Squid Game season 1 recap

The world has never looked at a simple game of Red Light, Green Light the same way after Season One of Squid Game premiered in 2021. The Netflix drama was met with international acclaim, becoming the streaming platform’s most-watched series ever and winning a number of awards for both its cast and crew. The South Korean series was a hit with fans and critics alike as audiences dropped into a deadly contest that was unlike anything they’d ever seen before.

The show earned a Golden Globe Award for O Yeong-su, Screen Actors Guild Awards for Lee Jung-jae and HoYeon Jung, an Emmy Award for Lee Jung-jae, as well as the Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series. Creator Hwang Dong-hyuk’s series took a look at the class disparity in South Korea and turned the idea on its head by creating a setting that shows 456 players all battling in a deadly game based on children’s games and vying for a prize of 45.6 billion Won.

Squid Game had a terrific first season, and it was recently announced that Season 2 would premiere on December 26, 2024. The final season is slated for some time in 2025. If you sat through every tension-soaked hour and want a refresher on what happened, we’ve recapped the first season above to get you ready for the next installment.

Squid Game Season 1 recap

Set in a dystopian South Korea

Netflix

The series opens up with Seong Gi-hun, a divorced father who lives with his sick mother, struggling to handle his gambling debts. His daughter is slated to move to the United States with her mother and stepfather because of his financially instability. He’s running from loan sharks and is in the subway station when a man in a suit asks him if he wants to play a game of ddakji for money. If Gi-hun wins, he gets money. If he loses, the man slaps him in the face. After a few rounds, the man asks Gi-Hun if he wants to participate in a contest to win a substantial amount of money and is given a card with a number on the back of it. Gi-Hun, thinking about his daughter and his debts, calls and agrees to join.

He is sedated and awakens in a huge dormitory with 455 other people. Everyone is differentiated by a number on their green tracksuits that they wear. Gi-hun is the final contestant, Player No. 456. A number of guards in pink tracksuits and masks, led by the Front Man who is dressed in all black and a mask, show up and explain that every person there is suffering from debts and financial stress, and they have all been entered into a contest to win a large amount of money if they can win six games in six days. Gi-hun befriends an elderly man, Player 001, who is suffering from a brain tumor, and recognizes two other contestants: Player 218 is Cho Sang-woo, a former classmate of Gi-hun’s who became an investment banker, and Player 067, a female pickpocket who stole Gi-hun’s winnings from a horse race earlier.

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The first game is Red Light, Green Light, which seems simple enough until it is revealed that anyone moving during the Red Light portion is shot and killed on the spot. Players begin to panic and try to run, which causes more and more people to be shot. Gi-hun is saved by Player 199, a Pakistani man who is in the game to provide for his family, and Sang-woo, and escapes to move on to the next game. More than half of the contestants are eliminated during the first game and many of the remaining contestants demand to be released. The players all vote and agree to cancel the games and be released without any prize money.

On the outside, Gi-hun goes to the police but no one believes his story except Detective Hwang Jun-ho, who realizes his brother had received an invitation to a similar game and has been missing. When another round of invitations comes out to the players, many re-enter the game, realizing they are still in dire financial straits. Players 001, 218, 067, and 199 all return to the game along with others. Jun-ho follows Gi-hun when he is picked up for the game and sneaks into the game by disguising himself as a masked guard.

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On the inside, Gi-hun, Sang-woo, Player 001, and Player 199 build an alliance. The second game is revealed to be Ppopgi, where players must extract a stamped shape from honeycomb candy in under 10 minutes. Sang-woo learned of the game ahead of time, thanks to Player 067’s sneaking into a vent and seeing the guards mixing sugar, and made it easy on himself by picking a straightforward design. Gi-hun gets tasked with an umbrella, but makes it through by licking the back of the candy to melt it. Other alliances are formed as Player 101, a gangster named Jang Deok-su, is helped by Player 212, a loud woman with a lighter.

There is a disgraced doctor who is a contestant who is working with the guards to secretly harvest the organs of killed game players in exchange for information on the upcoming games. After realizing that the prize money increases whenever a contestant dies, Deok-su plans a riot to start eliminating players in between games. During a lights out riot, Gi-hun’s group survives and shares their names with one another. Player 199 is Ali Abdul, Player 067 is Kang Sae-byeok, and Player 001 can’t remember his name because of his brain tumor. Player 212 is revealed to be Han Mi-nyeo and, realizing Deok-su is arguably the strongest person there, she has sex with him to get on his good side. During the riot, Deok-su gains intel from the disgraced doctor that the next game is tug of war.

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The group is told to break up into teams of 10 and Deok-su only picks strong men. When Han Mi-nyeo wants to join his team, he refuses, and she must join Gi-hun’s team. Sae-byeok recruits Player 240, a young woman around her own age to join their team. While Gi-hun’s team faces another all-male team, they win because of Player 001’s strategy of holding the rope by the center of your body, tilting your back and looking toward the sky as you pull. Jun-ho finds out about the organ harvesting operation as the person he is impersonating was in on it. After the disgraced doctor isn’t given advanced notice for the next game, he exposes the operation, forcing the Front Man to kill all the guards involved in it. Jun-ho escapes and the Front Man has other guards search for him. He infiltrates the offices of the Front Man to find that the games have been happening for over 30 years, and his long-lost brother won the games back in 2015.

The next game requires the group to pair off, but only after they do are they told it is a game against their partner. They must try and win their partner’s marbles in 30 minutes. Whoever has all the other person’s marbles in that time frame wins. Sae-byeok pairs up with Player 240, named Ji-yeong, and during the playing of the game, they tell each other about their lives. Ji-yeong, realizing that Sae-byeok has a brother that she is trying to save, sacrifices herself for her friend. Sang-woo tricks Ali into giving him all his marbles, eliminating Ali. Gi-hun takes advantage of Player 001’s dementia to win his game. Midway through the game, the old man tells Gi-hun that he knows what he is doing, that he remembers his name is Oh Il-nam, and he sacrifices himself for Gi-hun.

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Alternately, Jun-ho finds out that wealthy people have been watching the games remotely and betting on them and have come to the arena to bet and watch the last two events. He then escapes the island after finding this out. The fifth game requires the players to cross a bridge where the floor is made of panels that are either tempered glass or regular glass. They don’t know which one is which, so many contestants fall to their death while testing the glass. The time limit stipulates that they all must cross in a certain time, or they will all fall to their deaths. When Deok-su is at the front, he refuses to move for fear of falling. Mi-nyeo, after having been betrayed during tug of war, jumps onto him, causing them both to fall to their deaths but clearing the path for the rest to make their way across. Player 017, who was a glassworker, can tell which panels are sturdy or not. So the Front Man turns the lights off and Sang-woo shoves him to his death. Sang-woo, Gi-hun, and Sae-byeok are the only contestants that make it through. The bridge explodes, showering the three in glass.

Sae-byeok is severely injured by glass but hides the wound. Gi-hun suggests they form an alliance to stop Sang-woo, who is bloodthirsty to win. She tells him that whoever wins should look after the other’s family and he agrees. Gi-hun goes to kill Sang-woo in his sleep, but Sae-byeok stops him from turning into a killer. Her wound gets worse, and he calls for help, but Sang-woo kills her before the guards can come. Meanwhile, Jun-ho escapes to another island, but the Front Man tracks him down. It’s revealed that the Front Man is his missing brother, and he tries to recruit him, but Jun-ho refuses. His own brother then shoots him, and he falls off a cliff.

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The final game is Squid Game and the Gi-hun and Sang-woo battle for the prize money. Gi-hun outwits and outplays Sang-woo and beats him, but refuses to kill him. Sang-woo asks Gi-hun to look after his mother, and he kills himself to make Gi-hun the winner. Gi-hun is then sent back to Seoul with all the prize money on a bank card, but he finds out that his mother died while he was in the arena. The series jumps a year in time to where Gi-hun still has not collected the prize money, but he receives a message from Oh Il-nam who is on his deathbed. He admits to being the person who created the games as a way for wealthy people to be entertained, and he chose games that he played as a kid as a nostalgic twist. He joined the year before’s version for fun, knowing that he was soon to die. He then dies with Gi-hun by his side. Gi-hun has Sang-woo’s mother look after Sae-byeok’s brother and gives them a portion of the prize money.

The final scene features Gi-hun getting ready to board a plane to the United States to see his daughter, and he sees the same man in a suit who he played ddakji with doing it with someone else. Gi-hun confronts the person he was playing with and steals the invitation card the man in the suit gave him. He calls the number on the back and demands to know who the people are that run the game. The Front Man gets on the call and tells him to get on the plane. Gi-hun turns around and heads back into the airport.

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Squid Game Season 2

Here’s what to expect

Netflix / Pocket-lint

Based off the end of Season One, it’s obvious that Gi-hun is going to join this year’s version of the game and try to end it for good. It was confirmed that both Gi-hun and the Front Man characters would return for this season. Jun-ho will return in some capacity, as Hwang Dong-hyuk has said that he wanted to explore the relationship between the brothers. There will also be a portion of the season that focuses on the recruiter in the suit and how he got involved in it all, according to interviews Hwang has done.

Netflix revealed that a number of casting announcements were made in June 2023, with Park Gyu-young, Jo Yu-ri, Kang Ae-sim, Lee David, Lee Jin-uk, Choi Seung-hyun, Roh Jae-won, Won Ji-an, Yim Si-wan, Kang Ha-neul, Park Sung-hoon, and Yang Dong-geun all joining the cast with Lee Jung-jae, Lee Byun-hun, Hwang Jun-ho, and Gong Yoo reprising their roles. Hwang wrote and directed each episode, just as he did with the first season. The entire season will drop on December 26 on Netflix.

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