This article contains spoilers for The Squid Game Season 2.

The Squid Game is, by design, a show with a massive cast. Well, at least that's how it starts - as fans you remember all too well from Season 1's The Squid Game, The show's deadly playground games tend to reduce the cast to something sinister as the plot progresses. Knowing this, it's only natural that some of the show's more obscure characters fail to capture the viewer's attention. This actually works in the second season's favor when it comes to Jung-bae (Lee Seo-hwan), who has such a small presence in the first season of The Squid Game that he almost counts as a completely new character from the second season ... while simultaneously having a useful, pre-established history with series protagonist Seong Gi-hoon (Lee Jung-jae).

Jung-bae is a good friend of Gi-hoon who appears several times in the first two episodes of the first season - "Red Light, Green Light" and "Hell" - and signs up to play the game in season 2. How to work already weren't tense enough for Gi-hoon, the revelation that the closest remaining human contact outside of his daughter Ga-jeong (Jo Ah-in) is now wearing the green jumpsuit is just the thing to raise the stakes (and level of Gi-Hoon's stress) high.

You'd be forgiven for not remembering Jung-bae at first, since he's not actually named in Season 1 of The Squid Game. Since he's only present during the dark, ruined early cutscenes that take place outside of the game, he's relatively easy to miss and only appears in the first two episodes. However, he is actually present for Gi-hoon's fairly early character development, as his partner in crime in gambling and later shares a candid conversation outside Jung-bae's bar before his wife (Kim Young-soon) stops it.

While Jung-bae has a business and thus seems to have his life a bit more together than Gi-hoon, the show's first episode, "Red Light, Green Light," establishes that they share a love of gambling—and if nothing else , Jung-bae may be the more responsible of the pair, given Gi-hoon's constant nagging of his inability to be a better man. Because Jung-bae joins the other four returning characters from season 1 and becomes the latest Player 390 of the deadly game for The Squid Game Season 2his newly established status as a major character marks a very dramatic—not to mention tragic—change in his fortunes.

Season 2 of The Squid Game is now streaming on Netflix.