Squid Game Season 3 Hits a Dead End for Its Characters (Spoiler Review)
By repeating the themes of the first season, the show had few new avenues for its characters to explore.
[This article contains major spoilers for all three seasons of Squid Game. For a review of Squid Game Season 3 that only contains minor spoilers, please click here. If you’d like to support what we’re doing here, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Feel free to discuss spoilers in the comments section of this article.]
One of the overarching ideas of Squid Game is that morality becomes largely irrelevant within a capitalist system. Good people die just as easily as bad people, and the amoral sociopaths at the top remain the same. We can’t “win” playing this game, so the best we can hope for is to make choices that affirm who we wish to be rather than thinking an external factor like money can alter the cornerstones of our personality. The lesson Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) learns at the end of the first season is that he wasn’t a degenerate gambler, but a decent person who didn’t want others to suffer for his transgressions.
Where the sequel seasons hit a snag was trying to find new ways to tell the story, only to repeat the same narrative with minor variations on preexisting characters. Perhaps the clearest example of this is moving The Front Man/Hwang In-ho (Lee Byung-hun) into the game under the assumed identity of “Oh Young-il.” It’s a repeat of the first season where Oh Il-nam (O Yeong-su), the game’s creator, masqueraded as a player and friend to Gi-hun, faking his death within the game to continue observing its machinations once outside. Showrunner Hwang Dong-hyuk tries to add a new twist by showing In-ho as a doomed path for Gi-hun, highlighting a man so wrecked by the world that he succumbs to the rules of the game and its hateful outlook on humanity. While this makes for an interesting challenge to Gi-hun, it appears to have little effect on In-ho. While he does give Gi-hun’s prize money to Gi-hun’s daughter after Gi-hun dies, he still seems resigned to the ongoing existence of Squid Game as he spots an American recruiter (Cate Blanchett) playing ddakji with an impoverished person in an alley.
What’s more unsatisfying is how the show shrugs off any kind of bond between In-ho and his brother, Detective Hwang Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon). The cliffhanger at the end of Season 1 and its resolution in Season 2 imply that In-ho went to the trouble of wounding but not killing his brother, and then ensuring that a local boat captain would pick up Jun-ho and keep him away from the island in the future. There’s pathos here of a brother still wanting to protect his sibling, but knowing he must always keep him at a distance for his protection. But as Jun-ho starts to close in, In-ho gives the boat captain the order to kill everyone if they threaten to make it to the island. For all the glimpses we get in Squid Game Season 2 that In-ho may be a real person, Squid Game Season 3 quickly returns him to being nothing more than an obstacle and facilitator, his usefulness as a character largely relegated to plotting.
Showrunner Hwang Dong-hyuk takes this approach repeatedly throughout Seasons 2 and 3 of Squid Game, where characters who have outlived their narrative usefulness are reduced or eliminated without any kind of satisfying resolution. Season 1 had the benefit of shock value, where, while we could largely count on our protagonist Gi-hun reaching the last episode, everyone else was fair game. In the final two seasons, the deaths are unsatisfying and borderline arbitrary. The show never seems to be able to get its arms around the relationship between Park Yong-sik (Yang Dong-geun) and his mother Jang Geum-ja (Kang Ae-shim). Whether you think Yong-sik was going to kill Kim Jun-hee (Jo Yu-ri) and her baby (unlikely given he couldn’t bring himself to kill a full-grown man) or he was trying to bait his mother into killing him — a way of showing how he always leaned too heavily on her — it’s an underwhelming conclusion given the emotional roller coaster Yong-sik and Geum-ja went through.
The third season also shows how poorly Hwang treats his female characters. Setting aside that only men reach the final game this time around, our major cis-gendered female characters—Guem-ja, Jun-hee, and the guard Kang No-eul (Park Gyu-young)—are all mothers (there’s also the “shaman” Seon-nyeo (Chae Kook-hee), but she’s a one-dimensional villain just like Im Jeong-dae (Song Young-chang), the businessman with the greatest amount of debt). And what do these mothers do? Guem-ja hangs herself, Jun-hee steps off a cliff, and Kang No-eul continues to search for her lost daughter. These aren’t resolutions that say anything other than mothers are only driven by motherhood, and if they can no longer be a mother, then they don’t have much reason to live.
Life outside of the game isn’t much better, as Jun-ho’s storyline completely sputters out. He’s meant to be an external force who could possibly come in and rescue Gi-hun or have some kind of final confrontation with In-ho, but neither happens. He’s a detective whose criminal partner Choi Woo-seok (Jeon Seok-ho) does far more investigating and has to basically shout at Jun-ho, “Don’t trust the boat captain, dummy!” When Jun-hee’s baby gets dropped off at Jun-ho’s home, it doesn’t say anything about Jun-ho’s character or what being a father might mean for him. It’s just tying up the loose end of who takes care of an orphaned child (South Korea’s dumbest cop, apparently).
The only character who has a satisfying arc is Gi-hun, but it comes at a tremendous cost, and still pales in comparison to what he went through in the first season. Lee Myung-gi (Im Si-wan) is reminiscent of Cho Sang-woo (Park Hae-soo) in that he has flickers of morality before ultimately succumbing to his greed under the auspices of cold pragmatism, but Gi-hun and Myung-gi have no relationship, whereas Gi-hun and Sang-woo were former classmates and built an uneasy bond throughout the games. When Gi-hun, Myung-gi, and the baby are on the final platform in the final game, there are no emotional or dramatic stakes because nothing will be lost between these two characters, and we know Myung-gi will die before Gi-hun because this is Gi-hun’s story. So much of the final game is just Myung-gi trying to talk his way to victory with Gi-hun standing around, holding a baby, and we’re waiting for minor characters to die because we know that the most drama will come when our major characters reach the final platform.
Even here, there’s a tired inevitability to the whole thing. We know Myung-gi will die not because he chooses to, but because he needs to “lose” to Gi-hun. The only question was whether Gi-hun would survive, but since the rules of the game required one player left on the platform, only the baby was going to make it. Squid Game is too brutal to let both Gi-hun and the baby survive, and there was no universe where they kill the baby because it’s not that kind of show, and viewers would check out completely if the show eliminated an infant.
Squid Game previously knew how to wring as much drama as possible from its sadistic games, but in the third season, the games no longer feel clever or well-executed. The hide-and-seek game seems like it will be fun with its opening twists of knives, keys, and switching teams, but once the characters are in the game, the execution takes way too long and feels like a cheap way to cram in a bunch of character deaths without much definition to the game itself. The jump rope game feels like a retread of Season 1’s tempered-glass bridge. And the last game’s final platforms lack dramatic weight because so many of the remaining characters are non-entities.
That’s not to say the characters are inherently bad or lack interesting performances. The cast is uniformly great, and while we spend time with these main characters, we do care about them. I love that Squid Game, arguably the biggest show in the world, showcased a transgender woman, Cho Hyun-ju (Park Sung-hoon1), as an unimpeachable hero. She frequently risks her life to help others, and while many of the contestants are portrayed as gamblers who got in over their heads, Hyun-ju’s story has the tragic weight of being a trans person who can’t find honest work because of society’s prejudices. There’s something particularly brutal about watching her get stabbed in the back after all she did to protect Jun-hee and Guem-ja. But even interesting characters had to become curtailed in service of Gi-hun’s arc, like when Kang Dae-ho (Kang Ha-neul) shows himself to be a coward and thus becomes little more than fodder for whether or not Gi-hun will become a cold-blooded murderer like In-ho.
It’s telling that the biggest material changes are for characters who exist only as symbols. Jun-hee’s baby and Gi-hun’s daughter are not major characters, but they represent the future. However, the future they represent is one of inherited wealth divorced from the presence of their parents. They now have money, but no idea where it came from, how much blood was spilled to obtain it, and how it’s part of a larger system where the wealthy use the poor as hapless pawns for entertainment. Following the money would have been a much more interesting route for Gi-hun than simply reentering the game, but to land on the thematic point of what gets sacrificed for capitalism, I can understand why Hwang structured the story in this way. Nevertheless, it’s another example of how the themes fail to connect to the dramatic moments in the sequel seasons.
While heavier scenes like character deaths aren’t particularly shocking in the world of Squid Game, it becomes a problem when those deaths seem to serve no larger purpose than moving the plot along or informing what Gi-hun will do. Even though only three characters made it to the final game in the first season, it felt like all the interactions among the contestants were far more interesting, and the payoffs made dramatic sense. It’s sad when Ali (Anupam Tripathi) dies in Season 1, but it reveals the deep cruelty in Sang-woo’s character while also providing a potent social commentary about how natural-born citizens see migrant workers as disposable.
Squid Game Season 3 aspired to the same kind of pathos as its first season, but never found new ways to articulate the drama. Too many characters felt like retreads of former figures or lacked a payoff that made their arc feel worthwhile (I’ve accepted I’m just going to be mad about Jun-ho’s non-story for a while). The prize money of $45.6 billion won may be the same, but Seasons 2 and 3 of Squid Game were clear examples of diminishing returns.
Matt Goldberg is a film critic who lives and works in Atlanta. If you enjoyed this review, check out his newsletter, Commentary Track.
I understand the issue being fraught with a cis-gendered man, Park, playing a transgendered woman, and I respect those who feel like the casting falls short regardless of the performance. But in terms of how Cho Hyun-ju is written, she is the show’s most straightforwardly heroic character.