Squid Game 3: Episodes 1-6 (Series Review)

by SailorJumun

The global phenomenon Squid Game returns for its third and final season, hitting the ground running into a thrilling, action-packed climax. The players get more desperate with the end — and the money — in sight, bringing on more blood and more emotion. It also brings on the ultimate question: Can anyone truly win at these games?

NOTE: This review contains major spoilers, so proceed with caution.

 
SERIES REVIEW

Seriously. If you haven’t watched the show yet, do not read any further. Unless, of course, you’re morbidly curious, in which case, come on in. The horror party is just getting started. Last time, in Season 2, our hero and one-time Squid Game winner SUNG KI-HOON (Lee Jung-jae) assembled a crew of players to infiltrate the control room. This resulted in many deaths on both the player and enemy sides, including Ki-hoon’s friend Jung-bae.

As the gamemakers regain control of the situation, pink soldier KANG NO-EUL (Park Kyu-young) purposely gives the player PARK KYUNG-SEOK (Lee Jin-wook) a nonfatal wound and sends him down for organ harvesting. She’d been keeping an eye on him all throughout the games, wanting to get him back to his ill daughter, and she finally has the chance to help. She kills all the soldiers in the organ harvesting operation and gets Kyung-seok disguised in a pink suit.

Back in the players’ break room, Ki-hoon is forced to sit with his failure, having lost all of his fight. But when he hears that his group member KANG DAE-HO (Kang Haneul) flaked out of their big battle when he was supposed to retrieve more ammo… it lights a new fire in his eyes. He finds the motivation in his misguided anger, which is probably what the Games’ FRONT MAN (Lee Byung-heon) wants.

This newfound anger follows Ki-hoon into the next game — hide and seek. The players are split up into blue and red teams, blue being the hiders and red being the taggers. The cruel twist is that the red players have to find and kill at least one blue player in order to move on. Unfortunately for Dae-ho, Ki-hoon is on the red team and dead set on coming after him.

The hide and seek game is probably my favorite aesthetically, with its disorienting maze setup and cat-and-mouse-like direction. (My entire body tenses up anytime someone has to go around a corner.) This game also has the most impactful deaths, rivaling the infamous marble episode in Season 1.

Ki-hoon and Dae-ho face off, throwing the blame for their failed mission on each other. In a fit of rage, Ki-hoon strangles Dae-ho to death, Dae-ho’s last words being, “It’s your fault.” And with no one else to blame, Ki-hoon is left with his own guilt. Elsewhere, while hiding, the young pregnant woman KIM JUN-HEE (Jo Yuri) goes into labor.

Jun-hee has the kind elderly woman JANG GEUM-JA (Kang Ae-shim) there to care for her, as well as the badass trans woman CHO HYUN-JOO (Park Sung-hoon) to fight off any red players. When Hyun-joo has her guard down, however, she’s stabbed and killed… by LEE MYUNG-KI (Im Shi-wan), Jun-hee’s ex-boyfriend and father of her newly born CGI child. Yeesh.

If that wasn’t bad enough, Geum-ja’s son PARK YONG-SHIK (Yang Dong-geun) appears and pursues Jun-hee, as he’s failed to kill any other blue players. To stop him, Geum-ja stabs him in the back with her hairpin. The wound itself isn’t fatal, but it does seal his fate. The countdown for the game ends, and Geum-ja barely has enough time to hug her son before the soldiers barge in to finish him off.

The intense emotion is immediately thrown off with the arrival of the VIPs. *dramatic sigh* Now, look. Despite being a dark and violent series, Squid Game does have a lot of ironic humor that works. The VIP characters — the one-note billionaires who watch the games for entertainment — do not work for me. Their Bahaha, look at the trash commonors commentary is just too corny in execution. I think it would’ve been more effective if they were merely stoic masked figures silently watching on.

Coming back from hide and seek, Geum-ja begs a dejected Ki-hoon to look after Jun-hee and her baby. It’s apparently her last wish, because the next morning, Geum-ja is found dead from hanging herself. Once again, Ki-hoon clings onto this new motivation and steps up to protect Jun-hee. That’s not going to be easy, though, since the next game is a super-sized version of jump rope and poor Jun-hee is too injured to jump.

The gamemakers insist that the baby has to make it across the arena too, or else they’ll eliminate it. So Ki-hoon, being the beast that he is, jumps across with the baby in tow. He’d planned to go back to retrieve Jun-hee, but the platform is too narrow, and he’s unable to cross with other players on it. On the other side, Myung-ki offers Jun-hee his help, but she doesn’t want it. Knowing she can’t survive this one, she yells for Ki-hoon to keep her baby alive and then steps off the platform, to her own death.

Afterwards, the annoying group of players who kept voting to stay in decide that they’ve accumulated enough money and are ready to go home. But the Front Man already thought ahead, changing the rules to make the baby a player in place of its mother — meaning less money. It’s also announced that for the final game, the players get to choose who to eliminate. Just like that, the greedy ajusshis are essentially manipulated into keeping the Games going. It’s pretty fucking sad how easy it is.

That night, the Front Man calls Ki-hoon up to his quarters, offering a knife and a proposition. He tells Ki-hoon to kill the rest of the players in their sleep, that way Ki-hoon and the baby will automatically win (since the final game can’t be played with only two people). Ki-hoon doesn’t understand why the Front Man would help him, so the Front Man unmasks himself. Ki-hoon’s confusion shifts to anger, seeing his supposed teammate “Young-il” was his enemy all along.

Ki-hoon seems tempted to kill him right then and there, but he just takes the knife and leaves. The Front Man has a flashback to when he was a player in the Games, when the creator Il-nam gave him the same proposition. And though the Front Man had been conflicted, he ultimately killed his opponents to take the win.

Ki-hoon is just as conflicted, and he nearly goes through with it… But then he imagines Sae-byeok, the player from his last Games, before him. She reminds him that “You’re not that kind of person,” which makes him walk away. The Front Man watches the whole thing from his monitor, clearly shaken that Ki-hoon chose differently.

On the final game day, it’s revealed that they’ll be playing Sky Squid Game. Similarly to the original Squid Game, the arena is the square-triangle-circle shapes — although, this time, the shapes are these massive pillars. They have to shove at least one player over for each pillar, and the majority is already eyeing Ki-hoon and the baby. Thankfully, Myung-ki seems like he actually cares about his baby, so he uses his Bitcoin brain to get other players knocked off.

Not-so-thankfully, Myung-ki lets his greed get the best of him, and he kills one too many players on the penultimate shape. For the last shape, the only ones left are him, his baby, and Ki-hoon, and one of them has to go. Ki-hoon initially offers to sacrifice himself, but Myung-ki is too paranoid to trust him. The two get into a violent struggle, ending with them going over the edge. Ki-hoon manages to grab hold of a bar, while Myung-ki falls and dies.

All the while, the other storylines are coming to a head. Out at sea, in search of the island, Detective HWANG JUN-HO (Wie Ha-joon) discovers too late that his ally Captain Park is working for the Front Man. There’s a total bloodbath on the boat, with Captain Park killing most of Jun-ho’s men, and with Jun-ho killing the captain with a harpoon gun. Jun-ho continues his search, and he eventually comes across Kyung-seok, who No-eul sent off in a motorboat.

Back on the island, No-eul confronts her boss, the Front Man’s subordinate (Park Hee-soon), demanding that he destroy any records of Kyung-seok. The boss tries to fight her, but she kills him off and goes down to the archive room herself. After getting rid of Kyung-seok’s file, she peeks at her own file and learns that the daughter she’s been trying to find is supposedly dead. Overwhelmed with grief, she wanders out and takes her gun, wanting to shoot herself. Right as she’s about to pull the trigger, she hears a shrill cry, making her notice Ki-hoon on the monitor, holding the baby.

I wish I could say that Ki-hoon and the baby were declared winners and freed to go. But alas, no one hit the goddamn start button before Myung-ki fell to his death. Ki-hoon only now hits the button, knowing it’s either him or the baby. From their viewing room, the VIPs consider it a done deal, assuming Ki-hoon will claim a second win.

But this is Ki-hoon we’re talking about. He looks down at the baby sadly (I can’t help but wonder if he’s thinking of his daughter), and he sets her down. “We are not game pieces,” Ki-hoon declares in defiance. “We are humans. Humans are…” Before he can finish his sentence, he lets himself fall backwards, over the edge. Everyone, including No-eul, the Front Man, and the VIPs, watches in quiet disbelief.

The Front Man gets word that Jun-ho is coming, followed by the coast guard, so he hits the timed self-destruct button (because top secret murder games always require a self-destruct button) and gets everyone to evacuate. As the Front Man enters the arena to pick up the baby, Jun-ho reaches the viewing room and shoots out the window, earning his brother’s attention.

Jun-ho desperately asks why his brother is doing all of this, but the Front Man turns his back on him and leaves without answering. They both manage to get off the island, and the timer for self-destruction ticks down to zero, blowing up every last bit of evidence. And honestly, after all that build-up, after Jun-ho spent all of Seasons 2 and 3 doing nothing but search for the island… I’m pissed that this is all we get.

Six months later. No-eul has hope that her daughter is actually alive and sets off to China to find her. Kyung-seok and his daughter are alive and well. And Jun-ho is surprisingly chill despite everything that went down. One day, however, when Jun-ho returns to his apartment, he finds Jun-hee’s baby waiting for him, along with a debit card of the baby’s winnings.

We then cut to Los Angeles, where Ki-hoon’s daughter Ga-young lives. The Front Man stops by her place to inform her that her father passed away. He leaves her with her dad’s belongings, which turn out to be his bloodied player uniform and a debit card with the rest of his earnings from the first game. On his drive back, the Front Man passes by a well-dressed woman playing ddakji with a homeless man. The woman (cameo by Cate Blanchett) turns to the Front Man and smiles.

So. Many. Mixed. Feelings. Before I get into an inevitable rant, I’m going to say that, overall, I did have fun with this season. The games were, as expected, creative and effectively terrifying. A lot of characters were easy to root for and, as a result, easy to get attached to. And, as much as I dump on the VIPs, they did provide a good (albeit pained) laugh. But as the credits rolled, all I could think was What the hell was the point? The ending was unpredictably predictable. Because of course Ki-hoon would die to keep his humanity. Of course Jun-ho would fail to stop his brother. Of course the Games would continue. In this world, the gamemakers are invincible, so it just wouldn’t make sense for one player and one detective to break the system. But I wanted some kind of catharsis — something different.

I’m not saying that this needed a happy ending. I even appreciate the fact that writer/director Hwang Dong-hyuk committed to the bleakness and gave us the ambiguous message that “Humans are…” With that, my interpretation is that humans are complicated. Good things don’t always happen to good people, and good people don’t always do good things. As we saw in the finale, Ki-hoon’s decision to go out as a good person changed something in the Front Man. It revived a part of his heart that years of gamemaking hardened. But, at the end of the day, the Front Man can’t step away from the Games, I’m guessing because he doesn’t have anything else. It’s sad, sure, but I don’t know if it was worth two extra seasons to get to that sentiment.

Looking at all three seasons as a whole, the first chapter said everything it needed to say, and then the last two just repeated it. So to me, it just feels like a perfectly decent show blew up internationally and was pressured into being stretched out. What’s funny is that the Los Angeles scene almost seems like a jab at the obsession with the franchise. Like how interest can spread and take a life of its own. If the franchise does spread into a US spinoff, though, I won’t be tuning in again. There are only so many times I can have the Money always wins theme hammered over my head.

 
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