Major spoilers ahead for The Squid Game Season 2.

One of the most famous unforgettable characters from the shocking first season of The Squid Game was a mysterious, nameless figure played by Gong Yoo. Some people colloquially refer to this guy as The Salesman, but the official subtitles for the show call him The Recruiter, so that's what we'll call him here.

The recruiter is the man who looks for people to play deadly games that could either earn them millions of dollars or lead to their violent deaths. To find players, the Recruiter hangs out in the subway system and challenges strangers to a game Dhakawhich involves trying to flip one heavy colored envelope with another. The recruiter tells the players that if they manage to turn over his envelope, he will give them 100,000 won. If they lose, they must give him 100,000 won. If they don't have money (which they almost certainly don't), he can slap them in the face. However, if a player wins, they don't just get 100,000 won - they also get a chance to play deadly games and win a much bigger prize (or, you know, die horribly).

As played by Gong Yoo, the Recruiter is an unforgettable figure: a tall, well-dressed man with an eerie smile on his face and a vaguely menacing aura. In the first season he was only a minor player, but he made quite an impression. Of course, The Recruiter returns for the first episode of Season 2 of The Squid Game.and this time we learn more about him, including a dark, disturbing, tragic story.

The second season of "The Squid Game" is set two years after the first season, and we learn that during those two years, Seong Gi-hoon (Lee Jung-jae) the 1 season games winnerwas trying to find the Recruiter. Gi-hoon wants to use the Recruiter to find a way to get to the people running the games and shut them down once and for all, but even though Gi-hoon has a whole team of people working for him trying to locate the Recruiter, the Recruiter proved to be illusive. Eventually, however, the Recruiter surfaces, leading to a major confrontation at the climax of the first episode of Season 2, titled "Bread and the Lottery."

Gi-hoon used some of the winnings to buy a motel, which he now uses as his base of operations. As the episode draws to a close, Gi-hoon finds the Recruiter waiting for him in one of the motel rooms, gun in hand. After some back and forth dialogue, the Recruiter spills the beans on his own story. He explains that before he took the gig recruiting people to play the games, he worked on the games himself. He was one of the men in charge of burning the bodies of the players who died. He says that while he was burning the bodies, he said to himself about the dead players: "These things are not human. They are just trash... useless... They have no purpose in this world."

Eventually, the Recruiter managed to become one of the games' masked armed guards. A recruiter reveals that one year during the games, he went to shoot one of the losing players, and something surprising happened. "I recognized his face." Guess who it was? My father," he says. "I was pointing the weapon at my father, and he was begging me with tears in his eyes to spare his life." So you know what I did? I shot him, bang, right in the middle of the forehead. Then I knew, "Ah, I'm really cut out for this."

It's a dark and twisted story, and implies that the Recruiter is a complete psychopath. Perhaps you could argue that years of working on games, burning bodies and shooting people turned him into a psychopath. Or maybe you could argue that he always was. Truth be told, we don't learn much more about him, and that's okay: if we did, it would take away some of the character's power. And while this is a tragic story, the tragedy is the death of Recruiter's father. The recruiter himself seems perfectly uninterested in doing the deed. He continues to laugh as he tells the story, much to Gi-hoon's discomfort.

Ultimately, this scene has an impact because while it reveals more about the Recruiter's backstory, it doesn't insult him or even make him sympathetic. If anything, it makes it even more disturbing and upsetting than it was in season 1.

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