How Squid Game Lost Itself

The Atlantic

2 days ago

This article contains spoilers through the Season 3 finale of Squid Game.
Ignore all the gore and death, and Squid Game might as well have been a show for children. Its characters face off in playground pastimes, its production design evokes juvenile locations, and its costuming relies on a cheery, bold palette. But the Netflix drama's most cartoonish creation may be the 'VIPs'—the group of bejeweled-animal-mask-wearing, exceedingly wealthy antagonists who helped create the central tournament, in which average people drowning in debt compete to the death for a massive cash prize. The VIPs' introduction in Season 1 was met with derision from some viewers: They were cookie-cutter villains with simplistic motivations and thinly written, poorly delivered dialogue.
The VIPs' unpopularity hasn't stopped Squid Game from bringing them back for its third and final season, however. This time around, they enter the fray by posing as guards, shooting survivors of one of the games and reveling in their despair. Later, in the comfort of their spectating room, the VIPs provide blithe yet listless commentary. When one of them sees a player ruthlessly murder another, he praises the twist by bluntly intoning, 'This just keeps getting more and more interesting.'
In some respects, Squid Game certainly has become 'more interesting' in Season 3. The players must endure an even deadlier set of games, and the world-weary protagonist, Gi-hun (played by Lee Jung-jae), faces more pressure to make it to the end after barely surviving the previous finale. But the centrality of the VIPs, in their dual roles as both hunters and a Greek chorus of mustache-twirling meanness, points to the primary flaw of this last season: Rather than deepen the capitalist satire that initially made it a phenomenon, Squid Game tries to critique humanity writ large—and delivers shallow thrills instead.
The show is still concerned with money, of course. The players gaze ruefully at the growing winnings pot dangled before them; one character makes regular calculations about how much he'll earn if he survives, and another mulls whether to become a loan shark. (Though Gi-hun was the sole winner of the 45.6-billion- won prize in Season 1, multiple victors could split the money in Season 2—by voting to end the games entirely following each round.) But the show used to do more than just gesture at the competitors' financial burdens. In Season 1, many of the rounds were inherently unjust: One requiring players to cut shapes out of sugar candy, for instance, put some of them immediately at a disadvantage, based upon how complicated a shape they started with. The unfairness allowed the show to underscore its theme of social inequality—how, for a person starting with a deficit, pulling even, let alone coming out ahead, can be nearly impossible.
Season 3 abandons such insight in favor of more superficial observations. The show's focus is now on how terrible people can be, whether they're one of the tournament's orchestrators or one of its contestants. The players, in particular, face more punishing obstacles that only emphasize their selfishness. A game of hide-and-seek, for example, is stacked against those who work alone, because escaping requires collecting keys from other participants to unlock a hidden door. A jump-rope challenge involves a bridge with a gap, a test of physical prowess that not everyone can pass. These competitions don't seem to contribute anything to the show's intimate dissection of economic anxiety and class struggle; they're plot contrivances meant to intensify the proceedings. Even a major character who had seemed poised to seek redemption turns into a straightforward antagonist by the end.
And then there's the matter of Squid Game 's newest contender, whose presence embodies just how much the show has moved on from its original, far richer themes. Jun-hee (Jo Yu-ri), the pregnant contestant introduced in Season 2, has her baby in the middle of playing hide-and-seek. Later, after Jun-hee dies during the jump-rope game, the VIPs decide to replace her with the newborn. The twist is shocking enough, but the ensemble's reaction goes even further: They bicker, ludicrously, over whether it's fair for a baby to compete for winnings. By incorporating a character unable to do anything but cry and coo, the show only highlights its disinterest in more nuanced examinations of human behavior, such as greed or egotism. In one shot, as the VIPs recap this development, the remaining players' bloodied faces surround the newborn in the center of a grid, Brady Bunch –style. The unserious image conveys how much the drama has become a parody of itself.
The newborn's inclusion also renders Gi-hun's arc frustratingly inert. Jun-hee, before she dies, asks him to keep her child safe, and he devotes himself to his new purpose. Yet making Gi-hun the newborn's caregiver only flattens him into an obvious avatar of goodness. Take the way he responds to In-ho, a.k.a. the Front Man (Lee-Byung-hun), Gi-hun's rival and the primary organizer of the games. In-ho disguised himself as a fellow competitor in Season 2, gaining Gi-hun's trust before betraying him in the finale. This season, after revealing his true identity to Gi-hun, In-ho encourages him to kill the other players in order to protect the baby. Just as he's about to murder his first victim, though, Gi-hun sees a vision of Kang Sae-byeok (Jung Ho-yeon), a fellow contestant who had been slain close to the end of the game in Season 1. She tells him that he's 'not that kind of person'—in other words, a murderer. But that's an odd assertion for the show to make, because Gi-hun has killed people before. During the Season 2 finale, he shot guards in order to save some of the other contestants who had joined him in an uprising against the tournament's overseers. Murder, then, has already been established as a justifiable means of protection.
Season 3 can still be compulsively watchable. Its set pieces remain impressively staged, and the intriguing subplots regarding the tournament's mysterious creation—including the ongoing search for the island on which the event takes place—pick up after being sidelined in Season 2. The finale leaves tantalizing threads that open the door for a possible new iteration of Squid Game. And many of the characters' relationships are affecting, even in their simplicity: A mother-and-son duo learning to care for each other rather than the prize is emotionally affecting, and Gi-hun's quest to exact revenge against a player who contributed to the rebellion's defeat last season briefly brings a fresh layer of tension.
But in a television landscape dominated by portraits of wealth, Squid Game, in its first season, was the rare success that scrutinized the cost of debt. Those initial episodes captured the risk of chasing capital and existing in a system that puts a price on every part of life; they served as a study of many slices of society in the process. Gi-hun himself proved a tough protagonist to root for when the show began, as a foolish gambling addict hoping to reconnect with his family but who becomes obsessed with the games anyway. By Season 3, however, the players exist as little else but epitomes of good or evil. Though its epilogue shows how much the Front Man came to sympathize with Gi-hun's perspective—that people are worth saving— Squid Game ends with one more surprise to highlight the tournament's savagery. The story may have depended on the horror of juxtaposing kids' games with life-and-death consequences to convey how being in debt can be a living hell. But in the end, the show turned its insights into child's play too.