When Squid Game, the South Korean survival drama series created by Hwang Dong-hyuk, debuted in 2021, it took the world by storm, topping Netflix’s most-watched list barely two weeks in, and at one point becoming “the most in-demand show in the world, with 79 times as much audience interest as the average title,” according to Parrot Analytics. It penetrated the cultural conversation way faster than other Netflix hits at the time, including Sex Education’s debut season and Money Heist’s third installment. Memes and fancams were all the rage on Twitter and TikTok. All types of marketing rapidly followed: merchandise shirts and tracksuits, replicas of the Red Light, Green Light doll, exhibits, pop-up stores, raves, collaborations with popular video games, and all sorts of simulations of the games featured in the series. Billionaire Jeff Bezos even praised Netflix’s “internationalization strategy,” calling it “impressive and inspiring.” Safe to say, Squid Game, which its creator has been shopping to producers since 2009, is an unprecedented success for a non-English-language title that isn’t based on any existing work, no precursors whatsoever. Of course, it’s nearly an instinct for Netflix to dramatically bloat the series and milk it for as much as it can, as in the case of Squid Game: The Challenge, a 2023 spin-off of the Netflix original, where 456 fans figured in a reality competition for $4.56 million, the biggest cash prize in reality TV history, or the likes of the immersive, IRL adventures Squid Game: The Trials in Los Angeles and Squid Game: The Experience in New York, not to mention the millions the streamer has already invested for the subtitles and dubs of the original show alone. Squid Game has become the very thing it aims to critique: a cultural product in today’s attention wars propelled by a familiar kind of capitalist enthusiasm.
So here comes the third and supposedly final season of the series, consisting of six episodes that premiered on June 27 as a continuation of the additional 13 episodes split into two seasons. Since the second installment, superfans and casual viewers have been reintroduced to the secret, nightmarish playground in a remote island. The 456 debt-ridden players, who are primed to fight to the death for a mega cash prize, are back, and so are the green and pink tracksuits, the giant panopticon doll, the ruthless VIPs in bejeweled animal masks, the games, and all the bloodbath. Chief of all, our mighty hero, Seong Gi-hun (played by Lee Jung-jae), is also back, eager to change the system from the inside, even after barely surviving the last one. But apart from Gi-hun’s journey and renewed trust in humanity, the succeeding seasons also follow two other plotlines, that of North Korean undercover Kang No-eul (Park Gyuyoung), who saves a player from the botched uprising that ended Season 2, and that of detective Hwang Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon), who leads a search operation to seek answers from his brother In-ho (Lee Byung-hun), previously revealed as the Front Man.
The third season begins with a depleted energy as Gi-hun’s quest to take over the games and subdue the armed guards has been cruelly squashed, with only 60 players left to play. Player 456 has been largely racked with pain and guilt throughout the episodes, often mute and handcuffed to his bed. But the games continue just as the blood money accumulates. The competition banks on its twisted notion of “democratic voting,” in which participants decide on whether to carry on with the game and risk their lives, or halt it altogether and split the prize they’ve won. The first option, to no one’s surprise, wins, doubling as an excuse for the series to indulge in its bloated gore and heightened spectacle, made particularly grotesque by the insertion of murder into the actual games, as in the twisted version of hide-and-seek played in the first two episodes, “Keys and Knives” and “The Starry Night.” But even that isn’t the most shocking element in the final season, as Hwang, in an attempt to double down on the show’s argument about how pure and sacred humanity is, opts to include an infant player. That narrative choice, a child in a battle royale based on children’s games, might seem clever if the series’ way of finding pleasure and spectacle in death does not outweigh its humanist point.
At the same, Squid Game kneecaps its own momentum with its decision to bifurcate the additional 13 episodes rather than presenting it in a single season for a more holistic, arresting experience. To its credit, it still feels visually striking and colorful and sonically unsettling and macabre, just as its Hunger Games-esque appeal, where most players will likely end up as losers than winners, endures. The result, however, fails to replicate and, more importantly, provide more insights into what it has already exhausted in the first season, with the last three games registering as nothing but tacked-on. Whatever the series says about capitalism, class disparity, and the insidious household debt in South Korea no longer feel as well thought out. If anything, the third season functions as though it debates itself via the meta-commentary that its faceless elite spouts in a way that it wants to pre-empt its own allegory and broader preoccupations. The season even features a neurotic faux-shaman (played by Chae Kook-hee), who built a cult-like following inside the dorms, an archetypal character that is another way to repeat the show’s worldview. Squid Game’s satire, broad as it is, no longer feels as sharp and impactful here precisely because its idea of deepening its commentary is simply to spell out that very commentary so neatly, so afraid that it will be misread. The final episode features a suited Cate Blanchett playing the ddakji flipping game with a stranger in Downtown Los Angeles. The American Recruiter later exchanges a glance with the Front Man, whose car pulls over upon overhearing the familiar game. Here, the series comfortably opts to unleash a Pandora’s box for it cannot fathom its own articulations and contradictions.
Squid Game Season 3 is now streaming on Netflix.
Learn more about the show at the official site for the title.
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