What follows, though, when Gi-hun is left alone with the baby, is tragedy and of the purest and highest sort. “In a tragedy,” Anouilh tells us, “nothing is in doubt and everyone’s destiny is known. That makes for tranquility.” The VIPs seem to genuinely think Gi-hun is going to toss the baby, but we—and In-ho— know better. “Tragedy is restful; and the reason is that hope, that foul deceitful thing, has no part in it. There isn’t any hope. You’re trapped.” Lee Jung-jae has often been stuck doing little more than grimacing in these second and third seasons of Squid Game, but he’s perfect here. If you couldn’t see the desire to live painted on Gi-hun’s face, the sacrifice that’s coming wouldn’t rate. “The whole sky has fallen on you, and all you can do about it is shout,” Anouilh continues. “Don’t mistake me: I said ‘shout’: I did not say groan, whimper, complain.” He kisses the child. He says a silent goodbye—to everything. “But you can shout aloud; you can get at all those things said that you never dared say—or never even knew till then.” As No-eul watches, trapped in the depths of her own despair in the Front Man’s office, and with a gun pointed up suicidally under her own chin, Seong Gi-hun delivers his final refutation of the games. “We are not horses,” he intones, calling back to his confrontations with the Front Man in “One Lucky Day” and “Halloween Party.” (“And you don’t say these things because it will do any good to say them: You know better than that.”) He doesn’t even look at the cameras, at the watchers. He’s saying it for us. (“You say them for their own sake.”) “We are humans.” (“You say them because you learn a lot from them.”) “Humans are…” And then, simply, the fall. You may fill in the final words of that last sentence as needed and as your own heart dictates. The point is that they’re humans. Not horses. Not trash.
It’s a beautiful, affecting, inevitable climax, and nothing that follows—no meandering entrails of Plot Shit, no sudden resurgences of the hated Choi Comedy Hour, no insanely distracting celebrity cameos that feel like a big, red flashing Netflix sign screaming “American Squid Game, coming someday!”— can take anything away from it. Gi-hun dies on his own terms and for a fairly simple principle that Squid Game has returned to, again and again, in its rejection of total nihilism. The world is bad. The system is hateful. The planet, as a whole, is a machine that makes monsters out of men—who make more monsters of each other in turn. But you can still look after people. You can still care for the weak and the vulnerable. You can still reject the ethos of “trash” and try to be a shepherd and maybe manage to pass something worthwhile onto those vulnerable, wonderful, flawed human beings who come next. It’s a heartfelt, tragic ending.
And then, like a rising tide—or, more specifically, like a bunch of big cartoon bombs with giant red timers literally slapped on them—the tragedy detonates, and the melodrama rolls back in. We watch poor, pointless Jun-ho run around the abandoned island under the watch of its Big Dumb Final Level Of A Video Game Self-Destruct Timer, trying to shoot enough panels of glass to make his brother finally come home. (Alas, he never can.) We cut to six months later, to a magical land where childhood cancers evaporate, convicts bask in the light of fresh friendship, and missing children miraculously turn up in China for some reason. We spend a lot of time with characters speculating over where Gi-hun’s money ended up going, as though we haven’t just watched three seasons of TV about how the money really wasn’t the point of any of this. We watch, in short, a show that has dispensed with its higher aims but still seems stuck filling out its lesser ones. (Was someone, somewhere, going to get angry if we never found out what Choi’s plans of future hotel ownership might look like, or what the PIN number for baby Jun-hee’s winner card was going to be?) Some of the material in this extended, meandering epilogue almost hits—I can mock the reveal that No-eul’s kid is improbably still alive, but it at least holds thematic weight, and seeing Sae-byeok’s mother and brother reunite is genuinely sweet. But that same precise detailing of steps that made Squid Game so compelling when it was applied to the minutiae of lethal kids games has never worked half as well when applied to plot beats off the island. It makes the epilogue of the show’s big finale feel like filler at the point where the series should be at its most compelling.
We finish, at least, on a slightly higher note, as In-ho travels to Los Angeles to perform a final service on behalf of his…friend? Victim? Destroyer? (The man himself fails to specify, saying only, with that beautiful gravitas that Lee Byung–hun has always brought to this part, “I’m someone who knows Mr. Seong Gi-hun.”) He hands off Gi-hun’s final effects—including the money—to his daughter Ga-yeong, who’s angry, and then heartbroken, to learn of her father’s fate. Last duty dispensed, he gets back into his car, driving us toward Squid Game’s final twist.
Because, apparently, Hwang Dong-hyuk has one more thought he wants to leave us with—one more big idea he wants resonating in our minds as we leave his career-defining magnum opus for good. As he’s caught in traffic on the ride off into the sunset, In-ho hears the sound of slap-on-skin and rolls down his window to see a familiar sight playing out in an L.A. alleyway: a poor man, playing a children’s game with someone in a high-class suit, selling his dignity for a little cash one throw and slap at a time. It’s an easy enough message to internalize: Of course the games don’t confine themselves to South Korea, of course this is an international franchise of human misery. But all of that philosophizing gets shoved back-of-brain pretty quickly, when the camera pans up from the game of ddakji to reveal the face of the new recruiter who’s winning it so handily. Because the final impression Hwang apparently wants to leave us with—the final thesis of his massive, sometimes frustrating, incredibly thrilling, and frequently far-smarter-than-it-needed-to-be takedown of the horrifying, compulsive machinery of capitalism—is this:
Is that Cate fucking Blanchett?
I regret to inform you that it is.
Stray observations
- • Dipping back to the beginning: Myung-gi basically has to believe Gi-hun was connected to Jun-hee in some way in order to explain his behavior, because he’s killed off the parts of himself that can believe otherwise.
- • The cleverest element of the episode is in making No-eul (who also torched the entire Squid Archives) part of the audience for Gi-hun’s final decision. It goes a long way toward justifying her entire arc, as someone carrying Gi-hun’s sacrifice forward.
- • On a more satisfying note, it’s very satisfying to see the VIPs rendered completely speechless by Gi-hun’s last act.
- • Did anyone else find themselves really distracted by the action-movie logistics of Jun-ho navigating the entire island in 30 minutes without getting blown up? This episode plays pretty fast and loose with time anyway, but him doing all of that in half an hour stretched plausibility to its limits.
- • A tiny detail that made me laugh: True to “theme park sketch artist” style, 246 draws No-eul with the wrong, much-easier-to-draw style of hat when she’s sitting for her picture in the epilogue.
- • There’s no hint that No-eul helped pay for Park Na-yeon’s treatment. It kind of seems like she just… got better?
- • Jun-ho ends up with the baby, whose winner card gives her his family name, “Hwang.” Choi ends up with the crappy hotel. Choi’s friend ends up with a crappy job at the crappy hotel. The heroic human trafficker from Squid Game 1 and 2 remains surprisingly heroic.
- • I’m enough of a Fringe nerd that my initial response to the new recruiter’s face at the end was actually “Is that Anna Torv?” so I’m certainly glad they put that part in English in the credits.
- • And that’s a wrap on Squid Game 3. As someone who does, genuinely, love this series—and who respects the hell out of Hwang Dong-hyuk for getting such pointed and brutal satirical points into what could have been “baby’s first murder game show”—I know I’ve been hard on it, including in this final recap. But when Squid Game is flying, as with “The Starry Night,” and as with the best parts of both this episode and “Circle Triangle Square,” it hits harder than just about anything else on TV. I hope I’ve done right by those moments, while giving the series as a whole the point-by-point examination I legitimately think it deserves.
