Where Squid Game 3 Went Wrong
A Lesson in Poor Execution
Saturday movie nights with my brother don’t happen often. Usually, if one of us makes it to our hometown the other is inevitably interning or back at college. Somehow though, the stars aligned so that our most anticipated show of the summer released around the one night we both were actually home.
We binge watched all six episodes back-to-back in denial of what this season really was- a derivative let down (dare I say even a mockery to the first two seasons at times) to a franchise known for its ability to break boundaries and incite critical conversations about class.
Before the staunch supporters come at me let me explain why I thought this. To do that, I first need to briefly go back to the first two seasons.
Season 1
Season one introduces us to our main character Gi-hun. From the beginning, it’s apparent how flawed he is. He has good intentions towards his daughter and mother, but those intentions are exceptionally weak because of his love of gambling. Over the course of the season, we see these good intentions in his attempts at protecting Il-nam and later keeping his promises to Sae-byeok and Sang-woo to look after her little brother and his mother. The games don’t succeed however in ridding Gi-hun of his reckless gambling nature. We see this in the final scene when he makes a choice to turn his back on his family yet again to hunt down the Front Man and end the games.
Before I move on, I also want to briefly summarize some of the side characters because I will be referring back to them later.
Almost immediately Il-Nam and Gi-Hun become close - Gi-Hun because he wants to try and keep him alive in the games and Il-Nam because Gi-Hun intrigues him (maybe even reminds him of one of his mentees). Later, we discover he was never in any danger at all - he was the creator of the games and wanted to have fun one last time. He only allowed Gi-Hun to live in the marbles game because he enjoyed playing with him.
Sang-Woo is characterized by his cunning. Gi-Hun is shocked to see him there as he thought Sang-Woo was a successful businessman. This cunning takes on a darker edge when Sang-Woo tricks Ali into giving him all his marbles in the Marbles game, thus sacrificing Ali to survive.
Jun-Ho is a detective who infiltrates the games in search of his brother, In-ho who vanished. He ends up finding his brother but ends up nearly dying from the altercation (In-ho being the only reason he survives it in the end).
As much as I love Sae-Byeok’s character, she isn’t relevant to my critique on S3 so I’m going to bounce past her for now.
Season 2
Some of my friends disliked season two of Squid Games. While I didn’t like it as much as season one, it was interesting in how it treated Gi-Hun’s character arc. His gambling takes a much sinister turn in this season when despite his intentions he gambles the lives of the X voters to try and carry through his rebellion.
He still befriends 001 except this time it’s the Frontman in disguise: In-ho. The dynamic between In-ho and Gi-Hun is fascinating. Masquerading as Young-Il, In-Ho finds plenty of ways to manipulate Gi-Hun throughout the game while continuing their philosophical debate about the worth of humanity (not unlike Gi-Hun’s and Il-Nam’s final conversation on Il-Nam’s deathbed). Gi-Hun becomes so obsessed with ending the games he doesn’t realize his hypocrisy, instead rationalizing any consequences his intentions.
Season two also brings in some interesting new characters (and new games of course). Thanos was one of my favorites for the utter chaos he brings. Every so often, you see a few blips of humanity underneath the high that I wished was explored more. Tragically, he was killed right before the Special Game.
Other players of note (remember their names because I will bring them up later) are Dae-ho, Hyun-ju, and Jun-hee.
Season 3
Finally, onto the actual critique. As all fans (new and old) know, season three is supposed to be a continuation of season two while also serving as a finale for Gi-Hun’s arc. Despite the controversy over the ending, I honestly don’t think the ending of the season was the issue. Gi-Hun sacrificing himself for an innocent child after spending most of the season wrangling with guilt over his actions beautifully portrays the complexity of humanity. It’s also a little ironic to see him go to such great lengths to ensure the survival of someone else’s child when he himself failed as a father. Contradictions that like that are what makes Gi-Hun such a good leading character.
My problem was Season Three’s lead up to this ending. I’m going to try and break this up into further sections to properly explain why I think this is.
Stretched Thin
It starts with the sheer number of characters. There are so many of them and the show tries to meaningfully give depth to each of them when that just isn’t possible in the amount of run time they have. The show was constantly cutting back and forth between all these characters. We’d start with Jun-ho on the boat looking for his brother then move on to Jun-hee and her pregnancy then to No-Eul messing up the harvesting process to Geum-ja and her son etc. I’m not saying I hate big casting. I hate that they tried to stuff so many storylines in such a short timeframe.
They spent so much time trying to properly flesh out all their characters, they failed to dedicate enough time to any of them in season three which left some moments that were meant to feel critical instead feel random. The main one I’m thinking of in this instance is the scene of In-ho flashing back to a conversation with Il-Nam. This scene is so quick I thought I hallucinated it.
To make matters worse, by the last few episodes, all of these characters die, leaving us with only Gi-Hun, a poorly CGI ’ed baby, 333 and 100. To spend all that time trying to inundate us with so many people only to kill them too early is a crime and messy storytelling.
If they had cut half of the characters (focus wise) and instead pulled more flashbacks of In-ho and Il-Nam it would have been way more interesting especially since Il-Nam took Gi-Hun as a mentee in a way too (and it would have further emphasized the juxtaposition made between In-ho and Gi-Hun in season two).
Hide and Seek
The horror of the games in Squid Games are their simplicity. Every single game in seasons one and two have very few rules. The action comes from the players doing everything in their power to manipulate their surroundings (including other players) to survive onto the next round. I’ve noticed in these games players have died in two ways (when I say this I’m not talking about the “Special Game” because I think it’s its own thing): by gun or by falling from a large height.
The game-makers in season two make a big point of preserving as many bodies as they can for harvesting. With a gun, that’s easy enough to do. All the triangle guards must do is aim for non-vital areas - enough to immobilize but not kill. With heights, it’s a little more tricky but still possible to manipulate the odds enough so the majority are still harvestable. After some digging, I found a Netflix article mention a 30-foot free fall in reference to the glass bridge game in season one. From thirty feet, there is about a 90-98% survival rate. Assuming all the height games (tag, glass bridge etc) are 30 feet high, that leaves good odds that the players will be immobilized but harvestable.
My point in saying all this is the game-makers work pretty darn hard to run an organ harvesting business from all the players. So why would they allow the players to kill each other with knives?? It makes zero sense from a control standpoint. Yes, they give knives to players in the Special Game but the losses from that usually aren’t terrible compared to the deaths from the actual games, especially one that is cutting the player population in half.
It would have made more sense from a logistical (and thematic) standpoint if all the players were hiding and the VIPS (which I’ll get to later) with the triangles guarding them were hunting the players down. To do that would have taken the predator and prey of the rich vs poor classes to a whole new level.
So why did Netflix do this instead? I have a hunch. I genuinely think they were trying to find a way to escalate the Marbles game. It makes sense. The labyrinth-esque arenas are similar (one having a sunset theme the other night) and each player must sacrifice another person to live.
The problem (what makes Marbles work and not Hide and Seek) is how the players sacrifice the other. Marbles is so haunting because like the case with Ali and Sang-Woo, Sang-Woo kills Ali without laying a hand on him (so to speak). The game gets across the different angles (ugly and brave) of humanity in a subtle, eerie way.
Hide and Seek is just a blood bath. It completely forgets the subtlety that drew millions of viewers to the show in the first place.
Hyun-ju also died in this game which angered me because she was such a good character. From a writer standpoint, I know why they killed her off (she would have derailed the director’s intended ending for sure if she was kept around) but that doesn’t mean I have to like the way they did it.
The only plot point that actually makes sense to me is Gi-Hun hunting down poor Dae-Ho. His spiral into singling out Dae-Ho instead of facing accountability for his actions makes complete sense for his character. Dae-Ho’s death leaves him with no more targets to pin the blame of the rebellion’s failure on except for himself. It’s a key turning point for Gi-Hun’s maturity.
Jump rope
If Hide and Seek was meant to be the escalation of Marbles, jump rope was definitely meant to be the new version of Glass Bridge. By this point, the only likable character left was Jun-hee and she chooses to kill herself off instead of even attempting the game in this episode. This angered me even more than Hyun-ju’s death for so many reasons. For the sake of this article, I’ll keep it short.
Three Reasons Jun-hee was done dirty by Netflix
It’s too predictable. Seriously. Every time there’s a pregnant woman she always seems to die right after she births her kid (it concerns me).
It doesn’t make sense character wise. She literally told Myung-gi she’d kill for her kid. Someone that fierce would at least allow him to carry her on his back (especially if she didn’t want him around that kid in the future).
It doesn’t make sense medically. She just had a baby and she’s taken out from a sprained ankle? If they wanted to kill her off it would have been more realistic for her to die from a post-partum hemorrhage.
Back to the game itself. This was the game Netflix spent a ton of promo on. We got clips of the boy doll, Tiktok sounds of the jump-rope song, and hundreds of theory videos hyping up the game and what it could mean. There were so many cool ideas. My favorite theory was the rope switching direction every time the lights changed colors or stopping completely when the light went red at random times. Compared to those theories, the actual game we got was a letdown.
It fit in line with the other games for its dangerous simplicity I’ll give it that. What made it worse than Glass Bridge was the focus on one guy just shoving people off the bridge, so fewer people made it out alive. But AK, you’re probably thinking, they shoved people on the Glass Bridge too. They shoved people in Glass Bridge out of sheer terror for their lives. In jump-rope they’re doing it for money AND Gi-hun has made it through. There is no suspense. Instead, there is a terrible rock music montage of some random players shoving people off the end of the bridge. There’s no dimension to these scenes because each one is a cardboard cutout of the previous. I’m sure Hwang Dong-hyuk is making tons of money off this but it can’t be easy watching American Netflix botch your precious creation.
The VIPS
Need I say much about them? I have yet to see a single person positively review the VIP scenes and for good reason. The scenes suck. They’re superfluous at best. Their introduction was so awful my brother and I had to immediately pause the show to make sure our tv hadn’t switched to English dubbing (we watch in Korean with English subtitles).
The VIPS of season one work because of how disgustingly they treat Jun-ho (posing as a server) while watching the games. The scenes further the plot because we are worried about Jun-ho’s cover being blown (and if he’ll find clues about his brother’s whereabouts here) and it makes sense thematically to show the extortion of the poor for the rich’s pleasure.
The VIPS of season three don’t do any of this. They start with a terrible first impression and it goes downhill from there. I mentioned earlier they should have been the ones hunting the players in the hide and seek game. I mention this because of the VIP introduction, specifically from the comment one makes about “enjoying playing the game”. Excuse me?? All the VIPs did was walk around the arena after the game and shoot one player. That’s not playing. That’s disgusting tourism. It’s also forced. Why was that red player even attacking the guard in the first place?
Conclusion
I have more to say honestly but I’ll end here now that I’ve aired most of my grievances. I’m saddened such an incredible show was thrown to the wolves of capitalism but not surprised.