‘Squid Game’ Season 2 Episode 4 Recap: Team Up

The clock is ticking on Squid Game, and I don’t just mean for the contestants. In a short season of just seven episodes, we’ve just completed Episode 4 and haven’t even finished our second game out of six. Will the remaining games get rushed through via montage or some other means? Will the competition get cut short, perhaps by Gi-hun and Jun-ho’s mercenary team? Will the season finale end with a big TO BE CONTINUED? No matter the outcome, the result is going to be paced quite differently from the previous season. In other words, we’re guaranteed something novel.

Unfortunately for them, so are the players. Much of the season’s fourth episode centers on the ongoing debate between the contingent led by Gi-hun, who voted to end the Game, and the “Game on” faction, whose most prominent members include Thanos the rapper; player 100, an insufferable blowhard who’s the side’s de facto spokesperson; and the deciding vote, player 001, who is secretly the Game’s Front Man. 

As we saw in the previous episode, Gi-hun’s intervention backfired: Since he revealed to the other contestants that he was a previous Game’s sole survivor, they believe he can guide them safely to victory, at least for as many individual games as it takes to narrow the field and build up their winnings. That confidence turns out to be misplaced, though through no fault of Gi-hun’s own, as we’ll see. 

In time, player 001 emerges as something of a hero among the other players. He beats up Thanos and his minion Nam-gyu when they attack Myung-gi, the crypto influencer whose bogus tip landed them in this mess, to the applause of all the other players. He behaves in a conciliatory and friendly way toward Gi-hun, even confiding the (very real) reason he wound up in the Game: medical debt on behalf of his pregnant wife, who needed a liver transplant. He stops player 100 from badmouthing Gi-hun. He even asks to join Gi-hun’s team in the next game. To any outside observer, he’s a real mensch. If I were him, I’d cultivate this image too.

A few other players are introduced or fleshed out in ways that seem significant. Geum-ja, the elderly mother of gambling addict Yong-sik, turns out to be either an obstetric nurse or a midwife, and comes to the aid of Jun-hee, the contestant whose stomach pains last episode stemmed from an attempt to conceal her third-trimester pregnancy. The father is none other than Myung-gi; like Thanos and Nam-gyu, Jun-hee fell victim to the crypto scam, and got jilted by Myung-gi when he found out she was pregnant, too.

We learn more as five-person teams form for game number two. Yong-sik and Geum-ja team up with Hyun-ju, the trans contestant, who is rejected by several other teams first. Hyun-ju brings along player 095, Young-mi (Kim Si-eun), a mousy young woman. Seon-nyeo, the cryptic psychic and self-described “shaman of the sea” — or “this skank,” as Geum-ja puts it after suffering one rude response too many from the woman — rounds out this quintet.

Meanwhile, Thanos gathers what pass for his Infinity Stones. (Amusingly, he has his fingernails painted in the all-powerful objects’ respective colors.) Nam-gyu rides with him, of course, and scores a designer-drug pill off of him too. Player 256, Gyeong-su (Kang Seong-wook), is a Thanos fan, so his choice is clear. Rounding out this group is player 380, Se-mi (Won Ji-an), the kind of good-looking woman Thanos is quick to seek out…and player 125, Min-su (Lee David), a timid young guy she’s taken under her wing.

The third and most important group includes Gi-hun, his friend Jung-bae, his secret nemesis player 001, and player 388, Dae-ho (Park Sung-hoon), who bonds with Jung-bae over their experience in the Marines. Their unlikely fifth teammate is Jun-hee, who reveals her pregnancy to them in order to ensure a spot. (Not that she needs to worry with this bunch of softies.)

The moment the team nature of the game is revealed, Gi-hun realizes that it’s not the dalgona challenge from his previous go-round, in which players have to pop an outlined shape out from a cookie wafer without breaking it. (The night before the game he has a nightmare that the most basic shape, the triangle, has become impossibly elaborate.) This time it’s a far more elaborate contest called the Six-Legged Pentathlon. With their legs tied together, each five-person team has to advance around a track and complete five mini-games, crossing the finish line before five minutes elapse. 

The first mini-game, ddakji, is the same one all of them played against the Recruiter to get here in the first place. Next is flying stone, a cornhole/horseshoe-type skill game that costs its competitors a lot of time if they miss their throw and have to scuttle back and forth to retrieve the stone. Third is gong-gi, an old-fashioned girls’ game that’s kind of cross between dice, jacks, and one-handed juggling. Fourth is spinning top, in which players must wrap a string around a top and then whip it loose in hopes it will land and spin properly; this is another time-consuming one if you blow it. Fifth is jegi, which…we don’t get to in this episode. Consider this an indication as to how far the first two teams of anonymous players get. 

The sequence in which those two teams try and fail to complete the pentathlon is cleverly edited to make it seem as though one team’s going to make it, while the other, disastrously stranded at the flying stone mini-game, is doomed. The first team’s members seem confident even when they struggle, the second team moans and groans and, by the end, pisses themselves with terror. Yet neither team even comes close to completing the course, and by the end of the episode, ten more dead bodies have been carted away.

Which leads us to the subplot that rounds out the episode. Just like Season 1, there’s an organ-harvesting business going on among the soldiers and drones who operate the Game complex. There’s no inside man working for the among the players this time, though; the black-suited Officer (Park Hee-soon) who’s overseeing the Game in the Front Man’s absence is running the racket and says he’s brought in an outside doctor. 

But he’s being undermined from the inside: Soldier 011, No-eul, keeps killing the players that the other soldiers are deliberately wounding rather than killing, so that their organs can be harvested live, or as close to it as possible. (It’s nasty work.) What’s surprising here isn’t No-eul’s principled stance about the nature of her job, but the fact that she’s known the Officer for seven years. It’s implied she’s been returning to the Game to work as a soldier every year in exchange for help tracking down her son. 

The episode ends just before Hyun-ju’s group is about to go for it — one of the most “Watch next episode” editing decisions I’ve seen on Netflix in a minute. To beat this game would seem to require a basically flawless performance on the part of all five participants, each of whom handles one game apiece. Each character will handle their turn in the lethal spotlight differently, whether they succeed in the end or not. It’s textbook Squid Game: Turn up the pressure on everyone to see how they crack.

One last thing before we go, though. Gi-hun’s first tipoff that player 001 isn’t what he seems is that he knows his name. 001 plays this off, saying he picked it up from Gi-hun’s buddy Jung-bae and just wanted to try it out himself. This seems to put Gi-hun at ease. But earlier in the episode, Captain Park, the fisherman who just so happened to pick up Jun-ho off the coast of the island and bring him to safety after his brother shot him last season, also knows Gi-hun’s name, surprising his colleague, Woo-seok. He plays this off too, saying he picked it up from their other comrade, Jun-ho, during their years-long search for the island. Woo-seok accepts this and goes right back into his rant about the informant in their midst. He may be closer than you think, buddy.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.