Netflix’s Squid Game Season 2 Gives Gong Yoo’s Recruiter A Brutal Backstory

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, nameless figure played by Gong Yoo. Some folks colloquially refer to this man as 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 the deadly games that could either net them millions of bucks or lead to their violent demises. To find players, the Recruiter hangs out in the subway system and challenges strangers to a game of ddakji, which involves trying to flip over one heavy colored envelope with another. The Recruiter tells the players that if they manage to flip over his envelope, he’ll 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 almost certainly do not), he gets to slap them across the face. However, if a player wins, they don’t just get the 100,000 won — they also are offered a chance to play the deadly games and win a much bigger prize (or, ya know, die horribly). 

As played by Gong Yoo, the Recruiter is an unforgettable figure: a tall, well-dressed man with a creepy smile on his face and a vaguely threatening aura. He was only a minor player in the first season, but he made quite an impression. Sure enough, the Recruiter returns for the first episode of “Squid Game” season 2, and this time we learn more about him, including a dark, disturbing, tragic backstory. 

“Squid Game” season 2 is set two years after the first season, and we learn that during those two years, Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae), the winner of the games from season 1, has been trying to find the Recruiter. Gi-hun wants to use the Recruiter to find a way to get to the people who run the games and shut them down once and for all, but even though Gi-hun has an entire team of people working for him trying to locate the Recruiter, the Recruiter has proven to be illusive. Eventually, however, the Recruiter surfaces, leading to a big confrontation at the climax of the first episode of season 2, titled “Bread and Lottery.” 

Gi-hun has used some of the money he won to purchase 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, a gun in his hand. After some back-and-forth dialogue, the Recruiter spills the beans on his own backstory. He explains that before he landed the gig of recruiting people to play the games, he worked at the games himself. He was one of the people in charge of burning the bodies of players who died. He says that as he burned the bodies, he would tell himself, in regards to 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 becoming one of the masked armed guards at the games. The Recruiter reveals that one year during the games, he went over to shoot one of the players who lost, and something surprising happened. “I recognized his face. Guess who it was? My dad,” he says. “I was aiming a weapon at my very own father, and he begged me, tears in his eyes, to spare his life. So you know what I did? I shot him, bang, right in the middle of his forehead. That’s when I knew, “Ah I really am cut out for this.'”

It’s a dark and twisted story, and it implies that the Recruiter is a full-blown psychopath. Perhaps you could argue that years of working the games, burning bodies and shooting people, turned him into a psychopath. Or perhaps you could argue he was always that way. In truth, we don’t learn much more about him, and that’s fine: if we learned more, it would rob the character of some of his power. And while this is a tragic backstory, the tragedy is the death of the Recruiter’s father. The Recruiter himself seems perfectly nonplussed about having committed the deed. He keeps on smiling as he tells the story, much to Gi-hun’s discomfort. 

Ultimately, this scene makes an impact because while it reveals more about the Recruiter’s backstory, it doesn’t defang 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.