Speaking of loathsome and unlikely team-ups: Circumstances also end up forcing together Player 100 (Im Jeong-dae) and Player 044 (Seon-nyeo) for a battle of the manipulative snakes. Finding the exit to the maze isn’t enough for the blues to escape, it turns out: You also have to have three different keys that were distributed to the hiders at random, representing either collaboration, or, in more practical terms, a willingness to rob corpses. (That’s certainly how Jeong-dae gets his extra one, after he wastes exactly zero time shoving an “ally” into the thresher to save his own ass.) Both of these characters have always felt more allegorical than the average Squid Game contestant, standing in for wider and dangerous forces driving people to self-destructive actions. If that’s the case, then fake business geniuses end up winning out over fake religious messiahs, as Jeong-dae betrays Seon-nyeo (who’s been busy using her own followers as human shields) once they’ve got the exit door open, for no apparent reason beyond meager profit and spite. She might have survived, even so, if not for a sudden appearance by Min-su, who’s whacked out of his mind on guilt (and one of Thanos’ loose pills). No talk of karma or demands to the spirits can save her from his wayward knife, as he fantasizes he’s saving the murdered Se-mi from Nam-gyu. Certainly, though, that’s going to be the most fucked-up murder of the episode, right?
Cut to Hyun-ju, Geum-ja, and Jun-hee, who’ve stuck together to stay alive—something that gets a lot more complicated when Jun-hee’s ankle snaps, followed swiftly by her water breaking. It falls on Hyun-ju to keep the two more vulnerable women alive while the young mother gives birth, fending off attackers, navigating the labyrinth, and ultimately finding the exit. Faced with the ultimate temptation—she’s carrying all three of the trio’s keys, for safety—Hyun-ju proves, once and for all, that she’s too good for this sinful earth, turning back from certain safety to save the other two. Her reward is a knife to the back, courtesy of Myung-gi, who doesn’t realize who he’s killed, or who he’s done it in front of, until it’s far too late.
Squid Game tends to get a lot of credit for its writing—at least in part, I think, because the language barrier sometimes makes its performances harder to appreciate. But it would have been very easy for Hyun-ju, as the show’s only trans character, to have existed as a sort of edgeless cipher, a character made deliberately anodyne because the show’s creators were too scared to give her a real personality or flaws. Park Sung-hoon never let that happen, though. In his hands, she was shy, funny, charismatic, and badass, a deeply necessary character to root for as the series has gotten ever darker. Losing the closest thing we’ve got to a hero right now is a horrifying gut punch, and the episode effectively sells the tragedy of her death. But, hey, at least that’s got to be the most fucked-up murder of the episode, right?
Cut to Gi-hun, who stalks the starry hallways like some kind of hyper-focused minotaur, hunting for blood. Our “main character” isn’t here to kill blue players; he’s not even here to try to ensure his own survival. Our protagonist is wearing red because he intends to kill Dae-ho, and Dae-ho alone, for his “betrayal” during the failed revolution. This is, honestly, the weakest of the various plot threads that run through “The Starry Night,” if only because its resolution is so very obvious (and because it’s disconnected from so much else of what happens in this episode). When Gi-hun finally tracks a desperate Dae-ho down, he’s confronted with the reality that all he’s really doing is externalizing his own guilt, and that the young military faker is just a scapegoat for his own desire to die over how many people he got killed. Which doesn’t stop Gi-hun from fatally choking his quarry, out of a blend of rage, survival instinct, and just a smidge of narrative convenience (because the show isn’t killing Lee Jung-jae off with four more episodes left to go). He squeezes the last of the life out of the boy just as the clock winds down; seconds later, he turns the knife on himself, but it’s too late. The Front Man’s guards shoot it out of his hands before he can kill the man he’s truly come to hate. But, hey, at least that’s got to be the most fucked up murder of the episode. Right? Right?
Cut to Yong-sik, Geum-ja’s son and the apparent Charlie Brown of would-be killers. Throughout “The Starry Night,” we check in on his hapless efforts to score a kill, failing each time, and bringing him closer and closer to the moment when he’ll be eliminated at game’s end. Lucky for him, then, when he stumbles onto two extremely vulnerable targets right at the last moment. The only issue is that they’re his mother. And Jun-hee.
What follows is queasy, horrible, honest, ugly, and absolutely devastating. Yong-sik seems like a nice guy, in small doses. He’s funny, goofy, and he tries to be kind. And he is, above all else, weak. It’s how he ended up in debt to loan sharks; it’s how both he, and his mother, ended up on the island. (Of all the characters we’ve met in Squid Game 2 and 3, in fact, he’s the one closest to the Gi-hun we met back at the beginning of the show.) And that weakness manifests here in the most grotesque way possible, as he begs his mother to step aside and let him murder a new mother holding her baby so that he can live for one more day. He’d never hurt his own mom to keep himself alive, of course. But he’d shamefully sink a knife into someone else’s.
But Geum-ja, despite her failings, is not weak and so she finds herself standing at the exact limits of how far co-dependence and love can take a mother. Kang Ae-shim has been one of the highlights of these last two seasons of Squid Game, and she’s utterly heartbreaking here, as Geum-ja realizes there’s only one way to stop Yong-sik from doing something truly monstrous. With her emergency knife jammed into his back, he’s halfway to dying, even before the Pink Guards show up to finish the job. He has just enough time to croak out an apology to his mom before we close on her screams and the shots.
“The Starry Night” feels, in a lot of ways, like a challenge. Squid Game weathered a lot of accusations of being simple torture porn after it was released, of existing as cruelty for its own sake and little else. And so Hwang has given us an episode that is all murder game, in which our heroes must either kill or be killed, and where we never leave the perspective of rats running in the maze. More than once, during my first watch of it, I had to check the running time of the episode—not because I wasn’t riveted, but because I needed to see how much horror was still on the horizon. And yet, very little in the episode feels gratuitous. (It is, essentially, a character piece, with each of our dwindling survivors being tested and mostly found wanting.) The episode represents an extremity: for the characters, for the reality of the show, and for the audience’s endurance. Hwang absorbed condemnations for making misery porn and seems to have been moved to create misery art instead, crafting something very close to Squid Game idealized: human beings trapped in a system designed to grind them down and turn them into killers. It might be the best episode the show has ever done. I pray like hell it never tries to repeat the achievement.
Stray observations
- • As for that cold open: No-eul kills the doctor after he announces he’s saved Geong-seok’s life, then prepares to disguise him as one of her fellow guards. It’s pretty slight, but a deadly introduction to the rest of the ordeal.
- • The game as a whole seems to be rigorously fair by Squid Game standards: The different keys are a twist, but there doesn’t seem to be anything consciously tilting victory to one side or another.
- • The sequence of Gi-hun “chasing” Dae-ho early on in the episode is a really nasty game of misdirection. I think it plays fair, using legit cuts to hide when it’s swapping between Dae-ho and the other guy with his same haircut, but it’s a mean little tease.
- • On a similar note: I’m not sure exactly how the episode pulls off covering 30 minutes of game time in 50 minutes of TV; we get glimpses of the clock throughout, but not often enough to be scrupulous about timekeeping. It could be irritating, but I’d rather have this closed system than something more plausible.
- • I’m slightly surprised the organizers let Myung-gi and Nam-gyu get away with their “each of us gets half a kill twice” strategy, but anything for more carnage, perhaps.
- • A pointed moment, halfway through, when Gi-gun doesn’t seem to even consider saving a blue player when she’s in peril. Dude is gone.
- • A very dark comedy beat: Seon-nyeo calmly noping right back out of a room she’s just unlocked—only to have Myung-gi and Nam-gyu burst out and start slaughtering her confused followers.
- • Immediately afterward, she has the bad luck—given that she’s the only other person in the labyrinth he might have enough hate for to kill—of running into Gi-hun. Her cold reading skills (briefly) save her life one last time as she sics him on Dae-ho, instead.
- • Another clever, claustrophobic touch: We never see the inside of the exit room, only its golden light (and cheesy music) welcoming in the survivors.
- • There is strong use of music throughout; the song that plays as Geum-ja and Jun-hee watch Hyun-ju die is especially understated and sad.
- • “It’s my fault.”
