Netflix’s Korean Hit Limps to a Close

There are some series that work so well as one-and-dones that it’s hard to imagine what could possibly be gained creatively from pressing onward with a second season. Sometimes, those seemingly unnecessary renewals nevertheless yield pleasant surprises: Barry got only darker and weirder as it went on, White Lotus successfully expanded itself into a globe-trotting anthology, and so on.

Other times, however, that initial skepticism proves justified. The second round of Netflix’s South Korean sleeper hit Squid Game was a thudding step down from the first, rehashing most of the same themes and story beats at a slower pace with fewer insights. But it also delivered only half a season’s worth of plot, planting bombs to be detonated later and then cutting off just as things got truly intense. A reasonable person might have hoped a third season could provide enough payoff to make at least some of those stumbles worthwhile.

Alas. It brings me no pleasure to report that the third and thankfully last of Squid Game seasons only confirms that we, like Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae), should’ve left that cursed island behind for good after his first victory.

Season three picks up in the immediate aftermath of season two, as the last few rebels from Gi-hun’s violent uprising are put down and their bodies cleaned up. Gi-hun himself is not among the dead, though that fact gives him no relief. The man who returns to the dorms is one so flattened by grief and guilt that he snaps to life only to scream at the guards to just kill him already.

They don’t, of course. Nor are the surviving contestants moved to reconsider his earlier pleas to choose to quit. So the game, and Squid Game, proceed as usual, hurtling contestants through deadly high-stakes versions of hide-and-seek, jump rope and something the organizers term “Sky Squid Game,” which is essentially a shoving match atop dizzyingly high columns.

But the thrill is gone, even if the VIPs — yes, they are back, and their bizarrely stilted line readings along with them — try to convince us otherwise. The voting is “more exciting than the actual games!” one declares, as if responding to viewer complaints that the voting took up too much time in season two. “This just keeps getting more and more interesting!” another announces late in this season, like we might start to believe them if they just say it loudly enough.

It doesn’t work. While creator Hwang Dong-hyuk still has a few more nasty tricks up his sleeve ­— including one final twist of the knife so cruel I gasped when I realized what was happening — its latest run is too short on surprise and emotion and too long on misery and, well, length.

Its main thematic target is once again the unjustness of our modern capitalist system, this time with a specific and sometimes devastatingly shrewd eye toward how the pretense of democracy can paper over unspeakable cruelty. “In accordance with your free and democratic vote, the next game will resume tomorrow,” the participants are informed after each vote to keep playing, as if there could be anything “free” about such a choice being made in a system rigged by distant elites and enforced by faceless thugs. In one of the season’s most darkly hilarious moments, a player apologetically informs another that the others have voted to sacrifice him. “Please forgive me, but we’re going to need you to die,” he pleads, invoking majority rule in a futile attempt to erase his own complicity and the man’s desire to live.

But season three is an awfully long way to go for those occasional bits of wisdom, and a largely unpleasant one besides. Squid Game has never been a “nice” show by any standard. Early on, however, its grimness was tempered by a deep empathy for the people trapped in this maze, and the occasional flickers of hope that compassion and connection might arise even under the harshest of climates; part of what made that initial outing so fascinatingly queasy was the tension between how bad we felt for the characters’ suffering and how entertaining it was to watch.

Now, it’s gloom and doom all the way down. The show is still great at coming up with new and creative ways to torture its characters (one twist involving a baby is as viscerally upsetting as it seems logistically implausible), but less so at digging into their humanity. And without the latter, the former starts to feel like misery for misery’s sake.

If the new players introduced in season two felt disappointingly thin, season three makes no attempt to flesh them out any further. It’s a miscalculation that limits our investment not just in clearly odious figures like sadistic Nam-gyu (Roh Jae-won) or greedy Jeong-dae (Song Young-chang), but also in sympathetic souls like trans soldier Hyun-ju (Park Sung-hoon) and expectant mother Jun-hee (Jo Yu-ri). Aside from Gi-hun, now a strong silent type with no remaining trace of his old gregariousness, the one thing all of them have in common is that they seem more like pieces being pushed around a chess board than complicated human beings with agency and interiority.

In lieu of character and relationship work, Squid Game season three offers heaps and heaps of plot. But while there are a few bright spots — chief among them the bits of levity offered by slightly goofy, occasionally clever and generally lovable loan shark Woo-seok (Jeon Seok-ho) — the pace is lumbering. Painstaking efforts by guard No-eul (Park Gyu-young) to save a player she knows from the outside, the interminable quest by ex-cop Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon) to find the island, and the frequent cuts back to the Front Man (Lee Byung-hun) in his fancy chair and the VIPs in their luxury suites only drag the proceedings in the arena out further, while adding little in the way of new information, emotional impact or thematic depth.

By the time Squid Game finally crawls over the finish line, there’s no sense of the triumph you might get from completing a really good story — only of relief that this entire grueling experience is finally over. The series has one last jolt to offer on its way out, one that could just be a fun little bow to tie the whole thing together or the start of yet another new spinoff chapter. For its sake and our own, let’s hope it’s the former. The kindest thing to offer this universe now might be a mercy killing.