Warning: major spoilers ahead for "Squid Game" season two.
The highly anticipated second season of "Squid Game" is out, and it ends with a chaotic and tragic finale.
Season one was a surprise hit for Netflix when in 2021, becoming a global sensation through word-of-mouth and social media trends. Netflix hopes for the same success with the second season, which debuts in the middle of the holiday season.
In season one, a group of people struggling with debt signed up for a competition where they played children's games to win a fortune.
What they realize too late is that the losers of the games are killed, leaving only one survivor, Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-Jae), Player 456.
At the end of season one, Gi-hun vows to stop the deadly competition, but his plan is foiled in season two, and he finds himself competing again.
He tries to unite the contestants against the game, but they mostly insist on playing, enticed by the prize money.
In the finale, this boils over into a massacre when the players who want to continue the games attack those who want to leave.
Gi-hun and his allies use that chaos to overwhelm the guards and start an uprising against the game makers. But the rebels are eventually cornered and defeated. Gi-hun survives, but his best friend, Park Jung-bae (Lee Seo-hwan), Player 390, is killed in front of him by the antagonist, Hwang In-ho (Lee Byung-hun), Player 001.
Gi-hun will likely seek revenge in season three, though his spirit may be broken by his failure and the loss of his close friend.
After Jung-bae's death, the credits for the director and cast appear on-screen.
Then, a small scene shows a group of players walking into a new game room. This room includes a train signal stand, a hanging doll resembling the Young-hee doll from "Red Light, Green Light," and a boy doll facing the first.
The boy doll is likely Cheol-su. In June 2022, Hwang Dong-hyuk said in a statement teasing season two that the show will introduce "Young-hee's boyfriend, Cheol-su."
Young-hee and Cheol-su are characters from old South Korean textbooks and are well-known as best friends.
Cheol-su is not assigned to a specific game, but the other signs in the scene may indicate that the game is somehow related to trains.