[Editor’s note: The recap of episode two publishes June 28.]
Who do you hurt when you can’t hurt the person—the system, the world—that’s hurt you? Who do you kill when your enemy is, by its very nature, untouchable?
That is the question on the table as we return to Squid Game for this not especially premiere-y season-three premiere. We’re picking up in the immediate aftermath of last December’s “Friend Or Foe”—which, fittingly, didn’t feel all that much like a true season finale, either. Series creator Hwang Dong-hyuk has been upfront about the fact that the Netflix show’s second and third seasons were initially conceived as a single unit, and that’s abundantly clear as we watch the fallout of the failed attack on the Games’ command center. Nothing has been meaningfully resolved: Jung-bae is still dead, the X team has now been decimated, and the only survivor who made it out of the worst parts of the fighting desperately wishes he hadn’t—as the Front Man’s goons drop a literally gift-wrapped Gi-hun right back down the well he spent all of Squid Game 2 climbing out of.
If there is a sharp demarcating line between these seasons, then, it’s happening almost entirely in Gi-hun’s head. Because our guy is, not to put too fine a point on it, broken. The revolutionary vanguard he spent the blood of innocents to muster has been smashed by betrayal from within, and overwhelming force from without, and it’s left him utterly hollowed out by guilt and despair. The only thing that seems to give him any kind of focus at this point is the concept of someone near at hand to blame—specifically Dae-ho, who (the show helpfully reminds us) went back to collect ammunition for the fighters at the height of the battle, but instead abandoned them to their deaths in a fit of cowardice. From our outside, more objective view, it’s easy to say that all Dae-ho could have done, had he been braver, was get himself killed along with his comrades, one more body dumped in a box and maybe chopped up for organs. (It also would have had the knock-on effect of eliminating Hyun-ju, since she only survived because she retreated to check up on his flaky ass, although Dae-ho can’t really claim credit for that one.) But an outside, more objective viewpoint does not seem to currently be welcome in Gi-hun’s mind. He can’t kill the Front Man. The Games don’t seem willing to let him kill himself. Dae-ho, maybe, will have to do.
Our other characters, meanwhile, are largely where we left them: Murderbro Nam-gyu continues to brand himself as Thanos 2.0, bullying timid Min-su over his unwillingness to protect the now dead Se-mi during the previous night’s attacks. Hyun-ju is still heroic as all get out and teamed up with tough-as-nails older lady Jang Geum-ja and her more pudding-y son Park Yong-sik. Pregnant Jun-hee (now apparently on the verge of labor) tries to figure out how far she can trust her ex Myung-gi. And the O team as a whole is diving ever-deeper into its embrace of performative cruelty, sweeping the next election to keep the games going and sarcastically thanking Gi-hun for making their electoral win possible by getting so many of his supporters killed. Of course, some of them might be about to get a sharp reminder that alleged meritocracies can get very nasty very quickly when the definition of “merit” arbitrarily shifts.
Into all this extant tension, the organizers introduce our next contest: an inventively nasty take on hide and seek. The rules are fairly simple, with players sorted into (new) red and blue teams, breaking up previous alliances (much to the dismay of O team leader Im Jeong-dae, who finds himself about to become a rabbit amongst his personal flock of wolves). The blues are the hiders, equipped with keys that will open doors inside a sprawling labyrinth. Find the exit, or simply survive the game’s 30-minute run time, and they move on to the next round. The reds, meanwhile, are the seekers, armed with knives. In some ways, their task is the more straightforward one: Kill a single hiding blue, and they’ve secured their own survival.
There comes a time, in both of the Games we’ve seen, when contestants’ complicity in the deaths around them get ramped up. The first season diffused that responsibility across groups first, dropping teams of players into the lethal game of tug-of-war before the direct and deadly competition of the marbles game. (This seems to get a deliberate visual callback here, with arena walls that similarly evoke childhood city streets.) In these second games, meanwhile, we’re still fresh off of the bloodbath that was Mingle, where players were forced to kill passively, denying life-saving space to others. Now, though, the knives are literally out: Players on red have to kill now, or they’ll die. No more illusions, no more niceties. As always with the Games, the cruelest aspect here comes down to choice. After both sides complain, at different points, that the game is rigged against them, the organizers—who love “fairness” in all things, of course— offer a compromise: Players may, with the consent of both parties, switch their team.
What follows is the meaty psychological material that makes Squid Game a much better show than the base stuff a million memes constantly strive to boil it down into. We watch various players try to navigate their own mental barriers, and those of the people around them, deciding who’s willing to kill for what. Myung-gi just barely manages to convince Jun-hee to let him protect her, trading her red shirt (and knife) for his blue. Yong-sik convinces Geum-ja to let him make the sacrifice of becoming the killer among them. Dae-ho and Jeong-dae utterly fail to get anyone to switch with them. And Gi-hun? Gi-hun takes his red ball (and knife) and barely blinks. He’s already been confronted with the strung-up bodies of all the people he got killed with his attack on the forces of the great and powerful. What’s one more murder after that?
Divorced of its role as a season premiere, this is a prime slice of Squid Games good stuff: Powerful emotions, complicated gamesmanship, great performances from all involved. (Even the boat crew, still floating around in search of the island the Games are on, gets a chance to do something dramatic, as Jun-ho and Choi have a falling out over whether to trust the secretly traitorous Captain Park.) The cast of the second games is well-enough developed at this point that even basically zombifying Gi-hun doesn’t really hurt the episode—he’ll either go off the deep end and embrace killing, or heroically bounce back, of course, but I’m just as invested in the other stories being told. (One of Squid Games 2/3‘s big selling points over the first outing, I’d argue, is that it’s built up a wider cast of characters into people worth caring about.) This isn’t a great introduction back into the show’s world—thank god it’s only been six months, or I’d be totally out to see—but on the binge it won’t really have to be. What it does have is a return to the tensions that make this show so wonderfully uncomfortable, a looming game designed specifically to exacerbate them—and a proven, and unflinching, willingness to twist the knife.
Stray observations
- • Welcome to The A.V. Club’s recap coverage of Squid Game 3! We’ll be rolling our recaps on a daily basis until we’ve covered the whole season. I’m working from screeners, but keeping my standing policy of not watching the next episode until I’ve finished writing up the previous one, so no worries of spoilers.
- • Today, in our daily installment of “not getting to all the subplots in the recap”: Guard Kang No-eul launches a mini-rebellion of her own, infiltrating the organ traders and then killing them so she can force their private surgeon to save Player 246. It seems like she could have just shot them as soon as she got into their secret lair rather than go through the whole rigamarole of putting down her gun and then picking it back up. But then, I’ve never infiltrated a secret organ-stealing ring.
- • There are now 60 players left in the game, with each one’s individual share now at 660 million won (roughly $486,000). Nevertheless, nobody on O seems to even briefly consider stopping.
- • In-ho gives Captain Park his orders: If the searchers find the island before the games are over, he’s to kill him—including his brother.
- • It’s interesting to contrast Gi-hun’s utter defeat here with the story he tells back in season one about the strike at his factory being broken. That violent smackdown from the Powers That Be turned him into a feckless gambler. It’s an open question what this one is going to do to him.
- • The attack on the command center is categorized as refusing “the democratic process of voting”; meanwhile, the guards do nothing to stop the Os from using intimidation tactics to get more Xs to vote for their side.
- • I continue to not know what to make of 044, Seon-nyeo: She almost gets herself strangled by taunting Gun-hi, then continues to build a following of broken people with her messianic claptrap.
- • Nobody seems to clock that “Oh Young-il” isn’t among the corpses strung up.
- • Watching Netflix’s Tudum coverage of the show last month was mostly an exercise in cringe, but it was a good reminder of how aggressively the series ages up Kang Ae-shim to play Geum-ja. She remains one of my favorite performers from this second batch of folks.
- • “It’s your fault.”
