Lee Jung-jae as Seong Gi-hun in Squid Game Season 3../Netflix
Much ink has been squirted over the years about Squid Game, the pop-culture phenomenon now back with its final season and a truly twisted twist that will make many viewers turn off Netflix in disgust.
Most of what’s been written about Hwang Dong-hyuk’s series about a secretive and deadly Korean reality show has focused on its impact on the television industry.
Squid Game certainly proved that South Korea could lead internationally in television as well as film and music. It cemented the fact that in the streaming age, even American audiences will watch television with subtitles en masse – if there’s enough creatively grisly death in it.
The show’s success, too, has been a great card for Netflix to play as it has pursued global domination.
To all those who have seen its worldwide expansion as cultural imperialism – as former CBC/Radio-Canada president Catherine Tait famously did – the fact that a Korean dystopian thriller remains the American streaming service’s most popular series of all time was a ready riposte.
So, Squid Game is significant. But how good, really, is this show about a shadowy event where 456 Koreans in dire financial straits compete in killer children’s games for a vast fortune (with the losers’ deaths live-streamed as entertainment for ultra-rich VIP voyeurs)?
The first season in 2021 was lauded for Lee Jung-jae’s central performance as unlikely hero Seong Gi-hun, the now-iconic production design and what many deemed its sharp-edged satire of late-stage capitalism.
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But when Squid Game returned for a second season late last year, Gi-hun’s motivations for going back into the game were muddy – and the reasons why Hwang In-ho, the show-runner of the evil show-within-a-show, let him back in and sometimes abetted him in undermining it were even more unclear.
Those who felt the show’s satire was always a mite hypocritical had their opinions confirmed by a return that seemed to have as its main motivation making more money out of images of poor Korean characters being slaughtered.
But that second season was essentially unfinished – Netflix made Dong-hyuk divide it in two – and it’s only now that we see his complete vision.
Picking up right after Gi-hun’s failed rebellion against the operators of Squid Game, the third season immediately has a string of scenes that deliver excellent payoff for the relationships that were set up among the secondary characters in the second – especially between the squabbling mother and son competing together, and in the cohort of players who are all there after having fallen for a cryptocurrency scheme.
It gets very Greek, to say the least.
The main dramatic engine, however, involves Jun-hee (played by former reality-show participant and singer Jo Yu-ri), who was revealed to be playing while pregnant.
Squid Game Season 3. Park Sung-hoon as Cho Hyun-ju, Jo Yu-ri as Kim Jun-hee, Kang Ae-sim as Jang Geum-ja, Yang Dong-geun as Park Yong-sik.Noh Ju-han/Netflix/Supplied
I’ll put a spoiler alert here – spoiler alert! – before revealing that Jun-hee does give birth, even though it was heavily foreshadowed.
During what may be the most brutal competition ever played on Squid Game, contestants have to choose between their own safety and helping her.
The genuine surprise is where the plot with the baby goes after that, however.
Without getting into details, the choices are so absurd that they absolutely explode any sense of realism in the show.
Some viewers are going to see this as the moment where Squid jumped the shark.
But, for me, the extreme elements redeem Squid Game’s status as a darkest-of-dark satire of our world. Before you write them off as exploitative, reflect on our own real-life consumption of images of children in mortal danger – and ask yourself whether people cheering on the deaths of babies is really that much of a stretch.
One criticism that certainly can’t be levelled against Squid Game is that it is another show about the 1 per cent. There are the VIPs, of course, whose faces we never see; their dialogue is as badly written and poorly acted as ever this final season – leading to the conclusion that this isn’t about the English-language acting pool in Seoul so much as it is a choice not to humanize them in any way.
(L to R) Jo Yu-ri as Jun-hee, Lee Jung-jae as Seong Gi-hun, Park Sung-hoon as Hyun-ju../Netflix
It’s certainly not copaganda either – not only is the police department useless, the renegade Jun-ho (portrayed by Wi Ha-joon) has the worst instincts of any TV detective ever.
The memorable characters are the players who struggle to pay their family member’s medical bills, the ones who struggle with addictions that have bankrupted them, and all the angry young men whose unsettled sense of masculinity made them easy marks.
And, of course, that redeemed reprobate, Gi-hun; his fantasies of heroism and righteous revenge having crumbled, his character gets the concluding arc he deserves.
It’s only a shame that the whole enterprise ends with a cameo by an Academy Award-winning actor that seems to confirm rumours that an English-language spinoff is on the way.
Does it weaken the themes of the show – or reinforce them – that the Squid Game carnage won’t end as long as there’s a market for it?
