Squid Game didn’t need its second and third seasons, no, but I’m glad they existed anyway. The imagery makes every other TV dystopia look like they’re sleepwalking through the design phase, the supporting cast is unforgettable, and Lee Jung-jae — who spends the bulk of this third season mute, his face his only instrument — delivers an incredible performance in a role without much precedent on the small screen. It’s not hard to see why so many millions of people wanted to swallow this show’s bitter, bitter pill.

But if there’s a central theme to the second and third seasons of Squid Game, maybe the meaninglessness of rules is it. Maybe it’s that Gi-hun doomed himself the moment he agreed to continue playing by their rules — that no matter how good his intentions or how hard his efforts, you simply cannot destroy the system from within. Writer-director Hwang Dong-hyuk presents life as an epic struggle between humanism and barbarism, in which barbarism holds all the cards while humanism rolls all the dice. The only way anyone wins is by refusing to play at all.

I reviewed the series finale of Squid Game for Decider.

“All right,” says Player 100. “If there are no objections, let’s go ahead and vote on Player 222’s elimination.” Player 100 presents this as an entirely reasonable statement, and that’s how it’s greeted by his co-conspirators in the final game. In the tradition of the nightly decision whether or not to continue playing, they’ve agreed that a majority vote will settle the matter of whose lives to sacrifice so that the others might live. Player 100 is trying to get things on track, keep things nice and orderly according to agreed-upon precedent and procedure. No more messy arguments that are beneath our dignity as colleagues — It’s time to democratically decide whom to murder.

Taken together, Squid Game’s second and third seasons are one long allegory for sham democracies. I mean, you hear how fucked up their logic sounds when it’s presented by Player 100, right? Vote how they will, the majority can never rightfully take away the rights, or the lives, of the minority. Our inalienable human rights are just that — unseverable from our status as human beings. They are not subject to vote or plebiscite, to Supreme Court ruling or executive order. They are ours forever. You can no more vote them away than you can vote away the bones curled hard in our fists or the hearts that beat in our chests.

But that’s the version of “democracy” that the Squid Game’s sadistic creators — the in-world ones, I mean, not the very nice filmmakers — have presented their players. It’s not dissimilar from the version we’ve been largely forced to accept here in the real world. Illegitimately condemning other people to torment and death because there are more of some than there are of others, the players participate in a series of zero-sum ballots where voters can only conceive of themselves as members of opposing teams since the stakes are so high. And no amount of voting can break the cycle of violence and degradation, not as long as the loathsome, mega-rich VIPs (David Sayers, Jane Wong, Bryan Bucco, Jordan Lambertoni, and Kevin Yorn, each of them almost unbearably obnoxious) want it to continue. 

And by this point in the games, it’s all been boiled down to its essence: Can you ethically vote to kill a baby, and are the results of that vote binding?

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Squid Game for Decider.

Okay, fine, I’m gonna come right out and ask it: Are they gonna kill the baby? I know this is television and 99 times out of 100 shows that aren’t Game of Thrones or House of the Dragon are not gonna kill the baby. But this is Squid Game. Yanking the audience’s heartstrings as hard as possible until the damn things snap is what Squid Game does. So I’ll ask it again: Is Squid Game gonna kill that goddamn baby?

I reviewed episode four of Squid Game Season 3 for Decider.

My understanding of the multiverse theory is almost entirely science-fictional in nature. It has something to do with probabilities, or maybe divergent timelines, I dunno; mostly I know the multiverse is where you find a few dozen Spider-Men. 

But it isn’t hard to picture a multiverse in which the island game complex from Squid Game, the severed floor from Severance, the Island from Lost, and the Village from The Prisoner each exist by themselves in their own separate universe, one standing in for the other. After all, when you get down to it they all serve the same purpose: trapping people in inescapable, inexplicable torment, the better to crack them open and see what comes spilling out.

As such, they’re kind of the perfect TV shows, aren’t they? By condemning Gi-hun and his fellow contestants to keep on playing and playing; by forcing Mark S. and his coworkers to keep on working and working; by forcing Jack and the rest of the castaways to keep surviving and surviving; by forcing Number Six to keep trying and trying to escape a place he also keeps trying and trying to figure out — by doing these things, Squid Game and Severance and Lost and The Prisoner are really only replicating the circumstances through which television shows in general entertain us.

Was anyone forcing Sam and Diane to stay in that bar, or Laura Palmer’s friends and family to stay in that small town, or Walt and Jesse to stay in that meth lab? Okay, maybe that one’s a bad example. But you get my point, right? The “weird prison of the mind” vibe of The Prisoner and its spiritual successors only renders more literal the purgatorial conditions of basically all television shows. Gi-hun and Mark S. and Jack and Six are all stuck where they’re stuck until we in the viewing audience — or the powers that be in the network suites — set them free.

I reviewed the third episode of Squid Game season 3 for Decider.

Don’t let overfamiliarity cloud your vision: Squid Game is one of the most singular sci-fi visions to reach television since The Prisoner 60 years ago. 

I reviewed the second episode of Squid Game Season 3 for Decider.

In the end, it’s both beautiful and brutal. All-out mass murder in a blue-and-red darkness. Muzzle flashes erupting from dozens of crevices in a vast pastel cavern. Desperate men and women fighting to the last bullet. Lovable characters cracking under pressure. A final betrayal in the royal purple corridors of power. The season finale of Squid Game is everything you’d want from a season finale of Squid Game…except for the “finale” bit. There’s nothing final about this episode at all. 

I reviewed the season finale of Squid Game for Decider.

By the time you finish this season of Squid Game, you will have witnessed hundreds of murders. Hundreds! It’s baked right into the premise. Other than shows that involve actual war, this kind of body count is just unprecedented. It’s certainly unique in that in virtually every case the murder victims are unarmed and helpless, and are getting killed because they messed up while playing a children’s game. 

The question I ask myself when I watch things like this is simply, Why? Why am I watching something in which human lives are discarded like garbage, in graphic on-screen deaths so numerous you need the show to keep track of them for you? Is this some high-octane action-movie thing that’s using murder the way roller-coasters use downward slopes — to shock your system and give you a thrill? Does the violence have weight, does it cause emotional pain, does it speak to something broader than “look out for armed men in pink jumpsuits”? In short, what does the violence communicate, and is it a message worth hearing?

I’m wrestling with this question, I’ll admit. That’s because I think it’s very obvious Squid Game does, indeed, have something to say. The cartoonish bluntness with which its premise is stated — poor and indebted people are pitted against one another in sadistic games for a chance to win enough money to become solvent again, in a sham quasi-democracy overseen by the world’s richest men — tricks the mind into thinking it’s simplistic. 

But read that premise again, and tell me how it differs from conditions on the ground right here and now. Friends, the real world is simplistic at this point. Just as the lethal games are designed to evoke fun childhood pastimes, Squid Game just renders the real world’s cruel absurdity in caricature form. 

There is, however, such a thing as diminishing returns. With only one episode remaining in this short season, and a longer one behind us already, it’s fair to wonder what this heap of several hundred green-tracksuited corpses tells us that we didn’t learn from the previous pile. 

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Squid Game Season 2 for Decider.

Recapping this episode of Squid Game is a daunting prospect. Not because it’s complicated — on the contrary, it’s a simple as these things get. The players play a game, the survivors take a vote and then a break, they bond with each other, they start a new game, there are brief detours for the No-eul and Jun-ho side plots, the end. 

No, the problem stems from how much of the energy of Squid Game is lost if you summarize it. I mean, the show really is as simple as it sounds above. The characters sound equally sketched out when you break them down in text form: the kindly old woman, the genial jarhead, the arrogant celebrity, the gentle trans woman, the surprisingly human villain, and so on. I found all their interactions compelling, but if I were to sum up their conversations without the benefit of the performances conveying them, they’d seem gossamer thin.

I reviewed the fifth episode of Squid Game‘s second season for Decider.

The clock is ticking on Squid Game, and I don’t just mean for the contestants. In a short season of just seven episodes, we’ve just completed Episode 4 and haven’t even finished our second game out of six. Will the remaining games get rushed through via montage or some other means? Will the competition get cut short, perhaps by Gi-hun and Jun-ho’s mercenary team? Will the season finale end with a big TO BE CONTINUED? No matter the outcome, the result is going to be paced quite differently from the previous season. In other words, we’re guaranteed something novel.

I reviewed episode 4 of Squid Game Season 2 for Decider.

So much of what makes this episode good is also what makes it familiar: the giant doll, the X and O voting, the “Greta Gerwig’s Barbie remixed by M.C. Escher” staircase set by production designer by Chae Kyoung-sun, But what sells the drama of it all, what makes it feel like more than just a rehash, is what has changed: Gi-hun. When we see flashes of the initial season, he looks like a different person, floppy-haired and fresh-faced. Actor Lee Jung-jae’s transformation is subtle, but it’s like an optical illusion or a Magic Eye poster: Once you train yourself to see it, it’s kind of mind-blowing.

I reviewed Squid Game Season 2’s third episode for Decider.

For a director whose signature achievement is capturing claustrophobically cheery sets, Squid Games‘ Hwang Dong-hyuk has a hell of an eye for exterior shots. An amusement park, a hospital, a bridge underpass, even Gi-hun’s run-down Pink Motel: They’re all given a real sense of scale, color, drama by Hwang’s camera. Even given how gorgeously creepy all the interiors are once we get to the island and its game complex, I’ll still miss the view.

I reviewed the second episode of Squid Game Season 2 for Decider.

Maybe it goes without saying, but like most episodes of Squid Game, this is a nasty bit of work. The episode stays fairly light until the end, characterized by joking banter between the loan sharks on one hand and Jun-ho and the fisherman (Oh Dal-su) who plucked him out of the sea after the Season 1 finale and now helps him search for the island. Then, all of a sudden, you have a protracted scene of queasy brutality and emotional torture straight out of The Deer Hunter, set to opera. This is followed almost immediately by a very similar scene in which the sociopathic Recruiter positively beams with joy over being a sociopath before shooting himself to death on camera. It’s a lot, but it’s supposed to be. If individual viewers find it’s too much to justify what is at root not all that different from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s The Running Man in conceptual terms, I get it.

But it sure looks good. We haven’t yet immersed ourselves in the pink pastel hellscape of the Game’s HQ yet, but the red and green lighting that falls on Gi-hun and the Recruiter during their face off, along with a sudden cut that jumps the 180-degree line so we suddenly see the bright red window against which they’re seated, had me thinking favorably of Drive director Nicholas Winding Refn’s own beautifully colored foreign-language Netflix thriller, Copenhagen Cowboy. (Go watch it, it rules.)

The most important contrast in this scene isn’t one of color, however, but of character, or more accurately of performance. Gong Yoo is positively demonic as the Recruiter here — eyes gleaming with the joy of cruelty, voice not skipping a beat when he reveals he killed his own father, mouth agape and grinning as he almost lewdly inserts the barrel of his gun into it before pulling the trigger. Lee Jung-jae, meanwhile, retains the sad-sack lovability that endeared him to audiences in the original, but it’s now tempered by trauma, grief, guilt, and the horror of knowledge. You still want this dear man to win, or at least to survive. Under the rules they make us play by, that’s usually the closest to winning you can get.

I’m covering the second season of Squid Game for Decider, starting with my review of the premiere.

And I get it. You know? I get it. To become an adult under capitalism, as you and I have done, as Sang-woo and Gi-hun have done, is to learn just how alone you are, how powerless against the mighty forces that move the world, forces that would strip you and yours for parts at the slightest opportunity if there were any money in it for anyone. Play whatever game you want in an attempt to outfox the game masters—hell, maybe you’ll get lucky and win, as Gi-hun does—but the bottom line is that no one calls you anymore. No one calls you home, where you’re safe, where you’re loved. No one can call off the game you’ve been forced to play. No one at all.

I reviewed the season finale of Squid Game for Decider.

Whatever the case, we’re left with two players, who are forcibly held apart by the pink guards. This time it’s for real: If one of them kills the other, there can’t be a final game. And wouldn’t that disappoint the VIPs? We can’t have that, now, can we?

It’s here, really, that the emptiness of the games’ promise of an egalitarian world, an antidote to the unfairness of the real world, is revealed as empty. Gi-hun and Sang-woo are being kept alive for the entertainment of the rich, to whom they are nothing more than toys to be used and discarded. Remind me again how this is different than the status quo that sent them to the games to begin with?

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Squid Game Season One for Decider.

One thing is for certain: Squid Game‘s power is additive in nature. Every episode compounds the tension and ratchets up the pressure on the main characters. Even a relatively straightforward outing like this one feels grandiose in the terror the characters experience. I’m almost afraid to see what the show will do for an encore. And that’s a good feeling.

I reviewed Squid Game episode seven for Decider.

There’s a cheerful sadism in the way the games are constructed—seriously, can you even stand one more ironically colorful set, one more chipper announcement that the game is about to begin over the strains of “The Blue Danube”—that belies the Front Man’s insistence that their goal is to construct a fair world in opposition to the unfair one outside the complex’s walls. About the best thing I can say about Squid Game is that, for all its brutality, it does not seem to share the games’ sadism itself. The scenarios it rolls out for us are awful to contemplate, to be sure, but the awfulness is the point. Creator/writer/director Hwang Dong-hyuk values the interpersonal connections he’s creating, even as he destroys them. It’s an exploration of violence, not an exploitation of violence. He’s making sure that when he kills people you care about, you know their names.

I reviewed Squid Game‘s brutal sixth episode for Decider.

There’s a moment early on in Squid Game Episode 5 (“A Fair World”) where Gi-hun looks directly into the eyes of a man he’s about to murder. He has little choice, of course. Once he, and everyone else involved in the games, accepted their invitation to play, they were effectively strapped into a murder machine, and the only way out is through. Still, in that moment, as Gi-hun and his tug-of-war team struggle mightily to save their own lives at the expense of their rivals’, you can see Gi-hun process the terror, desperation, and ultimately despair written all over the face of the opposite team’s captain. He knows he’s going to die, he knows Gi-hun is one of the people who will be killing him, and neither person can do anything about it.

I wrote about the fifth episode of Squid Game for Decider.

With over half a season left, Squid Game still feels like it’s entered the lightning round. Its fourth episode (“Stick to the Team”) is not only its most viscerally violent—in terms of savagery, if not body count—but also its most plot-heavy. New characters emerge, new alliances form and dissolve, new cracks in the facade of the game-masters’ united front begin to show, and, ultimately, a new moral burden is forced upon even the biggest babyfaces (that’s wrestling jargon for “good guys”) in the game. It’s tense, terrific filmmaking from start to finish.

I reviewed the fourth episode of Squid Game for Decider.

The show’s ability to make you care about the players it singles out for attention is impressive as well. Gi-hun and Ali and the old man come across like big sweethearts. The pickpocket’s survival instincts make her easy to root for. The mother’s scheming is funny and perversely endearing. Even the cop, Jun-ho, is sympathetic as a guy in way over his head, trying desperately to stay afloat. 

The big exception at the moment, other than the gangster, is Sang-woo. Why is he so reluctant to share his knowledge with his alleged comrades? In particular, why didn’t he warn Gi-hun against selecting the difficult umbrella shape? For all Sang-woo knew, he was handing his old friend a death sentence. Is he secretly trying to winnow down the competition in order to increase the jackpot at the end of the games? Does he resent Gi-hun personally for reasons we’re not privy to yet? Is he simply a secretive type, paranoid and self-interested, perhaps due to the years he’s spent one step ahead of the law?

It speaks well of Squid Game‘s success rate that I’m finding these kinds of questions as compelling to contemplate as the games themselves, or the mystery of how they can muster so many hundreds of henchmen for a clandestine enterprise this sadistic. (I briefly entertained the idea that the pink guys were all either aliens or robots, until Jun-ho dumped the obviously human guy he replaced off that barge.) I’m not sure any of these characters are gonna wind up being as complex and nuanced as, like, Tony Soprano, but they don’t need to be. A good action-thriller need only create convincing sketches of people, giving you just enough to latch onto so that their misadventures mean something to you. In that particular contest, Squid Game has already won.

I reviewed episode three of Squid Game for Decider.

From where I’m sitting, Squid Game episode two scores major points (sorry) in two different ways. First, there’s the matter of the vote. The instant the square-faced pink guy announced that a majority vote would decide whether or not the games would continue, I figured “Well, obviously they’re going to vote to keep going—otherwise there’d be no more show!” When he announced further that the vote would be tallied in reverse numerical order, I was like “Oh, okay, it’s gonna come to a tie, and the old guy with the brain tumor will cast the deciding vote in favor of staying because he has nothing to lose.”

Imagine my surprise—or maybe you don’t have to imagine, maybe it was your surprise too—when the elderly man voted to leave, and the pink crew dutifully dumped everyone back on the streets! This is as pure an example of a show zigging where I expected it to zag as I can think of in a long, long time. That kind of move earns a lot of trust, from me anyway; it demonstrates that this is a show that won’t always take the easy way out.

The second major structural thing this episode has going for it is the way it doles out the characters’ backstories. Rather than front-load the season by having us get to know all the major players in episode one, Squid Game kept its premiere’s focus squarely on Gi-hun, only introducing us to the rest of the main cast (with the exception of the pickpocket’s brief cameo when she stole Gi-hun’s money) when they’d already accepted the invitation to the game. This second episode backfills information on the gangster, the pickpocket, the immigrant, and Sang-woo, as well as giving us additional info on Gi-hun and his family, only after the show has already hooked us on its deadly-game aspect. Reverse that running order, and the show would feel much slower than it does as-is. It’s shrewd storytelling. And more games await.

I reviewed episode two of Squid Game for Decider.