It's game over for Hwang Dong-hyuk's mega-hit Netflix thriller. The sadly plausible South Korean dystopian game show series wraps up with Season 3, premiering only months after the release of Season 2.
The third season returns to the aftermath of the failed revolution led by Seong Gi-Hun (Lee Jung-jae). The majority of revolutionaries from Team X have been killed after the failed uprising, and the O faction begin threatening Xers to fall in line. Gi-Hun appears to have lost all faith. He's grieving the loss of his childhood friend Park Jung-bae (Lee Seo-hwan), and the seemingly inevitable mass deaths of the players he's been trying to protect — a horrific present and future that he feels personally responsible for.
Punishment for the uprising escalates as the Red and Blue teams are scrambled and assorted into two new teams and pinned against one another in the first game of the season, a literal manhunt (or "hide and seek") where Reds must seek out and execute the hiding Blues. Hope dwindles, Kim Jun-hee (Jo Yu-ri) prepares to give birth, and the X comrades are left rudderless without their knowledgeable leader.
Squid Game reflects the cruelty that emerges out of a society built around personal profit. The ruling class are happy to inflict suffering when their wealth prevents them from consequence, and the working class must accept and adapt in lieu of having true agency.
Originally intended as a one-and-done, Season 1's unprecedented global popularity and various cheap imitators resulted in the series getting renewed by Netflix. While the two subsequent seasons aren't devoid of worthwhile metaphors — for example, the recruiter toying with houseless folks in a park in Season 2, the X and O voting factions, etc. — they essentially deliver two halves of the same plot arc that experience a shared dip in quality due to the repetitive diegesis. By returning to the same high-risk environment that cemented Season 1 as Netflix royalty, the subsequent seasons' repetition flattens the series' intentional humanizing emotional highs.
From the outset, the series posed a question: will any of the players connect this sadistic murder-for-money game to the class struggles of their lived realities? Through the players' continued cycle of fighting for survival above solidarity, collective action and empathy, Hwang addresses this quandary — that the very struggle to stay afloat is the most effective sedative of all.
Hwang wanted to write a series based on "poverty, strife, desperation and capitalism" because of his personal experiences with financial precarity and shared empathy with those similarly suffering. Initially, the series can be read as the creator projecting his guilt, fears, pain and motivations through the deadbeat Gi-Hun.
We see a true evolution within our protagonist in the latter two seasons, an attempt at redemption and a sense of responsibility to save the other players from their doomed fate. By returning to Netflix, Squid Game creator Hwang confirms that Gi-Hun is not a stand-in for the filmmaker, but rather a stand-in for the series itself — an anti-capitalist series attempting to inspire consciousness and liberatory politics from inside the death machine.
During an interview with Variety in 2024, Hwang expressed exhaustion around the success of his project: "I'm so exhausted. I'm so tired. In a way, I have to say, I'm so sick of Squid Game. I'm so sick of my life making something, promoting something. So I'm not thinking about my next project right now. I'm just thinking about going to some remote island and having my own free time without any phone calls from Netflix."
Hwang's wrap-up of the most successful production of his career fell to pessimism. Season 3 is miserable, almost completely devoid of the hopeful rebellions of Season 2, and is directly reflective of its Hwang's creative suffering. Squid Game, not dissimilar to many anti-capitalist forms of art before it, fails to deliver a concrete alternative to the system it critiques. Without the vision of a viable replacement, the series loses its purpose.
In 2022, Dong-hyuk wrote a guest article for The Hollywood Reporter. "My only hope is that audiences walk away from what we've created and ask themselves: 'Do we have to live in a world like this? Is there anything we can do to change that?'"
The anti-capitalist thriller's dip in overall quality leaves fans reminiscing about the freshness of the original, and, in its last season, the show refuses to deliver satisfying, optimistic answers. Instead, Squid Game asks its audience to reflect on the purpose of the show, in what ways it mirrors their lived realities, and how we can make it better.