where it certainly won’t be next time. But some fascinating plot points have been building and the character growth, supported by unreal acting, is sublime, so it feels like the series is ripe for continued success down to the last drop. You have a hell of a lot of work to do, Squid Game, and only one season left to do it. Please don’t give me stomach cramps for nothing.