This is it, ladies and gentlemen! The Squid Game is officially over. And the winners are the millions of viewers!
I won’t retread a lot of ground. (My thoughts on seasons 1 and 2 are on the books.) Nor will I reveal any spoilers, because spoiling Squid Game is worse than running the Squid Game. The third and final season came out in its entirety today on Netflix—and it kills!
Season 1 used amazingly complex characters and grippingly tense scripts to look at the inequity of a debt-based economy (along with broader themes about being human), and season 2 was very much a Two Towers situation: a necessary development of the story that doesn’t stand on its own but relies on excellent beginning and ending chapters. So much was riding on season 3. Could Squid Game defend its #10 spot on my Favorite Television Series list and bring all the brilliance to a satisfying end?
It could. It did.
Season 3 broadens the original metaphor of the series by exposing not just the rot inside capitalism but democracy as well, while even saying a lot about infant rights! Taken as a whole, the series talks about basic human dignity and basic human depravity. Any good system we can build, we can corrupt. It looks at values displayed through active decisions and pushes against the idea that our circumstances define us. And, of course, it makes us complicit in a critique of our voyeuristic-exhibitionist culture and the new ways we enslave the poor and glorify the degraded in the name of entertainment. (You know we’re the VIPs, right?)
But none of that would make a dent if the show were not so expertly written, directed, designed, and acted. Squid Game is not just a good Korean TV show or a good Netflix TV show—it is excellence in the medium of television. With so many characters, it’s insane that they are all individuated and fully-formed, let alone so enthralling! The base of it all is the psychologically insightful writing—maybe the best of any series ever.
(Aside: Squid Game has so much in common with Lost, that it just shows the latter’s transformative legacy. An ever-growing ensemble cast full of great characters. A search for a mysterious island. The very real threat that any character could be killed off at any time. The comparison of who people are in the midst of their lives versus who they are at their core, when held together in a secluded location. A twisty but ultimately unrevealed set of sinister Others. OK, now you name some!)
Season 3 returns us to the Game with more creative, character-revealing children’s games. It focuses on themes of family. It admits that life is unfair, yet it holds each person responsible for their actions and priorities. It comes to what I now see is the only ending it could come to. But it ends on a tantalizing ellipsis. (No, literally. The last episode is titled “Humans Are…”) The Lord of the Rings analogy comes back around with the show’s never-ending series of denouements…but it’s worth it all for the shocking cameo in the final scene!
Perhaps it took an Asian show to meaningly tear off the façades of American culture (which is well on its way to being world culture). Squid Game may or may not be aware of its perfect timing in American history, but if ever we needed to face up to the ways that we’ve warped democracy, villainized the Other, manipulated the economy, fetishized violence, justified our own evil choices, and escaped thinking about it all by watching people on television fight… Well, there’s an ellipsis you can fill in yourself.