Squid Game Is Back to Its Brutal Best in a Final Season That Cuts to the Bone

If you have a low threshold for spoilers, you might want to save this review for after you’ve watched Squid Game Season 3. There is an exquisitely devastating episode early in the third and final season of Squid Game. For almost all of its hourlong runtime,“The Starry Night” follows contestants darting around a multi-floor indoor maze of hallways and locked rooms, its ceilings painted deep blue with yellow stars like an elementary school mural, playing a lethal game of hide-and-seek. Half of the players are given knives and told they’ll be eliminated if they don’t kill at least one person from the other group, who get keys that open some of the doors as a sort of head start. It’s a simple setup, but it makes for superb television. More than ever before, we see characters making individual decisions to kill and die; just about everyone comes out a murderer, a hero, a corpse, or some combination of the three. This is the kind of episode that will surely thrill fans and inspire recappers to dissect the ethical and emotional dimensions of each unthinkable choice. That, at least, was my reaction. Then I pressed play on the following episode and was embarrassed to see the VIPs—oh yes, they’re back, those monstrous and awkward masked elites who listlessly spectate the last few Squid Games on site—voicing some of the same observations that had occurred to me. Yikes. Welcome to the exhilaratingly brutal last chapter of Squid Game, which ensnares viewers with characters and storylines we can’t help but care about, then implicates us for treating a sadistic spectacle as entertainment. There’s no underestimating the harm Netflix did to Squid Game by merchandising this dark satire of capitalism into consumerist oblivion, then delaying its conclusion with a second season that was mostly filler. But I’m pleased to report that writer, director, and executive producer Hwang Dong-hyuk has wrested his creation from more cynical hands. Despite all the indignities to which it’s been subjected, the show closes with its most unsparing season yet, an indictment of societies where money trumps humanity that roots out all forms of complicity—especially our own. The groundwork for these final six episodes was laid in a Season 2 finale that ended just as the plot started moving. (Could the 13 episodes that comprised the show’s second and third seasons have been compressed into a single 10- or even eight-part season? Easily, and almost all of the cuts would have come from the first batch.) Our hangdog hero, Squid Game veteran Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae), had fomented revolution among some of the players, but that revolution failed, revealing that his ostensible comrade-in-arms, Player 001, was actually the Front Man (Lee Byung-hun) and leaving casualties that weigh heavily on his conscience. The aftermath is a crushing return to death games as usual. There’s a torturous rendition of jump rope to be played, cash to be won, people to be “eliminated,” and soon enough, VIPs to entertain. The VIPs were among the most divisive elements of Squid Game’s first season, and it’s not hard to see why. Suddenly, we had a new cast of live-action cartoons in sparkly animal masks speaking a version of English that sounded pretty stilted to Anglophone ears. Their scenes threw the tone out of whack, adding an element of artifice to a show whose emotionally realistic storytelling balanced out a far-fetched premise. None of the actors playing VIPs is in danger of winning an Emmy. And yet, the VIPs are crucial. On one hand, more than even the Front Man who oversees the awful spectacle, they’re the show’s ultimate villains—the people who pay for the annual pleasure of watching hundreds of high-concept murders. Yet their role as spectators of and commentators on the stylized death games that we, too, are watching and talking about also makes them a mirror for the audience. In what could be interpreted as a response to Squid Game’s emergence as a global phenomenon—albeit one neutered by reality competition spin-offs and child-size Player 456 Halloween costumes—the VIPs’ return in the final season emphasizes this uncomfortable identification between viewer and villain. If the VIPs were Season 1’s sour note, then in Season 2, slow-moving side plots set among the guards and the search party looking for Squid Game Island provided less jarring but more extensive distractions from the main event. Detective Hwang Jun-ho’s (Wi Ha-jun) procedural-like quest to follow Gi-hun back to the island, in hopes of shutting down the abhorrent competition and confronting his brother the Front Man, dominated the first two episodes; once the games began, Jun-ho and his crew mostly drifted around, lost. Meanwhile, a guard, Kang No-eul (Park Gyu-young), who’d left her young daughter behind when she defected from North Korea, was putting herself at risk by interfering with her co-workers’ organ-harvesting side hustle. By the Season 2 finale, her purpose in the show remained opaque. Season 3 quickens the pace of both stories, though they function mostly as catalysts for the endgame. That endgame is nothing short of gutting. Though we do get the occasional glimpse of hope, it’s overshadowed by horror after horror, each revealing a new dimension of Director Hwang’s diatribe against greed. This doesn’t make Season 3 a rehash of Season 1 but a profound, frequently poignant, and, yes, thrillingly twist-packed deepening of its themes. It is, in particular, an acknowledgment that individual heroes, burdened by conscience and a disproportionately low share of resources, can only do so much in the face of systemic evil. As one wise character laments to Gi-hun: “Bad people do bad things, but they blame others and go on to live in peace. Good people, on the other hand, beat themselves up about the smallest things.” To pretend a Squid Game victory could be anything but pyrrhic would be to accept a fairy tale written by the worst people on the planet. The only true victory would be a victory over Squid Game. So, Hwang is asking, when will the millions of us watching impotently from the sidelines join the Gi-huns of the world?