This text incorporates spoilers by the Season 3 finale of Squid Recreation.
Ignore all of the gore and dying, and Squid Recreation may as effectively have been a present for youngsters. Its characters face off in playground pastimes, its manufacturing design evokes juvenile places, 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, through which common folks drowning in debt compete to the dying for a large money prize. The VIPs’ introduction in Season 1 was met with derision from some viewers: They had 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, capturing 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 one in all them sees a participant ruthlessly homicide one other, he praises the twist by bluntly intoning, “This simply retains getting increasingly attention-grabbing.”
In some respects, Squid Recreation actually has develop into “extra attention-grabbing” in Season 3. The gamers should endure an excellent 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meanness, factors to the first flaw of this final season: Fairly than deepen the capitalist satire that originally made it a phenomenon, Squid Recreation tries to critique humanity writ giant—and delivers shallow thrills as an alternative.
The 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 develop into a mortgage shark. (Although Gi-hun was the only winner of the 45.6-billion-gained prize in Season 1, a number of victors might break up the cash in Season 2—by voting to finish the video games totally following every spherical.) However the present used to do extra than simply gesture on the rivals’ monetary burdens. In Season 1, lots of the rounds had been inherently unjust: One requiring gamers to chop shapes out of sugar sweet, as an illustration, put a few of them instantly at an obstacle, primarily based upon how sophisticated 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, might be practically not possible.
Season 3 abandons such perception in favor of extra superficial observations. The present’s focus is now on how horrible folks might be, whether or not they’re one of many event’s orchestrators or one in all its contestants. The gamers, specifically, face extra punishing obstacles that solely emphasize their selfishness. A recreation of hide-and-seek, for instance, is stacked towards those that work alone, as a result of escaping requires accumulating keys from different individuals to unlock a hidden door. A jump-rope problem entails a bridge with a spot, a take a look at of bodily prowess that not everybody can cross. These competitions don’t appear to contribute something to the present’s intimate dissection of financial anxiousness and sophistication wrestle; they’re plot contrivances meant to accentuate the proceedings. Even a significant character who had appeared poised to hunt redemption turns into an easy 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 throughout the jump-rope recreation, 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 honest 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 conduct, resembling 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 develop into a parody of itself.
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 protected, and he devotes himself to his new function. 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 identification to Gi-hun, In-ho encourages him to kill the opposite gamers to be able to shield the infant. 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 sort of particular person”—in different phrases, a assassin. However that’s an odd assertion for the present to make, as a result of Gi-hun has killed folks earlier than. Throughout the Season 2 finale, he shot guards to be able to save a number 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 concerning the event’s mysterious creation—together with the continuing 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 lots of the characters’ relationships are affecting, even of their simplicity: A mother-and-son duo studying to look after one another reasonably than the prize is emotionally affecting, and Gi-hun’s quest to actual revenge towards a participant who contributed to the revolt’s defeat final season briefly brings a contemporary layer of pressure.
However in a tv panorama dominated by portraits of wealth, Squid Recreationin its first season, was the uncommon success that scrutinized the price of debt. These preliminary episodes captured the danger of chasing capital and current in a system that places a worth 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 price saving—Squid Recreation ends with another shock to spotlight the event’s savagery. The story might have trusted the horror of juxtaposing youngsters’ video games with life-and-death penalties to convey how being in debt could be a residing hell. However in the long run, the present turned its insights into youngster’s play too.
