Netflix’s ‘Squid Game’ ends with a muted final season

Squid Game became a global sensation for a reason, in a way few South Korean exports have (Parasite, BTS, Gangnam Style; the list is short). Its inventive first season placed vivid, three-dimensional characters in elaborate, financially motivated survival games—à la Saw meets Takeshi’s Castle—for the glee of the ultra-wealthy. And while this premise reflected the merciless constraints of unchecked capitalism, the metaphor wasn’t its raison d'etre. As its remarkable second season proved, the show was just as much (if not more so) about how the pressures of a rigid class strata will slowly but surely break people, and bend their ethical limits. It initially seemed to double down on the gaming aspect, but it saw season one winner Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) transform from a nitwit to a vengeful force, who used his billions to track down and re-enter the secret competition, in the hopes of staging a revolution. Season two ended on a cliffhanger, when his armed revolt went awry, leading to the execution of his best friend from the outside world, Jung-bae (Lee Seo-hwan).

With Gi-hun captured, and his green tracksuited comrades crushed by the boot-heels of the faceless, pink-hooded drones, Squid Game 3 makes the strange decision to immediately revert to its status quo, by simply reinserting the surviving players into the game. On one hand, witnessing Jung-bae’s death up close pushes Gi-hun into unexplored emotional territory, affording Lee Jung-jae the chance to play someone so haunted by grief and anger that he feels practically cursed. However, the path to breaking this spell is both linear and oddly simple. Gi-hun quickly becomes obsessed with extracting vengeance not from his captors, but from supporting character Dae-ho (Kang Ha-neul), who Gi-hun learns had lied about his military experience, and failed to adequately assist the revolt in season two.

Once again: the metaphor sort of works. With no useful outlet, the victims of inequality are forced to blame and turn on one another. The imagery in the aftermath of their failed coup is horrifying as well, with bodies strung up as examples of what might happen should they continue to resist. However, Gi-hun’s new trajectory is flimsy at best. His emotional tunnel vision is based entirely on hearsay, rather than personal interactions, leaving his story for the first few episodes feeling divorced from the larger plot.

The same can be said about the timid, diminutive Min-su (Lee David). He’s still reeling from the death of Se-mi (Won Ji-an), and grief turns him practically insane to the point of hallucination, which ends up being the impetus to conclude several different character arcs, including his own. The season’s first major game forces the characters to chase and stab each other in an elaborate maze, a setting that yields intense moments for mother-son duo Geum-ja (Kang Ae-shim) and Yong-Sik (Yang Dong-geun), but reveals cracks in the story’s fabric. For most of the remaining characters, what ought to be a series of intimate skirmishes instead take strange and overly convenient form. Gi-hun, a once-sensible character, becomes murderous based on a rumor. Min-su isn’t in his senses, and has no concept of who anyone is. The manipulated Nam-gyu (Roh Jae-won) is so hopped up on the mysterious pills belonging to slain rapper Thanos (T.O.P.) that he becomes a bloodthirsty sociopath—nebulous “drugs” born from conservative fears, causing immediate withdrawal, psychosis, and violent impulses. Few characters seem to act in recognizably human ways, even in moments of desperation, and those that do are quickly dispensed with, leaving us with empty husks resembling real people.

The season’s biggest wrinkle comes in the form of the pregnant Jun-hee (Jo Yu-ri) finally giving birth, after which game-runner In-ho (Lee Byung-hun) and the international VIP spectators decide that her newborn ought to be a player as well, monetary share and all. It’s the show’s most barbaric twist to date, but it doesn’t end up having nearly the intended dramatic impact. Few characters are ever afforded anything resembling emotional or moral complexity in its wake. What ought to be agonizing ends up surprisingly easy on the audience, as the show immediately drafts the remaining players into two distinct factions: those willing to protect the child no matter what, and those who casually cackle at the thought of killing it.

This lack of moral dimension cascades as soon as the show cuts away to other subplots too. Outside the games, In-ho’s brother Detective Hwang Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon) continues to search for the secret billionaire island with the help of Gi-hun’s crew, in a tale that takes detour upon detour in order to delay inevitable confrontations. The brothers have been central characters since the series’ inception, with a central question looming over their heads: why did In-ho start running the games after winning them? You’d think that the show’s final chapter might at least start to gesture in the direction of an answer—or at least a difficult confrontation between the siblings—but you’d be wrong.

The only story that feels remotely complete is that of North Korean defector and Squid Game sniper No-eul (Park Gyu-young), who recognizes one of the players— Gyeong-seok (Lee Jin-wook), father to a sick young girl—from her lonely life on the outside. Her attempts to covertly harbor him to safety make up the season’s most propulsive element, though its askew editing structure ensures that this hours-long subplot ends up mysteriously spread out over nearly a week, as too little time is spent on her story, and too much elsewhere.

All in all, Squid Game 3 is an uneven bookend to an otherwise tremendous accomplishment. It isn’t conceptually half bad; the games themselves are, as always, intellectually intriguing puzzle-boxes, and their childlike nature continues to be incredibly eerie. However, the season’s ethos ends up reduced to distant observations on good and evil, and its conclusions are surprisingly open-ended (which is to say: in service of a Hollywood spin-off) for a story that definitively comes to a close. Once a standout of the global TV scene, it’s now the kind of series you could have on in the background and half-pay attention to—one that unfolds without the power to grab you by the shoulders and rattle you, the way it once did. It’s by no means the kind of terrible, mass-produced slop found at the bottom of the streaming barrel, but it may be something worse altogether: a show that was once sensational, but is now entirely disposable.