Squid Game Overestimated Us

Light spoilers follow for season three of Squid Game, which debuted on Netflix on June 27. 

Squid Game could have been a one-season wonder instead of a three-season bummer. When it premiered on Netflix in September 2021, the South Korean series about a surreal competition designed by the rich, in which 456 debtors play games to the death for a massive jackpot, felt like it appeared out of nowhere but applied to everyone. Its cultural specificity was essential to its world-building — dalgona candy, the ddakji flipping game, the country’s island geography — while its consideration of imbalanced economics and depiction of widespread financial hardship gave it broad appeal. This was a show inspired by South Korea’s pervasive household debt, but series creator, writer, and director Hwang Dong-hyuk crafted such strongly archetypal characters — struggling laid-off workers, taken-advantage-of immigrants, and downtrodden gamblers — that their relatability transcended national identity.

And the thrill of it! Hwang waited 45 minutes into the premiere episode to kill the game’s first player and fully reveal the nightmarish gauntlet these characters would be put through, but after that, it was all bangers, all the time, as Squid Game moved through macabre versions of children’s games and toward crowning its sole winner. Episodes ended by dangling game rules and character deaths, beguiling us to keep watching. The production design was absurd and eye-catching, like Willy Wonka took interior-decorating lessons from Ed Gein. Lee Jung-jae’s face as protagonist Seong Gi-hun was an elastic thing, reflecting all the effort required by the games and all the agony generated by them. Squid Game demanded your attention, and then it broke your heart by killing off nearly every member of its ensemble — and in doing so, its political ideology was never anything but obvious. The show didn’t argue its perspective so much as unapologetically and relentlessly bludgeon us with it. “This is what greed does,” Squid Game yelled when friends turned on each other in “Gganbu,” when the Front Man (Lee Byung-hun) shot his own brother to divert him from exposing the games, when the elderly Il-nam (O Yeong-su) revealed himself as the corrosive genius behind the competition and mocked Gi-hun’s belief in humanity. And although the first season ended with Gi-hun deciding to go back into the games to shut them down, that final decision — and the sliver of hope it offered for the power of individual action — felt almost foolishly naïve within the series’ established belief system. A single hero isn’t enough to change the world, and the world, Squid Game insisted, needed changing.

As the series followed Gi-hun’s journey back into the bloodbath he first triumphed over, it continuously found new ways to cut players off at the knees: offering up “democratic voting” as a way to turn them against each other, encouraging betrayal and backstabbing, building murder into the games. All of that was meant to emphasize how capitalism is rigged from the top down, operated by a few at the expense of the many, with always more losers than winners. And if that gets repetitive over Squid Game’s three seasons, well, that’s sort of the point. It’s difficult to change people, and even harder to change systems. When Squid Game first flung us into its arena of despair, questioning the status quo was the series’ fuel, and its narrative rhythm had the jagged urgency of that initial run of Red Light, Green Light. But what Squid Game underestimated was how quickly we, like the game’s players, would accept the violence it offered as entertainment rather than allegory. And despite the introduction of an infant player in its final season who is meant to remind us of humanity’s core innocence, Squid Game never quite figured out how to make us root for life as readily as we grasped for the series’ gamification of death.

Exactly why a series is successful can be an inscrutable thing, but some mixture of Squid Game’s grotesquerie, watchability, and class-war ideology made it so. The first season sat atop Netflix’s top ten for nearly a month, within the top ten overall for more than two months, and generated 265.2 million views. Netflix calls the series the streamer’s “most popular show to date,” and critical reviews were mostly positive. Art no longer belongs to its creators once it’s released — the death of the author and all that — and watching TV isn’t praxis; a series having a certain credo or dogma doesn’t automatically mean that its viewers will, too. But there was an undeniable disconnect between the skepticism and anti-commercialism of Squid Game’s worldview and the rapidity with which the series became merch.

This was a show about how susceptible people are to adopting the fashions and ideologies of their oppressors — and suddenly there were officially branded tracksuits and sneakers, Halloween costumes, and Red Light, Green Light doll cosplay outfits for sale. Netflix released an hourlong virtual fireplace styled like the Front Man’s private quarters so people could spend their holidays experiencing “the sweet taste of power” at home, and invited viewers into the arena through the immersive Squid Game: The Experience. For $44, $70, or $94, fans could “dive into 5 epic challenges directly inspired by the award-winning Netflix series,” “explore re-created sets,” and “see who comes out on top with a live leaderboard and real-time scoring system.” (All from inside the consumerist hub Manhattan Mall, of course.) The most ironic missing of Squid Game’s point came through Squid Game: The Challenge, Netflix’s November 2023 reality show in which 456 superfans competed in non-deadly versions of the games for a $4.56 million prize. People willingly lining up to betray each other on TV for cash isn’t new. Under the Squid Game umbrella, though, it felt a little tactless, more than a little cynical, and maybe actually inevitable. Nevertheless, people watched — so much so that Squid Game itself made it back into Netflix’s top ten when The Challenge debuted.

As all this was happening, Squid Game got renewed; in June 2022, Netflix announced a second season. In a recent interview, Hwang is described as ignoring his health while writing, directing, and producing the first season on his own (“It was torture … I lost eight teeth”), and being “encouraged by Netflix” to make two more seasons of the series, with seven episodes dropping on December 26, 2024, and the final six episodes premiering on June 27. You can feel this pressure in those 13 additional episodes, the sense that Squid Game had already said everything it wanted to and is just making the same points over and over. The giant hanging piggy bank in the contestants’ dorm fills with cash again. The snipers bloody the Red Light, Green Light course again. The contestants realize they can hurt each other again. And as he was in the first season, Gi-hun grows disconnected from his competitors as he realizes the ease with which they wield knives and guns against other rather than the game’s overseers, even after a failed uprising. Not unlike other conceived-as-one-season series that unexpectedly got renewed (Big Little Lies, The End of the F***ing World, and Bad Sisters), there’s an increasing repetition to how Squid Game plays out, a rehashing of an original idea instead of a deepening of it.

Ultimately, the most fascinating moments of Squid Game are when it engages with how peculiar it is that the series continued at all. In the second and third seasons, Squid Game questions the idea of democracy as an objective arbiter of what people want, and scoffs at the suggestion that someone playing the game (or watching the series) for a second time could expect a different outcome from what they first experienced. The scenes where characters vote are more pointed and nihilistic about the purity of the polling process; Gi-hun’s rivals more sneering toward those they see as choosing pleasure over nourishment. The payoff is in the metatext, in how Squid Game aimed its contempt outward through the existential dilemma of its own popularity.

But it’s in the latest depiction of the VIPs, anonymous baddies hiding their glee at the torture behind gilded masks, where Squid Game reminds us that if we’re gaping at the series’ ghastliness rather than ingesting its critique, we’re part of the problem. In season three, these elites are impossible to see as anything but derogatory audience stand-ins, foreigners who delight in dressing up as pink-jumpsuited guards, placing bets on which players will live or die, and providing tedious running commentary on character motivations. (Insert Euphoria’s “Is this fucking play about us?” meme here.) It’s another sign of Squid Game’s curmudgeonly worldview that the series ultimately presents the VIPs, not Gi-hun, as surrogates for the viewer. One of these parties is on the wrong side of progress, Squid Game suggests, and it’s not the man willing to risk his life to save others.

Of all the characters in Squid Game, Gi-hun is perhaps the purest: a champion who went once more into the breach for strangers he didn’t know and whose blows he often endured, all because he believed that somewhere deep down in each person waits the ability to make the right choice. Squid Game might have obscured that hopefulness with how it fetishizes bloodlust, and how it normalized the accompanying gore so that we, too, craved more than what we needed. But if the series has a legacy, it’s in choosing not to finish Gi-hun’s statement in the series finale about what he thinks “humans are.” This time, Squid Game wants us to make up our own minds.

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