By Bishop Foster

Warning: Spoilers ahead for Squid Game seasons 1 and 2.

Squid Game is a South Korean survival show originally released on Netflix on September 17, 2021. Season one of Squid Game features hundreds of people, all in serious debt, who are kidnapped by people of higher economic status and forced to play a series of childhood games to win money. These are not regular childhood games; there’s a twist. If you lose, you die, and with every death the cash prize increases by ₩100,000,000, equal to $69,128.33. And the deaths are often quite violent and explicitly shown in the show. This season is concluded when there is only one player left, and he confronts the person who runs the games. 

Image courtesy of Netflix.

Season two of Squid Game, released on December 26, 2024, continues the story. When the winner from season one is freed, he later realizes that the games are still being continued. He gathers a group of people to try to find the person who entered him into the game, using the money that he’d won. In this attempt, he ends up getting captured and goes back into the next game. While in the game, he tries to stop it, but the enemy is closer to him than he expects.

Squid Game quickly became very popular after it was released due to the original plot of the show. Squid Game was not an anticipated show and didn’t get much media attention until after its release. Fans were amazed by the show and began to spread the word, and the show gained popularity through social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram. The popularity from the first season built up to the widely anticipated second season.

On IMDb, Squid Game is rated 8/10. IMDB User shanekoggg has the most voted-for review, and he rates the show 9/10. His review is very short and simple: “I found the show to be fantastic, only ruined by the horrible VIP acting.” The second most-voted comment rated the show 7/10, and user minisaulol says, “My God the actors who potrayed [sic] the VIP people cannot act. I cringed everytime they said a line. It felt like they were just reading them. Even the intonation was off. It was like when we were kids and had to read a play in class and we exagerated [sic] the intonation. Terrible, just awful.” Both reviews comment on how they didn’t like the acting of certain characters in the show.

The third most-voted review on IMDb for Squid Game is paulyew-45125’s review. User paulyew-4512 rates the show a 6/10 and explains how the translation from Korean to English makes the acting look worse than it is: “Great acting, very interesting storyline. As someone who is fluent in Korean, I am watching the show without having to rely on the subtitles. As someone who is also fluent in English, I am reading the subtitles as well. I cannot believe that this high budget production is ruined by shockingly poor translation. For non-Korean speakers who must rely on the subtitles, please believe me when I tell you that the actual dialog is not that poor.”

Tyler Lewis (‘26) likes to watch shows with a “blank mindset” so that the show can take him where the director wants. He enjoyed the plot of Squid Game, saying that he “loved how original the story was” and how he’d “never seen anything like it before.” Lewis enjoyed watching the show but did not like the characters’ decisions, and he believed there didn’t need to be a season two. “It could’ve easily been left at the original Squid Game,” Lewis said. Xay Davis (‘25) also agrees with this statement, as he said, “The first season was good enough, it could have been stopped there, for real.” He noted that he, “didn’t notice that there was any bad acting until season two.” Davis stated he could “tell who was an actor and who was not.” This backs up a common criticism of reviews on Squid Game across websites.

When I first started watching Squid Game, it was because I had heard so much about it from my friends, as well as on social media. I wasn’t sure what to expect when I started watching it, and I believed that Squid Game was going to be a very interesting show. The first season of the show truly had me glued to my seat. I liked the concept and the originality of the show, as well as the different variety of personalities between the players in the games, which created more conflict than just the games themselves. There was an aspect of suspense throughout the whole show, which wrapped me in, because I was always curious as to what the next game would be, and who would end up surviving. 

The second season was not able to reel me in as much as the first season, because the characters weren’t as interesting as they were in the first one. I do like that they switched up some of the games from the first season, because watching the characters go through the same games as the first season would have become repetitive and boring.