Squid Game Season 3 Review: Netflix Makes the Same Mistake as the Doomed Players
The final season of the hit show isn't a total misfire, but its conclusion only serves to reiterate previous points.
[Below is Matt Goldberg’s review of Squid Game season 3, which will contain full spoilers for the first two seasons and minor spoilers for season 3. Next week, Matt will also run a full-spoiler review for the season that goes into more detail regarding the show’s various themes and plot points. If you’d like to support what we’re doing here, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. And please try to keep the comments on this one spoiler-free. Thank you!]
The first episode of Squid Game 2 featured The Recruiter (Gong Yoo) going to various unhoused people and offering them a choice between a loaf of bread and a lottery ticket. As with most of Squid Game’s writing, the subtext was not subtle, and most of the unhoused took the lottery ticket because they knew that even if they ate for a day, they needed a bigger solution to their problems. They needed to win the lottery.
Netflix hit the jackpot with the first season of Squid Game, a beautifully rendered, sharply written capitalist critique that became the streamer’s biggest show. Netflix is not a starving person on the street, but the most successful streamer in the world, even after almost every major studio attempted to launch a rival service. Squid Game was a winning lottery ticket, but one of the show’s larger themes is that there’s always the desire for more. There is never enough money, and perhaps rolling the dice again, no matter how dire the consequences, can get you to another victory. By going back to the show, creator Hwang Dong-hyuk and Netflix made the mistake of casting aside the bread-in-hand for a lottery ticket, and like the unhoused, turned away from their sure thing—a hit show that landed upon a mostly satisfying conclusion—and tried to expand it. The lotto scratcher was not a winner.
That’s not to say that Squid Game seasons 2 or 3 are necessarily bad seasons of television, but every idea presented here feels like it was already addressed in the first season, and most of the expansions upon this world never seem to open it up in a satisfying way because we’re still locked to Gi-hun’s (Lee Jung-jae) story. When we last left him, his attempted rebellion failed to coalesce. He lost his friend Park Jung-bae (Lee Seo-hwan), and the game continued. His big plan of confronting the VIPs would never happen, so the big “twist” of Season 2 is that there is no twist. The game continues.
Rather than arising from the ashes of Season 2, Squid Game Season 3 trudges onwards, and had it aired as part of the second season (since it picks up right where Season 2 ends, there’s an argument to be made that we’re just watching one, 13-episode season of television split in half), I imagine viewers would feel thoroughly depressed and depleted afterwards. It isn’t simply that Season 3 is bleak, but that it seems to have no new ideas worth exploring beyond the one it already explored back in Season 1. We know we’re all trapped by capitalism and that the game is rigged. What’s bizarre is how almost every new wrinkle here—having the Front Man/Hwang In-ho (Lee Byung-hun) masquerade as player “Oh Young-il”, the machinations of Squid Game soldier Kang No-eul (Park Gyu-young), having Hwang Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon) endlessly search for the island—don’t add anything because the showrunner doesn’t want to veer away from his central points. Expanding the narrative in these two seasons never expands the underlying themes.
I don’t mind that Squid Game 3 doesn’t want to change the show’s thesis, but without anything new to say, there seems to be little point in having a story to tell. It seems like Hwang couldn’t crack how to blow up the narrative and still make the show about capitalistic rot and human desperation, so we’re essentially getting a retread of the first season, and there’s only so many times you can watch someone play a deadly children’s game and have a single tear roll down their cheek before asking, “Is this all there is?” The show wants to place Gi-hun as its hero, but its existence mirrors that of his avaricious foes chanting, “One more round!” And we all know how those extra rounds tend to go for the players.
This only leaves us with slight glimmers of where the show shines. It’s still an absolute triumph of production design and costuming, and Lee Jung-jae is outstanding as he finds new layers to the tortured Gi-hun, so consumed with survivor’s guilt that he’s started to lose sight of who he is and what he cares about. Like Season 1, there’s the idea of how much humanity you have to lose in exchange for money and survival, but Lee Jung-jae always keeps that conflict interesting, and does so without needing long speeches. If Squid Game Season 2 cast Gi-hun as an unlikely revolutionary, then the one in the fallout is far more somber, haunted, and pained.
The downside here is that there are no longer as many interesting characters to go around. T.O.P was an absolute delight as “Thanos,” but he got knocked off near the end of Season 2. Lee Byung-hun is such a rich, interesting actor, but after getting to see the beauty of his performance as “Oh Young-il,” which kept the audience guessing, he’s now back into Front Man mode, and the story rarely gives him another chance to showcase his talents. The final episode of Squid Game 2 did a good job of knocking the wind out of the audience, but it came with a heavy cost, not only to Gi-hun but to characters who added a new energy to the world of Squid Game.
As the show starts to run low on characters and worthwhile subplots, the narrowing effect reeks of familiarity, with scenes and concepts running on far too long. The whole story happening across Seasons 2 and 3 probably could have been told in nine episodes like the first season, but that gnawing hunger for “more” takes the air out of the plotting. We already have a pretty good idea of what happens next, and if what happens isn’t in the Squid Game, then it’s probably Jun-ho on a boat somewhere.
At its core, Squid Game is a story about futility in a capitalistic system. Gi-hun went into the first game looking for enough money to put his life back together, but came out so emotionally battered that the money ceased to matter. There is something a little clever about Netflix paying for more of the same so you can further stress the point of futility, but as a viewer, it makes for an uninteresting story, especially when tethered to such a similar arc for its protagonist. It all feels repetitive by design, but the point doesn’t become stronger merely by repeating it.
Ironically, Squid Game 3 seems to dispute its own existence. It reminds me of a line from The Good Place where Michael (Ted Danson) remarks, “There's something so human about taking something great and ruining it a little so you can have more of it.” In the Squid Game world of a zero-sum game, this makes perverse sense, where the desire for more overrides good sense. We don’t need these two seasons just as we didn’t need the reality series Squid Game: The Challenge, but capitalism demands more, and becomes a reflection of our humanity. We need “more” regardless of how much we already have.
Entertainment is littered with plenty of sequels to classics. Rarely do we get something like The Godfather Part II. Instead, there’s stuff like The Two Jakes, Staying Alive, and The Sting II. The first season of Squid Game remains unimpeachable television, one of the best things to come out of the streaming era, and an exhilarating promise of entertainment outside the bounds of Hollywood. Squid Game Seasons 2 and 3 don’t negate that legacy, but they’re also likely to be as forgotten as other mediocre follow-ups. Yes, they answer the dangling questions of “What happened when Gi-hun chose not to get on the plane?” and “Did Jun-ho survive being shot by his brother and falling off a cliff?” but they rarely recreate the thrill of that first season. We’ve already played this game before.
Matt Goldberg is a film critic who lives and works in Atlanta. If you enjoyed this review, check out his newsletter, Commentary Track.