‘Squid Game’ Season 3: How the Hit Show Lost Itself

This text accommodates spoilers by way of the Season 3 finale of Squid Recreation.Ignore all of the gore and demise, and Squid Recreation would possibly as properly have been a present for kids. Its characters face off in playground pastimes, its manufacturing design evokes juvenile areas, and its costuming depends on a cheery, daring palette. However the Netflix drama’s most cartoonish creation stands out as the “VIPs”—the group of bejeweled-animal-mask-wearing, exceedingly rich antagonists who helped create the central event, during which common individuals drowning in debt compete to the demise for a large money prize. The VIPs’ introduction in Season 1 was met with derision from some viewers: They have been cookie-cutter villains with simplistic motivations and thinly written, poorly delivered dialogue.The VIPs’ unpopularity hasn’t stopped Squid Recreation from bringing them again for its third and closing season, nonetheless. This time round, they enter the fray by posing as guards, taking pictures survivors of one of many video games and reveling of their despair. Later, within the consolation of their spectating room, the VIPs present blithe but listless commentary. When considered one of them sees a participant ruthlessly homicide one other, he praises the twist by bluntly intoning, “This simply retains getting an increasing number of fascinating.”In some respects, Squid Recreation definitely has change into “extra fascinating” in Season 3. The gamers should endure a fair deadlier set of video games, and the world-weary protagonist, Gi-hun (performed by Lee Jung-jae), faces extra strain to make it to the top after barely surviving the earlier finale. However the centrality of the VIPs, of their twin roles as each hunters and a Greek refrain of mustache-twirling meanness, factors to the first flaw of this final season: Fairly than deepen the capitalist satire that originally made it a phenomenon, Squid Recreation tries to critique humanity writ massive—and delivers shallow thrills as a substitute.Learn: The agony of indulging in Squid Recreation againThe present remains to be involved with cash, after all. The gamers gaze ruefully on the rising winnings pot dangled earlier than them; one character makes common calculations about how a lot he’ll earn if he survives, and one other mulls whether or not to change into a mortgage shark. (Although Gi-hun was the only winner of the 45.6-billion-won prize in Season 1, a number of victors may break up the cash in Season 2—by voting to finish the video games completely following every spherical.) However the present used to do extra than simply gesture on the rivals’ monetary burdens. In Season 1, most of the rounds have been inherently unjust: One requiring gamers to chop shapes out of sugar sweet, as an example, put a few of them instantly at a drawback, primarily based upon how difficult a form they began with. The unfairness allowed the present to underscore its theme of social inequality—how, for an individual beginning with a deficit, pulling even, not to mention popping out forward, could be practically unattainable.Season 3 abandons such perception in favor of extra superficial observations. The present’s focus is now on how horrible individuals could be, whether or not they’re one of many event’s orchestrators or considered one of its contestants. The gamers, specifically, face extra punishing obstacles that solely emphasize their selfishness. A sport of hide-and-seek, for instance, is stacked towards those that work alone, as a result of escaping requires gathering keys from different contributors to unlock a hidden door. A jump-rope problem entails a bridge with a niche, a check of bodily prowess that not everybody can move. These competitions don’t appear to contribute something to the present’s intimate dissection of financial anxiousness and sophistication battle; they’re plot contrivances meant to accentuate the proceedings. Even a significant character who had appeared poised to hunt redemption turns into a simple antagonist by the top.After which there’s the matter of Squid Recreation’s latest contender, whose presence embodies simply how a lot the present has moved on from its unique, far richer themes. Jun-hee (Jo Yu-ri), the pregnant contestant launched in Season 2, has her child in the midst of taking part in hide-and-seek. Later, after Jun-hee dies through the jump-rope sport, the VIPs determine to exchange her with the new child. The twist is stunning sufficient, however the ensemble’s response goes even additional: They bicker, ludicrously, over whether or not it’s truthful for a child to compete for winnings. By incorporating a personality unable to do something however cry and coo, the present solely highlights its disinterest in additional nuanced examinations of human habits, akin to greed or egotism. In a single shot, because the VIPs recap this improvement, the remaining gamers’ bloodied faces encompass the new child within the heart of a grid, Brady Bunch–fashion. The unserious picture conveys how a lot the drama has change into a parody of itself.Learn: What occurs when actual individuals play Squid Recreation?The new child’s inclusion additionally renders Gi-hun’s arc frustratingly inert. Jun-hee, earlier than she dies, asks him to maintain her youngster secure, and he devotes himself to his new goal. But making Gi-hun the new child’s caregiver solely flattens him into an apparent avatar of goodness. Take the best way he responds to In-ho, a.okay.a. the Entrance Man (Lee-Byung-hun), Gi-hun’s rival and the first organizer of the video games. In-ho disguised himself as a fellow competitor in Season 2, gaining Gi-hun’s belief earlier than betraying him within the finale. This season, after revealing his true id to Gi-hun, In-ho encourages him to kill the opposite gamers with a view to defend the newborn. Simply as he’s about to homicide his first sufferer, although, Gi-hun sees a imaginative and prescient of Kang Sae-byeok (Jung Ho-yeon), a fellow contestant who had been slain near the top of the sport in Season 1. She tells him that he’s “not that type of individual”—in different phrases, a assassin. However that’s an odd assertion for the present to make, as a result of Gi-hun has killed individuals earlier than. Throughout the Season 2 finale, he shot guards with a view to save a few of the different contestants who had joined him in an rebellion towards the event’s overseers. Homicide, then, has already been established as a justifiable technique of safety.Season 3 can nonetheless be compulsively watchable. Its set items stay impressively staged, and the intriguing subplots relating to the event’s mysterious creation—together with the continued seek for the island on which the occasion takes place—decide up after being sidelined in Season 2. The finale leaves tantalizing threads that open the door for a potential new iteration of Squid Recreation. And most of the characters’ relationships are affecting, even of their simplicity: A mother-and-son duo studying to take care of one another slightly than the prize is emotionally affecting, and Gi-hun’s quest to precise revenge towards a participant who contributed to the rise up’s defeat final season briefly brings a contemporary layer of pressure.However in a tv panorama dominated by portraits of wealth, Squid Recreation, in its first season, was the uncommon success that scrutinized the price of debt. These preliminary episodes captured the chance of chasing capital and current in a system that places a value on each a part of life; they served as a research of many slices of society within the course of. Gi-hun himself proved a tricky protagonist to root for when the present started, as a silly playing addict hoping to reconnect together with his household however who turns into obsessive about the video games anyway. By Season 3, nonetheless, the gamers exist as little else however epitomes of fine or evil. Although its epilogue exhibits how a lot the Entrance Man got here to sympathize with Gi-hun’s perspective—that individuals are value saving—Squid Recreation ends with yet another shock to focus on the event’s savagery. The story could have trusted the horror of juxtaposing youngsters’ video games with life-and-death penalties to convey how being in debt generally is a residing hell. However ultimately, the present turned its insights into youngster’s play too.