Squid Game Season 2's Worst Storyline Feels Like A Step Back For A Fan-Favorite Character

Don't lose your marbles — spoilers lie ahead for the second season of "Squid Game."

If you watched the first season of the unexpected (yet massive) South Korean hit "Squid Game" back when it premiered in 2021, there are a few things you need to remember, especially if you only remember the titular deadly game that pits 456 desperate players against one another for a massive payout. While Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) battles his way through the games themselves, a detective — Hwang Jun-ho, played by Wi Ha-joon — infiltrates the games by posing as a guard in an attempt to suss out and expose the mysterious masked Front Man. After a fun little mission, Jun-ho comes face to face with the unmasked Front Man only to realize that it's his missing brother Hwang In-ho (Lee Byung-hun), who won the game many years beforehand and is now involved with their entire process.

In-ho shoots his own brother and apparently leaves him for dead, with Jun-ho falling off the side of a cliff and into the ocean. At the start of season of "Squid Game," Jun-ho wakes up in a hospital with his worried mother by his side, at which point the story jumps forward by a full two years. Now, Jun-ho is trying to track down his brother again and expose the games alongside Gi-hun, but his storyline sucks. Why? He doesn't do anything. 

Here's what Jun-ho does in "Squid Game" season 2: nothing of note. The first time we see him after the coma, he's no longer a detective and is instead working as a traffic cop, writing tickets and looking rather miserable. In his free time, however, Jun-ho is sailing around in a boat trying to find the mysterious island where the games take place. 

Later, Jun-ho links up with Gi-hun and realizes they're both gunning for In-ho, and the two start working together. (Notably, Jun-ho does not tell Gi-hun the Front Man is his brother.) After placing a tracker in a false tooth that's implanted into Gi-hun's mouth, Jun-ho waits with his crew on a boat and hopes they can track down the island large enough to house the massive game. Unfortunately for everybody involved, Gi-hun gets to the game and suddenly realizes that the implant was removed while he was unconscious (players are gassed and knocked out before arriving at the games so that they don't know where they are). 

As for Jun-ho, he spends the rest of the season on a boat, trying to find Jun-ho and the island and getting absolutely nowhere. On top of that, whenever the show cuts away from the games to reminds us that Jun-ho is still at sea, the pacing drags. It genuinely feels like season 2 could've cut out Jun-ho entirely and functioned fine, but perhaps this is all intended as set-up for Jun-ho having a bigger part to play in the third and final season of the Netflix series

It's depressing that Jun-ho, who was a fascinating character in season 1, is relegated to searching through chum buckets and sitting around on a boat while Gi-hun gets all the interesting plotlines. Unfortunately for Jun-ho stans, he mostly just sails around looking at islands, and even the eleventh hour twist that the boat captain might be a double agent is seriously undercut by how boring this all is. By the time season 2 ends, Jun-ho is still no closer to finding Gi-hun and the island. He's literally adrift. Hopefully, in season 3 of "Squid Game," Jun-ho will get to do something interesting again, because his season 2 storyline was a major letdown.

"Squid Game" season 2 is streaming on Netflix now.