Squid Game Ends on a Bleak, Appropriately Cynical Note

At long last, the terrible, murderous Squid Game is over—sort of. The blockbuster Netflix show, about downtrodden Koreans playing a deadly series of games in the hopes of winning a gigantic prize, has ended after three seasons, closing out a historic, record-breaking run. There’s little chance that the series’s conclusion was ever going to satisfy everyone, a fact that creator Hwang Dong-hyuk seems keenly aware of as he lays out the final chapters of his story. He ties only a few bows and denies us the retribution we’ve long craved, instead favoring a perhaps more credible cynicism. What, did you think the wealthy monsters weren’t going to get away with it?

There are at least some close-to-happy endings. Though our troubled hero Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae)—a.k.a. player 456—is dead, his estranged daughter has received a windfall of cash that could, presumably, lend a hand her and her mother in their recent life in Los Angeles. That money may be soaked in blood, but it was earned as nobly as possible given the circumstances. Squid Game sniper No-eul (Park Gyu-young) is heading off on a perhaps vain search for her maybe-dead daughter, content enough to know that she helped Gyeong-seok (Lee Jin-wook) reunite with his own child, whose health has improved. The handsomest detective in Korea, Jun-ho (We Ha-joon), got no closure with his brother, game master In-ho (Lee Byung-hun)—but he’s been somewhat vindicated in finding the island. (And in capturing my heart.)

In most other ways, though, Squid Game ended on a note of massive, hopeless despondency. Perhaps Hwang was being evasive in not showing us how, exactly, the whole staff and their plutocrat guests escaped the Coast Guard—or, really, how hundreds of people could go missing from Korea every year without that boggling statistic catching the attention of the authorities—but I think this choice was more than a mere narrative dodge. Could any of us look around at our world and point to evidence that predatory zillionaires and the operatives who carry out their bidding are meeting any kind of justice, or even any substantive pushback? They seem near entirely sealed off from real consequence at this point, and so too are the fictional villains of the series.

A Squid Game that showed this protective bubble bursting and, say, No-eul gunning the ghouls down, or Jun-ho arresting them, would certainly have been cathartic, much as it was to see a fictionalized Adolf Hitler die in a hail of gunfire in Inglourious Basterds. But an ending like that would not have been true to the grim, stygian argument of this series: that so many people in the real world are caught in a kind of Squid Game, with little chance of true escape. In season two, Hwang lets the captives fight back, but it yields disastrous results. In season three, the only way to transcend miserable circumstances is through mutual aid and self-sacrifice. Maybe that reason sails the show past realism and into the realm of despondent fatalism, but Squid Game never exactly positioned itself as a series that would do anything uplifting.

If we are to take any warming message from the show, it is a broad one about the higher values of empathy and compassion. Hwang’s vision of the games—played mostly by greedy, bloodthirsty contestants mitigated only by a precious few decent folks—has always seemed a bit harsh and self-selecting. Squid Game’s social diagnosis walks a line between outright nihilism about human instinct and a righteous anger about what economic equality forces regular people to become. Sometimes I sympathize with his sentiments. At other times the cruelty and callousness of many of the contestants seems overdone: would that many people really want to kill a newborn infant?

Well, maybe actually yes. More and more awful people, who are proudly vocal about their awfulness, seem to emerge into public consciousness every day. Perhaps Hwang’s assessment is dead-on, and those of us who view ourselves as at least mostly moral will have to cling to each other as sociopathy—fueled both by selfishness and genuine need—encroaches ever closer. Or we’re as bad as everyone else, and we just haven’t had a chance to prove it yet.

Were there any lingering doubts about Hwang’s outlook on economic and social matters, the series’s slightly goofy closing scene confirms a dreary conclusion. Squid Game ends with none other than Cate Blanchett as an American recruiter playing a game of ddakji with a scraggly man in a Los Angeles alleyway—suggesting that of course the Squid Game is not solely relegated to Korea. While Hwang’s series was particularly attuned to his country’s attitudes toward class, debt, and upward mobility, he also recognizes that increasing economic inequality is a problem endemic to many nations, perhaps especially the great imperialist beast across the Pacific ocean. Jun-ho may have shut down one cell, but it seems to be just one part of a prospering network. 

While there is certainly some deeper meaning to be mined from that ending, it also more practically—more cynically, too—leaves the door open for a rumored American Squid Game spinoff. There may not be enough gas left in the Squid Game tank to merit any kind of revisit—we’d just be watching the games again, only in English?—but that’s never stopped anyone in Hollywood before. Me, I think I’ll stick with reality. By which I mean Netflix’s Squid Game game show; I’m not making a joke about the news. Or maybe I am.