“Player 456, do you still have faith in people?”
That’s the question Squid Game‘s Front Man (Lee Byung-hun) asks Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) in the show’s third and final season. But it’s also the question the show asks viewers. Over the past three seasons, we’ve witnessed countless atrocities. We’ve watched wealthy elites pit in-debt players against one another for sport. We’ve watched faceless guards gun down waves of players. We’ve even watched players stab each other in the back (sometimes literally) for a shot at extra cash. After all that, do we still have hope for humanity?
Squid Game poses that question time and again throughout Season 3, with new deadly games presenting new moral quandaries, each more horrifying than the last. These sequences are the definition of nail-biters, recapturing the horrors of Seasons 1 and 2. Often, though, they introduce twists that take Squid Game‘s (already not particularly subtle) messaging about economic inequality past any kind of incisive commentary. Instead, the show bludgeons viewers over the head with caricature. It’s enough to make you think that creator Hwang Dong-hyuk has little to no faith in the audience, even as the show comes to a fittingly brutal conclusion.
What’s Squid Game Season 3 about?
Lee Jung-jae in “Squid Game.”
Credit: No Ju-han / Netflix
Squid Game Season 3 picks up in the wake of Gi-hun’s failed rebellion against the games at the end of Season 2. He’s lost several key supporters in his fight to end the games, including his dear friend Jung-bae (Lee Seo-hwan) and new ally Young-il, the alias the Front Man took when he entered the games. (Worst of all: Gi-hun still doesn’t know about his betrayal.)
Overwhelmed by guilt over orchestrating the uprising, Gi-hun starts Season 3 as a shell of his former self. There are no more impassioned attempts to stop people from voting yes to continuing the games, only anguished confusion as to why he, of all people, was left alive. Lee gets little to no dialogue in most of the season, leaving him to deliver a searing physical performance that toggles between resignation and anger to something more nurturing and protective. The former manifests most in a confrontation with Dae-ho (Kang Ha-neul), whose panic attack in the Season 2 finale left the rebellion without ammunition. Gi-hun’s vengeful nature here seems like exactly what the Front Man wants: for Gi-hun to lose faith in humanity, just as he has.
But that hope and faith shows itself elsewhere, particularly in the trio of Hyun-ju (Park Sung-hoon), Geum-ja (Kang Ae-sim), and the very pregnant Jun-hee (Jo Yuri). This band of women remains steadfast in their loyalty to one another, proving Gi-hun’s faith in humanity is not misplaced. And when Jun-hee finally does give birth — in what has to be one of the worst places to go into labor! — protecting her and her child gives Gi-hun a new drive.
Does Jun-hee’s baby help or harm Squid Game?
Jo Yuri in “Squid Game.”
Credit: No Ju-han / Netflix
The presence of an actual newborn baby in the games acts as a physical manifestation of Gi-hun’s hope for the future. It also further establishes just how evil the games are, especially when the group of watching VIPs decide, “You know what? Let’s make the baby a player.”
Mashable Top Stories
The problem is, we already know the games are evil. We’ve known it since the very beginning of the entire series! Yet Squid Game keeps pounding it into our heads in increasingly ludicrous ways, many of which turn this terrifying dystopian hellscape into an unintentional comedy.
Take the return of the gold-masked VIPs, who serve as commentators throughout most of the season. With their poor acting, their poor dubbing, and their poor dialogue, this band of mostly white, mostly male billionaires tanks any of the tension Squid Game has built up. There’s certainly something to be said about the flattening of these wealthy characters: While they believe the players to be subhuman, it’s really them who are the two-dimensional monsters. However, the over-reliance on the VIPs as a gilded peanut gallery weakens the intense drama playing out within the games themselves, reducing Squid Game to a laughable train wreck for minutes at a time.
It’s not even like the VIPs even have much to add to the show. When they start frothing at the mouth for the players to kill the baby, it doesn’t bring new layers to the awfulness of the situation. We know killing a baby is bad!
The same goes for the other players’ reactions to the baby joining the fray. Those who have steadfastly voted for the games to continue are more than ready to take the life of the child in order to get a larger portion of the prize pot. It’s the final boss of selfishness, and it takes these players into the same realm of caricature as the VIPs. (But with much better acting.)
To be fair, that level of caricature is the point. Throughout its run, Squid Game has analyzed how inequality under capitalism leads to dehumanization. We see it in the ways the games erase identity: Players are reduced to numbers, guards hide behind masks. Trying to kill a baby goes beyond all that, though. It brings the bloodthirsty players in line with the VIPs, almost proving the Front Man right in his belief that they aren’t human. For Gi-hun and his allies, then, the challenge becomes finding hope, even when faced with the worst of evils.
Again, though, Squid Game has always been interested in how its characters maintain that last shred of hope and build connections in the middle of a nightmare. All the baby discourse doesn’t feel like a natural, thoughtful elevation of these conversations so much as a messaging sledgehammer straight to the temple.
Still, while these discussions are overwrought, the mere presence of Jun-hee’s baby in the games is enough to unlock a primal worry, even if your logical self might be thinking, “They wouldn’t kill a baby, right?” Truly, if you thought Squid Game couldn’t get any more stressful, wait until you watch a baby going through the games.
The games themselves continue to be terrifying, with riffs on hide-and-seek and jump rope eliciting boatloads of existential dread. (And if you’re scared of heights, the final game sure is a doozy.) Much of that dread surfaces in the moral dilemmas and impossible choices Hwang lays out for his characters. How much will they sacrifice to stay alive? And by the end of it all, will any survivors (or viewers) have faith in the world that spawned this cruel circus? As goofy as Squid Game Season 3 can get (I mostly blame the VIPs), these are the questions that linger once the games are done.
Squid Game Season 3 is now on Netflix.
