The third—and, if there’s any mercy, final—season of Netflix’s Squid Game sputters to an end after abandoning everything that made the show a global phenomenon. What began as a brutal but thought-provoking critique of debt, desperation, and inequality devolved into cartoonish villainy and a vision of humanity so bleak it makes the idea of living through the show’s deadly games preferable.
Season Three picks up after a failed uprising that briefly appeared capable of toppling the Squid Game world’s perverse system, in which hundreds of contestants compete in deadly versions of childhood games for a chance to win a life-changing cash prize. We’re tossed back into the vicious contests with even more vicious contestants. Gone are the nuanced characters of Season One—instead we get moral archetypes so exaggerated that one side is represented by a literal newborn, the other by people willing to kill it.
None of the few compelling characters survive, and fans who’ve stuck around to see some long-awaited justice are left utterly unsatisfied. A side plot about a detective hunting for the game’s secret island in order to expose those responsible could be cut without affecting the storyline.
Though created as a commentary on the social and economic landscape in Korea, the show clearly struck a chord around the globe. Anyone paying attention in the United States can see powerful people reveling in cruelty against those they deem less than human. But that’s never been the whole story, in life or this show. There is real goodness in most people—a kind of goodness that resists cruelty, protects innocents, and fights back. Squid Game once understood that. We still need stories that do.
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