Trump’s squid game: The danger of second seasons

Some series revolve around a groundbreaking idea, hence their impact. Probably, they should stick to one season, but the industry knows a good thing when it sees it and invariably tries to wring it dry. The second season is more challenging as the surprise factor has gone. New material must be created to hold the audience’s attention.

Netflix’s Squid Game and Apple TV’s Severance are back. In both cases, there has been a three-year hiatus. Both speak about exploitation and alienation within the framework of suffocating dystopias. The protagonists are losers who agree to participate in something that would be unacceptable to any but the desperate. The South Korean series returns to the macabre contest in which hundreds of people play life-and-death games until barely anyone is left to scoop up a million-dollar prize. In Severance, a group of people take a job in an office where their memory is erased on entry and exit: the employees will not remember who they are and will simply perform their task; when they return to normal life, none of what they have been doing will be remembered.

Both series reflect the social outrage and precariousness surfacing in today’s world. Both send a powerful message against ruthless capitalism, against the cult of competitiveness, against the abuses visited upon ordinary citizens by the powerful, against technology presented as progress but which robs us of our freedom as human beings.

Squid Game’s brutality is once again disturbing: the second season kicks off with a Russian roulette duel. There is a third season that is said to be the last to be released this year. Good thinking not to stretch the plot further. Severance will also have a third season, which may or may not be the last. For now, audiences are being drip fed an episode a week and remain hooked, but it is doubtful that this satire of the working world, set in those long white and dreary corridors, has much more to offer.

Trump, Season 2

President Trump’s second season has come after a four-year interlude. It is much more brutal, more destabilizing, more threatening than the first. The brakes that stopped him in his tracks the first time around have all but been removed, whether in his party or in U.S. institutions. And because there is no trace of compassion or empathy in his decisions or rhetoric, he dehumanizes millions of human beings: migrants, refugees, transsexuals, the disabled.

He has ushered in the era of the strong against the weak, but we have not seen him stand firm with the oligarchs who fawn over him. Even government workers are more afraid now of Elon Musk’s hatchet jobs than the memory-free trolling employees in Severance. We live in what author Andrea Rizzi calls The Age of Revenge.

The first episode of Trump’s second season, covering his first three weeks back in power, has already unleashed more chaos than the entire first term. Who knew we would actually miss the Trump of 2016, the one who was just as big of a bully but moved more tentatively. There was some comedy then; now it’s pure drama. There are new scenarios: Guantanamo, raids on migrants, flights with migrants in chains, Greenland, Panama, a Gaza “cleansed” of Palestinians that Trump envisions as the Las Vegas of the Middle East, the end of all aid to Africa. The dystopia is here: it is a reality that resembles Squid Game. It’s every man for himself.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition