My understanding of the multiverse theory is almost entirely science-fictional in nature. It has something to do with probabilities, or maybe divergent timelines, I dunno; mostly I know the multiverse is where you find a few dozen Spider-Men.
But it isn’t hard to picture a multiverse in which the island game complex from Squid Game, the severed floor from Severance, the Island from Lost, and the Village from The Prisoner each exist by themselves in their own separate universe, one standing in for the other. After all, when you get down to it they all serve the same purpose: trapping people in inescapable, inexplicable torment, the better to crack them open and see what comes spilling out.
As such, they’re kind of the perfect TV shows, aren’t they? By condemning Gi-hun and his fellow contestants to keep on playing and playing; by forcing Mark S. and his coworkers to keep on working and working; by forcing Jack and the rest of the castaways to keep surviving and surviving; by forcing Number Six to keep trying and trying to escape a place he also keeps trying and trying to figure out — by doing these things, Squid Game and Severance and Lost and The Prisoner are really only replicating the circumstances through which television shows in general entertain us.
Was anyone forcing Sam and Diane to stay in that bar, or Laura Palmer’s friends and family to stay in that small town, or Walt and Jesse to stay in that meth lab? Okay, maybe that one’s a bad example. But you get my point, right? The “weird prison of the mind” vibe of The Prisoner and its spiritual successors only renders more literal the purgatorial conditions of basically all television shows. Gi-hun and Mark S. and Jack and Six are all stuck where they’re stuck until we in the viewing audience — or the powers that be in the network suites — set them free.
This metaphor takes on extra resonance as we reach the halfway point of Squid Game’s short final season, because we now have in-world spectators to think about it. First appearing in the pink tracksuits of guards as they mop up survivors in the Hide and Seek game, the VIPs have returned. A young(ish), sexy(ish), cosmopolitan, English-speaking bunch beneath their guard or bejeweled animal masks, they’re openly sadistic and unfeeling in a way that might have seemed cartoonish, back before the world’s richest man did a Nazi salute and wielded a chainsaw on stage to symbolize how he was destroying life-saving aid programs, murdering tens of thousands of adults and children. There’s really no level of ghoulish, exaggerated cruelty Squid Game could come up with that our real-world overlords haven’t outdone.
Which is not to say Squid Game won’t try. This double-season’s fifth game is revealed to be Jump Rope, played on a tiny bridge spanning one of the show’s trademark vertigo-inducing indoor chasms. As the gigantic boy and girl robots spin the rope, all 25 surviving contestants — 24 players, plus Jun-hee’s baby, who a callow, drunken VIP insists should be treated as a player too — must make their way across within 20 minutes.
So far, at least, the gameplay seems straightforward. All you have to do is correctly time your jumps without losing your balance, double-jump about halfway across the span to bridge a gap in the floor, and you’re good to go. Of course, this doesn’t stop the players from complicating things for themselves, or for others.
Timid Min-su, for example, takes advantage of the game to get his nemesis Nam-gyu killed. Realizing the guy’s going through pill withdrawal, he makes a big show of producing the cross-shaped necklace where the late player Thanos stored his drugs and tossing it halfway across the bridge. When Nam-gyu braves the jump rope, grabs the necklace, and opens it, he finds that there are no pills left — and gets knocked off the bridge to his death while he processes the shock.
But Nam-gyu’s not the only psycho killer in the group. Player 096 (Lee Suk), a die-hard member of the “yes” voters led by sleazy Player 100 whose life was spared by Gi-hun during last season’s overnight riot, begins pushing his teammates off the edge when they reach the end of the bridge in order to thin the field and sweeten the pot.
What happens next will no doubt come down to Gi-hun himself. After a lecture from elderly Geum-ja snaps him out of his self-pitying fugue state, he agrees to help injured Jee-hun and her baby survive the next ordeal. He straps the baby to his chest and crosses the bridge before anyone else, with the intention of leaving the tot safely on the other side, then returning to the starting point to escort Jun-hee. He’ll have to make a decision about 096 pronto if he wants to make a full circuit one more time before time runs out.
He’s only in this position, however, because Geum-ja is dead.
“Ms. Jang,” as Jun-hee always calls her, has emerged as the heart of a season in which Gi-hun himself has been mostly pushed to the side. First, she gets on her knees and begs the “yes” voters to change their minds, to no avail. That night, she approaches Gi-hun and reveals that her meanness to her son Yong-sik once drove him to attempt suicide, and that despite how devastated she was by that, she wound up killing him herself.
“Bad people do bad things, but they blame others and go on to live in peace,” she says. “Good people, on the other hand, beat themselves up about the smallest things.” I heard a reversed echo of Yeats: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” This entire conversation is staged as Geum-ja sits side by side with Gi-hun, her hair hanging down long since she used her hairpin to kill her own child. The effect is to make her look younger, and beautiful — on Gi-hun’s level.
What happens to Geum-ja, then? She kills herself overnight, hanging herself from the scaffolding of the players’ bunks. The reveal is almost time-delayed, like a grenade’s fuse: Various characters see that the guards have brought a gift-wrapped coffin into the dorm, and only then do they look around to see why. It’ sa stunning reveal, up there with similar moments in the later seasons of The Sopranos and Mad Men. Moments like this are why you can never dismiss Squid Game’s sequel seasons: They’re not here to make you feel happy you watched.
The side plots advance too, it should be said. No-eul’s scheme to smuggle Player 246 out of the games in a guard’s uniform his a snag when an enterprising officer looks into the operating-room bloodbath more quickly and discovers that a player and a guard have had their places switched. Offshore, Jun-ho finally finds the island where his brother, the Front Man, shot him. Back on the mainland, Jun-ho’s right-hand man Choi discovers that Captain Park is one of them — and gets arrested for breaking and entering into the guy’s home and shooting his guard dog to death.
There are three important points to make after this episode, I think. The first is that the actions of the VIPs are drop in the bucket compared to the mass murder being orchestrated by the government of the United States of America and its minions in the past few months alone. The second is that the show’s gobsmacking production design makes it impossible to ever have a “seen it all before” attitude about this stuff; the colors of the Jump Rope room alone made me gasp when they were revealed behind a curtain in the VIP room.
Finally, actor Kang Ae-shim has become for this season what Lee Jung-jae was for the first two: the beating heart, the person who gives a face and a voice to the horrible feelings we experience when we watch all this take place. Ultimately, she felt she couldn’t go on. What hope does that leave the rest of us?
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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