The infamous murderous doll from Squid Game no longer kills, the guards don’t violently impose themselves and that abrupt sense of doom, the screeching quack of a gunshot has been replaced by a silly, playful, paintball gun. But – and it’s a big but – the ‘money is real’ and so is the emotional investment it takes for one person to last the slog, the battle or the puzzle to get to it. Netflix’s global hit Squid Game was an irresistible satire about modern capitalism. It has now returned as Squid Game: The Challenge, a reality TV series set in the world of the show that became more than just a binge-worthy global phenomenon. Surprisingly, begrudging cynicism notwithstanding, it is a riveting series, unpredictable and unhinged in ways that scripted fiction could never be.
For a grand prize north of 4.5 million dollars, some 456 players enter the game. The Challenge is so intent on being minimalistic, it doesn’t bother setting up the series, laying down the rules or even introducing us to a world of brutally dispatched economics. We begin as we did with the original, in the middle of ‘Red Light, Green Light’. This is a series for the original’s fans and though its nefarious existence can feel problematic, its thrills cannot be denied. A lot of it plays out like the show, except there are no standout lead participants or a clear protagonist to root for. That vacuum, however, is filled by a surreal amount of prize money dollied like a carrot in front of men and women in dire need of some. It’s a bit exploitative – ala Hunger Games– but then what adventure/survivor reality show isn’t?
To the show’s credit, it really does sell its own silliness at times. People being shot by paintballs are forced to pretend like they’ve actually been shot. The suited guards, hiding behind indecipherable masks really do on-board the nihilism but what makes this spin-off so watchable, is that some of the tension it rakes, the twists it conjures are of its own making. People sweat, quarrel, scheme and bawl in excruciatingly real details. The challenges – most of them children’s games borrowed from the original show – look amateur and, without the jeopardy of death, a bit witless, but the stakes attached to them transform grown adults into nervy, shattered individuals. There is no acting to it which makes the nervousness, the suffering of it all real in ways that comfort-seeking viewers might even resent. At least, it’s not as easy on the consciousness as it can appear on the eye at times.
The reality show does focus on a few characters of interest – an overconfident jock, a nervous choker, a 69-year-old father figure, a mother son combo and so on – but with the handbrake of narrative fiction relieved, it doesn’t hold back on pressing the big red button when you least expect it. Contestants who look like they might scathe through get eliminated, characters you begin to warm up to are swiped left without fuss. To improvise, not all games from the original have been replicated and though you might like or dislike the replacements, it adds to the confusion and chaos of being stumped, along with the contestants, by the unpredictability of it all. Strategies therefore are important until they aren’t.
News of the Korean original being turned into a reality show featuring mostly Americans and some Europeans wasn’t exactly met with enthusiasm around the world, but there is enough here to go on in terms of racial representation at least. It maybe only decorates the universalism of the show as a piece of pop culture enigma that translates across the world without ever seemingly enveloped by a singular culture, the way most K-dramas usually are.
Squid Game as a fictional show was fairly predictable after a point, but the reality show it has given birth to is mad, deranged and at times hilariously self-involved. Some of its best moments happen between contestants as they bond and bicker over that hanging oyster of money, so temptingly close yet agonisingly distant. You don’t have to kill anyone to get to it, but there are parts of you that might die on the way. “How you play, is who you are,” one of the guards in charge tells the contestants as they look on, bemused yet attentive.
To say that Squid Game: The Challenge undoes the social critique that the original K-drama offered, would be missing the point. Both are entertainment pieces commissioned by a globally syndicated media behemoth. The fact that Netflix can have its cake and eat it too (remember Black Mirror is also a Netflix series) is in part, admission of the power storytelling commands and the privilege its creator is in return entailed. The privilege to redraw the margins, switch a handful of cardboard blocks and still extract that sigh or silence, we were forced into the first time we stepped into the world Hwang Dong-hyuk painstakingly built. The fact that the postal address for this particular journey has changed, maybe makes its fascinatingly different, if not irreverently better. All criticisms about studio opportunism aside, the envelope it comes in still holds your attention, making it impossible to look away.
Squid Game: The Challenge is now streaming on Netflix.
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