Why the Season 3 finale is sensible.

This text comprises spoilers for the collection finale of Squid Recreation.

With the June 27 launch of the third season of Squid Recreation, Netflix’s hit Korean dystopian thriller has lastly concluded, bringing the ugly saga to an in depth. The collection grew to become a world phenomenon seemingly in a single day after dropping on Netflix in September 2021, when viewers had been simply starting to emerge from various states of isolation and social distancing. Whereas common pandemic-era collection like Tiger King and The Queen’s Gambit had been darkish in their very own methods, they had been nothing in comparison with Squid Recreation’s brutally violent depiction of the various ways in which capitalism disenfranchises, endangers, and dehumanizes the poor. Now, 4 years, three seasons, two casts of characters, and a complete (questionable) actuality present later, it’s the top of an period for the collection that when proved that monoculture nonetheless exists. Only one query stays: Did Squid Recreation stick the touchdown? The reply: Properly, kinda.

Season 3 is a direct continuation of final 12 months’s Season 2, which introduced in a complete new slate of opponents as our lead participant, Seong Gi-hun, aka Participant 456 (Lee Jung-jae), enters the bloody event for a second time with the hopes of demolishing the video games, as soon as and for all, from inside. All through that season, Gi-hun tries and fails to persuade his fellow Squid Recreation gamers that it’s higher to stroll away from the cutthroat contest than to die within the try to win the prize cash, which will increase with every participant killed. Within the Season 2 finale, Gi-hun makes an attempt to stage a coup—just for his fellow rebels to be gunned down whereas preventing for his doomed trigger. Within the third season, Gi-hun has misplaced almost all will to reside, behaving like a lifeless man strolling for the remainder of the video games, till the delivery of an toddler rekindles the tiniest smidge of hope for humanity.

The collection finale, titled “People Are … ,” is break up into two components: The primary half begins proper the place Episode 5 ended, and the second half takes place after a six-month time soar. After we left off within the earlier episode, we had been in the midst of the ultimate sport, Sky Squid Recreation, through which the gamers should progress throughout three separate pillars by urgent a button after which pushing off no less than one participant per pillar within the allotted time. We begin with a standoff: After the pregnant Participant 222, Kim Jun-hee, (Jo Yu-ri) birthed her child within the video games after which died, Gi-hun is making an attempt to maintain his promise to her and shepherd the child—now inducted as a participant within the lethal competitors—to a win as a way to assure the child’s security. There’s just one pillar left to go, which means only one extra individual has to die. The issue is, there are two gamers left, not together with the child, and the opposite contestant is the child’s organic father, Participant 333, Lee Myung-gi (Im Si-wan), who’s mentally succumbing to the stress, adrenaline, and occasions of the sport. Unable to belief that Participant 333 will hold the child protected, quite than select to win the video games alone by killing it—thereby profitable all the prize cash as a substitute of splitting it—Gi-hun is unwilling to lose. The lads tussle, and Participant 333 falls off the pillar, which ought to safe the win for each our lead and the child. Nevertheless, within the throes of their preventing, neither man managed to press the button beginning the timer for the spherical, which means that the dying doesn’t depend, and one of many remaining gamers—Gi-hun or the child—nonetheless has to die to ensure that somebody to win. Gi-hun presses the button to begin the timer earlier than sacrificing himself for the child, tearfully leaping off the pillar. His final phrases earlier than his fall, directed on the Entrance Man and the rich VIPs who he is aware of are watching, are “We aren’t horses,” alluding to the construction of the sport, which has the wealthy betting on the lives of the poor. “We’re people,” he continues. “People are … ” However Gi-hun falls to his dying earlier than he can end the assertion, leaving the clean to be crammed by the viewers.

In the meantime, Kang No-eul (Park Gyu-young), the North Korean sharpshooter working as an executioner on the sport’s workers, is making strikes of her personal. She not too long ago defected from the workers as a way to save a participant who she is aware of is the daddy of a sick daughter, feeling sympathy as a mom who misplaced her personal daughter. However as a way to guarantee the person’s full escape from the sport, she has to delete the arduous copies of the participant data. Whereas doing so, she checks her personal file and discovers, to her devastation, that the file lists her daughter as deceased, regardless of her boss having dangled above her head the opportunity of serving to discover her daughter if she did as he commanded. No-eul makes an attempt suicide earlier than deciding to go away the island beneath cowl as a substitute. She is ready to do that despite her life-threatening accidents as a result of, shock, the Squid Recreation employees are evacuating the island earlier than it’s set to explode in half-hour, Mission: Unattainable–fashion.

Why is the island about to be detonated, you could ask? The sport’s Entrance Man (Lee Byung-hun), who spent most of Season 2 pretending to be a participant in order that he may befriend Gi-hun after which stab him within the again, bought wind that our good-looking but silly detective, Hwang Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon)—who has devoted his life these previous two seasons to serving to Gi-hun cease the video games by pinpointing the island the place the video games are—lastly discovered their location. Jun-ho makes it to the island and, as a substitute of instantly turning round upon seeing the bombs all over the place, finds the Entrance Man—who additionally occurs to be his long-lost brother, In-ho—on the actual second that the Entrance Man is carrying the game-winning child out of the sector. Jun-ho will get his brother’s consideration and goals a gun at him, however, in an echo of their Season 1 encounter, fails to shoot him, letting the Entrance Man stroll free with the child in hand. Jun-ho leaves the island earlier than it explodes, destroying any hint of the event that has resulted in numerous deaths.

Six months later, Squid Recreation follows up on quite a lot of plotlines. Jun-ho is virtually unemployed, having misplaced his need to work for—and, let’s be actual, his credibility with—regulation enforcement. When he arrives at his condominium one evening, he finds Jun-hee and Myung-gi’s child mysteriously positioned on his desk, together with a financial institution card that has all the child’s winnings loaded onto it: 45.6 billion South Korean gained, the price of 456 lives within the remaining Squid Recreation.

No-eul, the previous guard, has survived. She visits the daddy she saved, alongside together with his now-healthy daughter. Although the person doesn’t know that she is the one who saved his life within the competitors, they’ve a pleasant interplay as strangers. On her approach residence, No-eul will get a telephone name from the service she employed to search for her daughter, whom she believed to be lifeless given the information she learn on the island. Surprisingly, the service says they bought a lead that her daughter is perhaps in China. Nonetheless hopeful that her daughter is alive, No-eul boards a flight to China. Concurrently, on the airport, Squid Recreation closes a loop on a plotline that was launched within the first season. Again in Season 1, Jung Ho-yeon stole the present as Kang Sae-byeok, a sympathetic North Korean defector who entered the video games to win cash that will assist her mom enter South Korea to rejoin Sae-byeok and her youthful brother. As her brother’s sole guardian within the nation, Sae-byeok left Gi-hun together with her dying want for Gi-hun to maintain him. Gi-hun had been financially offering for Sae-byeok’s youthful brother this entire time, and within the remaining episode we see the boy lastly reunite together with his mom, who does efficiently arrive in South Korea.

As for Gi-hun, the Entrance Man, and the way forward for the video games, that story continues in america. Followers will keep in mind that Gi-hun’s daughter relocated to Los Angeles throughout the first season, and Gi-hun was on a aircraft to satisfy her after profitable the video games the primary time earlier than he rotated with the one-track-minded objective of ending the video games for good. Within the finale, after Gi-hun’s dying, the Entrance Man visits Gi-hun’s daughter in L.A. He tells her that her father has died (calling Gi-hun “a buddy” of his, which is an extremely simplified description of their advanced relationship), and offers her a field containing his bloody Participant 456 jacket and a financial institution card with the remainder of Gi-hun’s winnings from the primary event loaded onto it.

Nevertheless, probably the most essential a part of the finale comes quickly after this second. Because the Entrance Man is being pushed away behind a black luxurious automobile with totally tinted home windows, he passes an alleyway, from which we will hear what appears like somebody enjoying ddakji, the slap sport that the Recruiter (Gong Yoo) used to recruit contributors in Seoul. That’s as a result of somebody is enjoying the sport, a jaw-dropping twist for anybody who believed that the merciless competitors started and resulted in South Korea. When the Entrance Man rolls his window down, we see a unique recruiter enjoying the sport with a person within the alleyway. In a stunning cameo to finish the collection, this recruiter is performed by none apart from Cate Blanchett. The Entrance Man and this Recruiter give one another a understanding nod earlier than the Entrance Man rolls his window up and the automotive pulls off.

The final two seasons of Squid Recreation haven’t been as sharp because the viral first season, however the finale underscores one thing past the present itself. The ultimate moments of Netflix’s hit present posit that all the pieces we watched up till now was a mere drop within the bucket of the worldwide exploitation set in movement by capitalism. Every thing Gi-hun did, all the invaluable issues he sacrificed—his relationship together with his daughter and, in the end, his personal life—had been a waste. He was by no means dismantling the operation from the within; he was merely reducing a singular head off the hydra, just for two extra to develop as a substitute. In a approach, this displays what has occurred with the present in actuality. Squid Recreation creator Hwang Dong-hyuk gave us a sanguinary warning about how morality crumbles within the face of each want and greed, and the way these two issues are sometimes facilitated by the haves exploiting the have-nots. Netflix took the ugly cautionary story and answered with Squid Recreation–themed actuality competitors reveals and Squid Recreation vacationer “experiences.” Granted, these spinoffs of the IP is perhaps enjoyable—they give the impression of being enjoyable!—however the whole level of Squid Recreation was to depict one thing so brutal you wouldn’t need it emulated. As an alternative, despite the story’s message, we twisted its iconography into more cash and leisure. It will probably’t get far more Squid Recreation than that.