The second season of Squid Game came out the other day on Netflix, and while it was thrilling to see a whole new crop of contestants compete in deadly games for a grand prize, there's a sense that the second season was a bit of a let-down from the first. Or at least that's what I thought: I enjoyed the new episodes, but there were fewer of them than last time, the stakes didn't seem as high since not as many characters died, we didn't see any of the VIPs — the super-rich people who pay to watch the Squid Games, arguably the reason they persist — and the story basically ends smack dab in the middle of itself. Pretty much everything is left unresolved by the end of the seventh episode.

Speaking with Variety, Squid Game creator, writer and director Hwang Dong-hyuk explained how he approached the second season; the show...