“Squid Game” season 2 is both exciting and underwhelming, and the return of the show’s most disgusting storyline certainly belongs in the latter category. Throughout the season, the black market organ trader subplot comes across as a weird leftover from season 1, where it tied into Jun-ho’s island-infiltrating storyline and fell by the wayside when the Front Man (Lee Byung-hun) found out about it. The sophomore season’s revelation that the Front Man’s black-clad right hand officer (Park Hee-soon) runs the whole thing and has recruited a new batch of guards in his crime ring feels repetitive and unimportant, and seems to serve no purpose beyond giving masked guard Kang No-eul (Park Gyu-young) a chance to seem comparatively heroic.
Fortunately, this changes in season 3, where we find out that “Squid Game” has been playing the long game all along. Here, No-eul uses the organ traders’ established method for transporting wounded patients to rescue Player 246 (Lee Jin-wook), the father of the sick kid No-eul connected with while working as a mascot in season 2.
