Major spoilers for “Squid Game” Season 2 follow.
One of the most memorable characters From the shocking first season of “Squid Game” was a mysterious and anonymous character played by Gong Yoo. Some people colloquially call this man The Salesman, but the official subtitles for the series call him The Recruiter, so that’s what we’ll call him here.
The Recruiter is the man who seeks out people to play deadly games that could earn them millions of dollars or lead to their violent demise. To find players, the Recruiter hangs around the subway and challenges strangers to a game of ddakjiwhich involves trying to flip one thick, colorful envelope with another. The Recruiter tells the players that if they manage to return his envelope, he will give them 100,000 won. If they lose, they have to give him 100,000 won. If they don’t have the money (which they certainly don’t), he can slap them. However, if a player wins, they not only receive the 100,000 won: they are also offered a chance to play deadly games and win a much bigger prize (or, you know, die horribly).
Played by Gong Yoo, the Recruiter is an unforgettable character: a tall, well-dressed man with a creepy smile on his face and a vaguely menacing aura. He was only a minor player in the first season, but he made a big impression. Effectively, The Recruiter returns for the first episode of season 2 of “Squid Game”and this time we learn more about him, including a dark, disturbing and tragic backstory.
Recruiter reveals he murdered his own father during the games
Season 2 of “Squid Game” takes place two years after the first season, and we learn that during these two years, Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae), the winner of the games of season 1tried to find the recruiter. Gi-hun wants to use the Recruiter to find a way to reach the people running the games and stop them once and for all, but even so Gi-hun has a whole team of people working for him trying to locate the Recruiter . , the Recruiter turned out to be illusory. Eventually, however, the Recruiter surfaces, leading to a big showdown at the climax of the first episode of season 2, titled “Bread and the Lottery.”
Gi-hun used some of the money he earned to buy a motel, which he now uses as his base of operations. As the episode draws to a close, Gi-hun finds the recruiter waiting for him in one of the motel rooms, with a gun in his hand. After a few discussions, the recruiter reveals his own story. He explains that before landing the assignment to recruit people to play the games, he worked on the games himself. He was one of the people responsible for burning the bodies of deceased players. He said that as he burned the bodies, he thought of the dead players: “These things aren’t human. They’re just trash…useless…They have no purpose in this world.”
Eventually, the recruiter worked his way up to become one of the masked armed guards at the games. The Recruiter reveals that one year during the matches, he went to shoot one of the players who lost, and something surprising happened. “I recognized his face. Guess who it was? My father,” he said. “I was pointing a gun at my own father, and he begged me with tears in his eyes to spare his life. So you know what I did? I shot him, bang, right in the middle from the front. That’s when I knew: “Ah, I’m really made for this.”
Even with this story, the Recruiter remains a mysterious character
It’s a dark and twisted story, and it implies that the Recruiter is a full-blown psychopath. Maybe you could argue that years of working on games, burning bodies and shooting people, turned him into a psychopath. Or perhaps you could argue that it has always been this way. In truth, we don’t learn much more about him, and that’s fine: if we learned more, it would deprive the character of some of his power. And although it is a tragic story, the tragedy is the death of the recruiter’s father. The Recruiter himself seems perfectly perplexed as to having committed this act. He continues to smile as he tells the story, much to Gi-hun’s discomfort.
Ultimately, this scene is impactful because although it reveals more about the recruiter’s story, it doesn’t demoralize him or even make him sympathetic. If anything, it makes him even more disturbing and off-putting than he was in Season 1.
“Squid Game” season 2 is now streaming on Netflix.
