And while I’m on the topic, this is probably as good a time as any to tackle all the other stuff “Circle Triangle Square” gets up to that’s not the game itself: No-eul’s final confrontation with The Officer, as well as the exciting culmination of Boat Adventures 2: Boat Harder. There is at least something to No-eul’s (very long) fight with her former middle-manager, who apparently bonded with her over leaving people behind in North Korea. (In his case, it was apparently due to a lack of transplantable organs, so that’s that character beat/criminal smuggling ring explained.) Taking place in In-ho’s office (because that’s where he keeps paper copies of the amusingly named Squid Archives), this sequence goes on for a long time, but ultimately never develops much beyond “woman forced to abandon her child betrays evil organization to save other child, man gets mad about it.” He gets the drop on her, she gets the drop on him, she gets stabbed, he gets shot, nobody threatens to throw a baby off of anything, and it’s all kind of a wash. No-eul survives, gets rid of the hard copy of 246’s records and another couple of things get ticked off the show’s plot checklist. (The boat stuff, meanwhile, is even more slight: 246 gets into a running gunfight with some Pink Guards and is saved when Jun-ho and The Other Guy Who’s With Jun-ho come across him in their boat. Truly, it’s a joyous confluence of maritime coincidences. It’s a shame we couldn’t get some shots of Choi floating somewhere out in a dinghy, too.)
I’m continually dismissive of this material, not because No-eul and Jun-ho aren’t decent enough characters—although they both tend to be pretty flat in practice. But A.) traditional action sequences aren’t Squid Game’s strong suit, as the season-two finale pretty ably demonstrated. And B.) these bits contribute nothing to the show’s over-arcing themes. Jun-ho just really wants to find his brother; No-eul just really wants to save some guy she knows from work. There’s not much more to their stories than that. At no point, during either of these plotlines, do I feel like I’m getting much insight into how the games work or how they’re meant to reflect on society. It’s just…Plot Stuff.
Anyway, back in the actual TV show: The nine surviving players are introduced to the rules of Sky Squid Game, and they’re simple and brutal. Standing on top of lethally high towers, they’ll have fifteen minutes to push at least one (living) member of their group off, allowing the survivors to move to the next edifice. Successfully complete the task three times within each individual time limit, and the survivors walk away with their prize. Otherwise, well…you know.
Jeong-dae and his crew think they have the game already solved coming in: push off Min-su, Gi-hun, and the baby, and walk out as multi-billionaires. But their pronouncements about “fairness” and the “democratic” process keep running, hard, into the practicalities of murder in ways that give “Square Triangle Circle” a queasy tension it might have otherwise lacked. How, for instance, do you get the baby away from Gi-hun, so that each can be killed in a one-per-tower fashion? (Screw it up and kill them both at once, and one of Jeong-dae’s six is going to have to tumble down to fulfill the win condition for the final bout.) And once a target has been safely picked, how do you actually get them off the ledge without going over yourself? It’s all well and good to try speaking calmly about how the electorate has decided you, specifically, need to smash into the ground and explode for the good of the group—but try telling that to a man on the brink.
None of this psychological math is made easier by Myung-gi, who’s secretly running his own program separate from everybody else. Sure, he’s the one who ultimately pushes poor, addled Min-su to his death, using a “safety” pole at the center of the tower to prod him over the edge and finish the first round with just a few seconds left on the clock. But he’s also desperate to save his child, first attempting to engineer a complicated con to get the kid off of Gi-hun and then, when that fails due to that still-in-play knife, seizing a moment of distraction to shove one of the attackers to his death in Gi-hun’s place. It all nearly works, as the surviving Os immediately identify the path of least resistance/stabbings and swiftly turn on one of their own to be a “lunch box,” beating him mercilessly so that they can throw him off the ledge as soon as the Circle tower’s game has started. But, wouldn’t you know it, Gi-hun’s altruism just won’t bite: His insistence on actual fairness, with the surviving six adults drawing lots to see who dies last, kicks off a final fight that depletes the supply of available victims quickly. And it’s here, as with Hide And Seek, that Myung-gi’s blend of pragmatism and greed fucks everybody: Sensing a chance to punish an asshole and bulk up the final pot, he shoves a defenseless Jeong-dae to his death. It’s all well and good, since they’ve still got the “lunch box” to toss…until the doomed man gets his posthumous revenge by throwing himself off the tower preemptively. Now it’s just two men and a baby, as we go out on Myung-gi and Gi-hun staring each other down, and the circle tower still demanding one final death.
Whew! It’s a lot to parse, especially because there’s not room here to chart out every single shift of alliance, authority, pragmatism, and self-serving rhetoric that goes down on those two towers. The aggregate, though, is a pleasant whiplash between dark comedy and just pure darkness, with men trying to find the right combination of lofty words that will make a noble act out of the cowardly murders they’re trying to commit. Watching Myung-gi maneuver, and the cracks form in Jeong-dae’s supposedly solid alliance, is a pure distillation of all the ugly things Squid Game has had to say about capitalist democracy ever since the voting concept was introduced. The result isn’t as draining as “The Starry Night,” because it would be hard for anything to match that particular ordeal. But it’s a fascinating final game, and it makes “Circle Triangle Square” one of the strongest episodes of the season (at least, of course, when it focuses on the parts of this show that actually matter).
Stray observations
- • The show got me with the shot of the knife going into the neck, at least at first. (Also, it feels telling that In-ho’s kill is eerily close to how Sang-woo ended up killing himself at the end of the first season.)
- • I can’t read Korean to check the credits, but I’m assuming that’s not O Yeong-su—who was convicted on sexual misconduct charges in 2024—reprising his role as Oh Il-nam in the flashback. (Although we do get a bizarre look at the old man, since In-ho apparently keeps a lifelike mannequin of him in his apartment.)
- • A nice touch: Gi-hun shading from X red to O blue as he crosses the floor to potentially stab Jeong-dae.
- • The show brings back a lot of old actors for this episode: T.O.P., Roh Jae-won, and Won Ji-an all reprise their roles as Thanos, Nam-gyu, and Se-mi in Min-su’s final, fatal flashbacks. Meanwhile, if that’s not new footage of Jung Ho-yeon as Sae-byeok, it’s at least not the shots the show used in the first season.
- • Speaking of: R.I.P., Min-su, you went out as you lived: imparting the valuable moral lesson that people shouldn’t take drugs to cope with the stress of being trapped in a murder game.
- • Once you start looking for the word “trash” in these scripts, you really can’t escape it: Il-nam uses it as he talks In-ho into murdering his competitors, and it continues to crop up throughout the episode.
- • The “Safety First” sign at the Sky Squid Game course is a cute touch.
- • I do not find the No-eul fights compelling from a strictly action-based lens, but I will admit to wincing when The Officer brains her with his glass.
- • Last episode, I complained that the surviving O guys were too generically greedy to serve as meaningful characters, but 336 (Park Jin-woo) and 203 (Choi Gwi-hwa) get a lot of mileage out of their, let’s say, “support” of the democratic process.
- • “We’ve discussed this and made a democratic decision. I’m sorry, but we’re going to need you to die.”
- • I might be wrong, but I don’t think Lee Jung-jae speaks until 35 minutes into the episode. What’s there to say?
- • I know it’s a stylistic choice, but the VIP dialogue still sounds so fake, especially when contrasted with the genuinely great comedy work the Korean stars are doing.
- • “Well done, guys! You did the right thing! That trash should have died a long time ago!”
