We reach this depopulated status quo courtesy of that brutal cold open, which dispenses with pretty much all of our remaining extras—as well as Jun-hee, who ultimately opts to drop into the deadly pit herself rather than face the indignity of trying to cross the jump-rope bridge with her shattered and swollen ankle. (She also doesn’t accept help from Myung-gi, whose contrition extends only as far as regretting killing Hyun-ju where his ex and child could see him do it rather than the act itself.) The young mother goes into the hole along with what seem like they might be Gi-hun’s final shreds of belief in his fellow man, having already had to personally kill the gleeful asshole who was blocking the bridge last episode in hopes of driving up his share. As already noted, Squid Game has no interest in humanizing the more monstrous players in its second and third seasons: The show simply accepts that a decent chunk of players have completely bought into the games’ ethos that human life is so valueless that they’ll kill not just to survive but to eke out a few more bundles of cash. They’re “trash,” as the game runners continually assert.
The knock-on effect of that shift is worth looking at, because it pushes the series into bleak waters even by “the TV show where you get shot for being bad at Red Rover” standards. Part of the compulsive horror of Squid Game’s original season was the way its trap steadily closed around the participants, forcing them into increasingly ugly situations where they had to kill, not just to drop a little more money into the big plastic pig but simply to stay alive. It forced you, the viewer, to imagine what you’d do, what depths you’d descend to when your life was on the line. But the addition of the voting in this second round of games (and the ability to take home the already-accrued cash) has forced the opt-in nature of the contest to the forefront. There’s satirical value in that, undeniably: As we’ve sat with the VIPs in their debauchery loungers these past two episodes, the Front Man has calmly laid out all the ways he’s rigged the system to get the majority to vote to keep playing, while firmly believing its their own idea. The O voters’ enthusiastic defense of a system that keeps killing them, while promising to make them rich, is a clear expression of the show’s capitalistic critiques. But in so openly turning so many of the games’ players into “money-crazed” monsters, creator Hwang Dong-hyuk trades much the tragedy of the original run for something angrier and less nuanced. The first season of the show didn’t really hate any of its characters, excepting the VIPs. But it treats Jeong-dae and his gangsters as mere obstacles to be overcome, and it means there’s far less humanity to attach ourselves to as viewers as we cruise into the show’s final stretch.
It’s possible that this is by design, and that Hwang is running a con on those of us in the audience. This entire game has, after all, been engineered by In-ho to strip Gi-hun of his belief in people, culminating in the final scene of “222,” where he reveals himself to our deeply depressed protagonist and encourages him to slit the throats of the Os while they sleep. It’s the ultimate test of the games’ assertion that some people really are “trash,” whose lives mean nothing, and the strongest goad yet to get Gi-hun to drop his belief that the players trapped in the system are actual people who need to be saved. But if Hwang is building to a more hopeful pivot, it’s going to come with some serious baggage: We just watched these guys conspire to murder a baby for a couple hundred grand; there’s not a lot of room for “we’re all in this together!” after that. Certainly, Gi-hun doesn’t leave the knife behind—or plunge it into In-ho’s chest, as we might expect. He hasn’t committed to the path of taking out the garbage just yet, but it’s clear he’s teetering on the brink.
If it feels like I’m getting in the weeds with my philosophizing here, it’s at the encouragement of “222,” which doesn’t actually have a lot of plot to spread across its hour. And what’s there has a tendency to strain the series’ hard-fought sense of groundedness amidst the murder games. (All of the Calvinball with the baby, like most of the material centered on the VIPs, is so far over the top that it’s hard to accept on a human level. Yes, it underlines how arbitrary these rules are—see also how easily the game lifts and drops restrictions on physical violence between players to suit its whims—but you can feel Hwang desperately pressing on the boundaries of the script, trying to keep his reality intact even as he rigs a scenario where Saint Gi-hun has to Lone Wolf And Cub a bunch of evil bankers.) There are, of course, Many Boat Adventures to fill the time: No-eul sends 246 to sail away, while she returns to settle accounts with her former boss; Captain Park kills most of the mercenaries before getting harpooned by Jun-ho; and Choi plays phone tag with some cops. But this material never engages me, because it rarely speaks to the show’s emotional or thematic cores. The actual action is still happening in the heads of the players—specifically, Gi-hun and Myung-gi—and the Front Man, and that action is at a midpoint in this installment. Credit to the show: I genuinely don’t know what happens next or how this ugly final game will play out. But there’s a tension missing for me as we head into these final two episodes, and it’s because I care, by design, so little for so many of the surviving participants. Squid Game has sold its humanity to shore up its satire. And I’m not sure it’s getting more than it’s lost.
Stray observations
- • It feels a bit weird to continually use season one as the comparison point here instead of season two, but it’s the show’s own fault: Squid Game 2 and 3 are so clearly the same story being told with a gap in the middle that there’s not much room to treat them as separate works.
- • Lee Suk gives a fun (if short-lived) performance as 096, the guy blocking the bridge. (He was previously the “fellow Marine” who tried to join Gi-hun’s Six-Legged Pentathlon team, but has been a consistent O voter throughout.)
- • If there’s one place, aesthetically, that I feel like Squid Game consistently drops the ball, it’s in its music choices. The action music during the jump-rope section is so aggressively butt rock that it’s distracting. (That being said, the cut to the VIPs watching the game, sans music, is an effective way of communicating what bloodless dilettantes they are.)
- • Doesn’t it seem weird that nobody combines their jump over the gap in the bridge with a jump over the rope? Seems like it’d be easy to do both at once, and save yourself a lethal double jump.
- • I don’t want to delve too deeply into the show’s gender politics in this limited space, but it feels very on the nose that the only remaining female player, by episode’s end, is a literal baby that Gi-hun has to keep safe. (As far as female characters overall, we’re down to just two: No-eul and the female VIP.)
- • Lee Jung-jae is, obviously, a very charismatic actor, but a lot of his work in this season has just been finding different ways to grimace while choking people or being choked. (It’s only when he’s paired back up with Lee Byung-hun that we see some genuine sparks.)
- • “The baby has nothing to do with trash like you.”
- • No-eul is lured back to the island when the Officer makes it clear he’ll target 246’s sick kid if she doesn’t return.
- • The current share for each player is 4.96 billion won, the equivalent to $3.65 million. (It’d be 5.6 billion without the baby, meaning the Os are getting bent out of shape and screaming about “fairness” over about $500,000 apiece.)
- • A genuinely chilling image: a Pink Guard leaning over the baby to feed it during the fancy dinner.
- • The final game sounds like it’ll be some kind of Prisoner’s Dilemma variant. The lure, of course, is in convincing the Os that their majority position will make them invincible, so why not pick up three more corpses’ worth of cash on their way out the door? (What none of them know—besides the basic structure of the game—is that Myung-gi is the baby’s father and probably won’t vote to have her killed.)
- • “Did we ever have a future to begin with?”
- • And then, finally, the reveal: “Mr. Seong Gi-hun…I’m sorry about Jung-bae.”
