Seong Gi-hun has long hated the game. The time has come for him to hate the player.
He already hates himself, that much is clear. Picking up right where Season 2’s premature ending left off, Squid Game Season 3 sees Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae), Season 1’s winner turned Season 2’s would be revolutionary, dragged back to the player dormitory in a gift-wrapped coffin. But he’s not dead. Indeed, he’s the only member of the squad of rebel players captured by the game’s pink-suited guards whom they left alive. When he realizes this, he screams over and over for them to kill him too. His undercover ally-turned-betrayer, the Front Man (Lee Byung-hun), watches all of this dispassionately from his headquarters, a glass of whiskey in his hand.
This isn’t to say Gi-hun is the only survivor from the rebel side. Two of their comrades were sent back to the dorm to retrieve extra ammo. The second, ex–special forces soldier and trans woman Hyun-ju (Park Sung-hoon), was stopped by guards before she could return to the fray. But the first, ex-marine Dae-ho (Kang Ha-neul), froze in the face of danger and collapsed rather than return to his besieged allies. If he’d acted differently, all those people might still alive…or at least that’s what Gi-hun and some of the others believe.
By this stage of the game, the players who vote to continue playing greatly outnumber those who want to leave, whose ranks were thinned out both by the rebellion and by the usual overnight bloodbath with the bloodthirsty yes-voters. The result of the next vote is a landslide, and before long it’s off to Game 4. (Season 2 and Season 3 each only cover one half of a round of Games. Not since the days of The Sopranos and Breaking Bad has one long final season been so clumsily split into two for contractual and budgetary reasons.)
The name of the game this time is Hide and Seek. After the players are split in half at random, those who find themselves on the Blue Team are given an ornate video game style key and told they can use them to hide though any doors they unlock cannot be locked behind them. The Red Team are given similarly beautiful knives and told they must hunt down and kill the Blue Team to survive. Any Red Team member who kills a fellow Red, or who fails to kill a Blue, will be killed in turn. The final twist is that provided you can find someone willing to swap, you can switch teams before the game begins.
So various pairs of characters try to figure out how to ensure either their own survival or that of those closest to them. Split between the two teams, mother Geum-Ja (Kang Ae-sim) and her son Yong-sik (Yang Dong-geun) agree to leave the killing to the younger man, even though both of their experience with violence has historically been as victims.
Pregnant Jun-hee (Jo Yuri) receives a stunning offer from her ex-boyfriend Myung-gi (Yim Si-wan), the crypto grifter who got her into this mess. He agrees to allow her to kill him so that she and her baby can survive…but he also tells the sociopathic Nam-gyu (Roh Jae-won) that he’ll work with him as a team. If that’s the case then I don’t like the odds of Min-su (Lee David), the nerdy young guy who watched someone he cared about get killed during the overnight bloodshed rather than step in to save her.
When the game begins, the Blue Team is ushered into yet another stunningly designed set: a street scene familiar from Season 1, but with a low ceiling displaying a starry blue-and-yellow sky out of a children’s drawing or a Van Gogh painting. It’s both expansive and claustrophobic — like many environments in the Squid Game complex, the worst of both worlds. Once inside, Hyun-ju quickly ushers Jun-hee and Geum-ja to safety.
But god help anyone who wants to stay safe from Gi-hun. With his rebellion defeated, his co-conspirators hanged from the ceiling as a warning, and his his IRL friend Jung-bae (Lee Seo-hwan) among the slain, he is at first beside himself, then catatonic. But when Seon-nyeo (Chae Kuk-hee), the self-described “Shaman of the Sea,” mocks him for his failure, he snaps and tries to strangle her even while the guards still have him handcuffed to the dormitory beds. It seems that with hope extinguished, all he has left is revenge, and Dae-ho is his target.
Aside from the games, there’s a trio of side plots. The Front Man, a former contestant named Hwang In-ho, is preparing for the arrival of the VIPs, the ultra-rich bastards for whose entertainment the games are staged. Elsewhere, his brother Detective Hwang Jun-ho (Wi Ha-Jun) and his right-hand man, the reformed criminal Choi Woo-seok (Jeon Seok-ho), continue their search for the island, which Choi has begun to suspect is being undermined by their secretly traitorous navigator, Captain Park (Oh Dal-su).
And down deep in the bowels of the Squid Game complex, North Korean defector turned pink-suited guard No-eul (Park Gyu-young) takes down the guards’ underground organ-smuggling ring and forces their in-house doctor to try to save the life of Player 246, Park Gyeong-seok (Lee Jin-wook). Both of them, you might recall, are there to raise money for the same person, Gyeon-seok’s sick daughter. Even though it seemed like No-eul killed Gyeon-seok during the post-battle massacre, the episode’s cold open reveals there’s still good in her yet.
The same is obviously true of Squid Game. Though breakout star Lee Jung-jae is mostly sidelined this episode, his performance, which consists of basically nothing but screams of agony and thousand-yard stared, is a frightening one in this new iteration. The sets and props overseen by production designer by Chae Kyoung-sun are so good they’ll be ripped off for decades; despite the noticeably less spectacular color scheme, I see Squid Game’s artificial environments reflected in Severance just for starters. And those keys and knives? I can already see racks of them at Newbury Comics.
Even since Season 2 aired late last year, though, the world has changed for the worse. You don’t need to turn on Netflix to see masked, anonymous goons abduct assault the poor and desperate anymore: The duly elected government of the United States of America is bringing this degenerate and disgraceful spectacle to a Home Depot parking lot near you, and bragging about it openly all over Truth Social (owned, illegally, by the President) and X, The Everything App (owned by Elon Musk, who worked, illegally, as the President’s boss). The pigs no longer feel the need to hide their cruelty on island complexes. They’ll do it right in your face.
So the question is, does this make Squid Game more or less timely? Had it only ever existed as one perfect season, the answer would be obvious: It’s a prophetic masterpiece. Spun out over three seasons, seemingly with creator-writer-director Hwang Dong-hyuk’s only relatively reluctant acquiescence, it can’t escape the sense that you’re watching a gigantic capitalist corporation stretch out a lecture about the dangers of capitalism in order to make more money off of it. That’s unfortunate.
But it doesn’t change what Hwang and his collaborators have accomplished. Few works of allegorical science fiction in recent memory have been this visually and stylistically daring and this politically and morally unapologetic. To the extent that the games are a metaphor for how our world is ordered, Squid Game is telling you it’s a world run by monstrous pigs who want nothing more than to eat you and shit you out again. Now the only question is whether Gi-hun, our hero, allows his soul to be gobbled up along with all those bodies. Can I quibble about the extra seasons? Absolutely. Can I argue with the central conceit? Absolutely not.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
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