'Squid Game 3' Finale Click-Bait Fails to Live Up to the Global Hype
Probably preaching to the choir but...so many plot holes, pointless, boring, wasted characters, blown opportunities, and an obvious cash grab. My rant (spoilers):
Like everybody else, I couldn’t wait to see “Squid Game” wrap up this summer. But when it finally came on (yesterday), I was sorely disappointed.
I kept waiting for the saving grace — but it never came.
This jackass never came to save anyone!
Instead, I was left with all sorts of questions, frustrated as hell:
what the fuck was Det. Hwang Jun-ho doing floating around in circles on that boat, believing the Captain who may have saved him but he barely knew?
why didn’t Jun-ho get to the island earlier to fulfill the promise he made to Seong Gi-hun to help save the contestants and deliver justice to the organizers, workers, and VIPs?
couldn’t Jun-ho band together with the North Korean defector, Kang No-eul, and loan shark Choi Woo-seok to go in and spray those annoying VIPs with bullets?
what’s the point of Gi-hun sitting there staring off into space for most of season three, how can he walk over to vote if he’s cuffed to a bed, how did he fight the attacker on the triangle tower with a baby strapped to his chest, when did he have time to put the baby on the ground, why did he jump to his death when he’s supposed to protect that baby as promised to Kim Jun-hee?
It IS Gi-hun’s fault!
explain the rules of the last Sky Squid game again? if the game can’t be played with two players, then why did Gi-hun have to jump? because he didn’t turn on the final tower (circle) until after that backstabber Lee Myung-gi already fell to his death? I don’t understand
why did a newborn win the whole thing when it did nothing but be born and cause hardship for everybody who actually volunteered to play?
what kind of person volunteers to pay off her debts in an unknown game, PREGNANT? Jun-hee’s an idiot who coasted through the games, dragging everyone else down. She should’ve died in Red Light, Green Light. I’d rather have Kang Sae-byeok from the first season back
how come the baby never cried when everyone slept? who’s changing its diapers? where are the diapers coming from? if the Front Man was torn, why not simply have one of the workers assigned to caring for the baby until the game was over?
why did no one end this game and hold those responsible accountable?
who the fuck were all those extras at the airport? I forget
what is up with the flailing end, and why can’t k-dramas end right?
why were literally ALL the characters from season one better developed than the stand-ins of seasons two and three?
I already know the answer to the last question: cash grab, USA.
What happened to “Squid Game” is what happens to everything that becomes popular around the world. Everybody wants to get in on the action and turn a horrible thriller where innocent people get slaughtered in children’s games into a Disney ride. Cue the stunt casting and stupid parades, where viewers can pretend it’s all real and death is cool.
We got more VIPs spouting nonsense than Gi-hun and the Front Man doing anything substantial. Then, to top off the stunt casting audition for America’s approval, we get award-winning Australian trophy Cate Blanchett in the mean streets of L.A. taking on Gong Yoo’s Subway Recruiter role, pretending to play a Korean game of Ddakji for the next cross-over rip-off (in the works).
Please.
Unfortunately, the actual highlights of “Squid Game 2, 3” were all killed off fairly early, along with any rooting value.
There went my favorite character, trans Cho Hyun-ju.
If I didn’t know any better, doesn’t it seem k-drama directors/writers prefer to glorify villains over decent, ordinary people trying their best? Again, the bad guys behind “Squid Game” never get caught.
Hyun-ju’s portrayer, Park Sung-hoon (“The Glory,” “Queen of Tears”), has been getting a bad rap over, IMHO, nothing, even losing a leading role tailor-made for him (he’s a huge foodie) over an honest mistake (accidentally posting a — gasp! — Squid Game porno on his social media).
Don’t forget, all is not ramyeon and long looks in the rain. It’s all a carefully curated, bullshit image pushed by the k-drama/k-pop industry.
Korea is still a repressive, uptight, judgmental, narrow-minded, FAKE fascistic country. (There’s a reason the director couldn’t cast an actual trans actor to play Hyun. Nobody would dare risk the backlash.)
Give the actor a break and give him some credit; if it weren’t for his warm, moving, nuanced portrayal of a Special Forces soldier fighting to transition, most of season two and three would’ve went the way of “Sweet Home 2.”
Luckily, the games — what we came here for — held up and grew even more terrifyingly real, especially Jump Rope (I’d have died instantly), the Tug of War of the final season. Alas…
…too bad we got more villainous bullshit when we’d rather have more teamwork and the heartbreaking chemistry of adults turning into children, cheering with delight over a game well won, like in season two/episode four’s “Six-Legged Pentathlon.”
Instead of more of that, we had to watch Player 100 (Im Jeong-dae), the one who owes the biggest debt — 10 billion won — walk over everyone, getting away with murder until the very end, as well as the obnoxious masked VIPs frivolously bantering like mindless, sheltered, bored chaebol influencers about the games’ outcome, treating human beings as slaves.
It was torture being stuck watching them watch the games. Let’s face it, they took over season three, turning k-drama gold into a global franchise…and you know what happens to franchises.
I don’t know about you, but as a k-drama fan and a Korean, I don’t want to see an excessive amount of white people speaking in any language other than my native tongue, especially after all the racism I endured growing up in the United States during a time where Americans made me feel like a freak for not looking and acting and talking like them.
Well, it’s over. I can safely go back to more worthy, under-the-radar k-dramas now.
I won’t be participating in their reindeer games, either, making sport out of Deep State suffering and senseless killing.
Nobody evil paid the price. The games go on, because to the sick fucks among us — the popular kids and cunning bullies — watching poor people play a losing game is fun.
What would I have done?
More games, like Jump Rope
More teamwork
More desperate people turning good
Kang Dae-ho (the fake Marine) finding the courage within him to come through clutch during the second escape
Hyun-ju helping everyone get out, with reformed loan shark Choi Woo-seok leading the charge
Everyone banding together to turn the tables on the bad guys and punish them in grueling deaths of their own
The North Korean and the Detective teaming up to fight the bad guys, escort the surviving contestants off the island, and put the Front Man out of his misery
Lee Jin-wook (carnival caricaturist) falls in love with Hyun-ju, raising Jun-hee’s baby together
End the third and final season of “Squid Game” with all the core good characters becoming close friends, hanging out, drinking, and sharing delicious food in Jeju Island, never suffering again, and maybe banding together as a super-hero fighting Avengers-type squad
A spin-off about Woo-seok, who becomes either a righteous cop or a prosecutor blowing the lid off Squid Games everywhere.
Wouldn’t that be nice?
“Humans are…”
The Compelling Counter-Argument
“…Beneath the spectacle of the games lies a thesis far more terrifying than death itself: that humans, when reduced to desperation, will either destroy one another or die trying not to…”
Trish Rai of “The Last Chord” (I subscribed, you should too) left a link to a well-argued, superior June 30th essay about the “Squid Game” series entitled, “Humans are... Squid Game and the Human Condition: Humans Are... What?” I read a line in the intro, the above pull quote, and almost cried.
She makes very good points about what “Squid Game,” seasons 1-3, was going for. If only the filmmaker followed any of it through to the end, it would’ve been a different “Squid Game 3” we’d be talking about.
K-dramas are good, the good ones, at reflecting the reality of unresolved stories and complex characters in-flux. This just isn’t one of them.
If you’re going for reality, stay in reality, even a little bit (how did Gi-hun put the infant down when he was fighting for his life?) and make sure everyone in the audience gets what you’re selling (wtf were the rules to Sky Squid Game again?), to serve the greater good (humans are flawed, but beautiful creatures, who — even the bad ones — yearn for each other).
Season 1 achieved everything writer Rai described in her “Humans are…” essay, without catering to Hollywood or a global Disney ride. It was, as the director/writer Hwang Dong-hyuk said in numerous interviews, supposed to stand alone. (Read: there was never supposed to be a franchise for America to bandwagon on.)
Unfortunately, “Squid Game” became what it strived — at least in its lead protagonist, the hero we were supposed to root for — to avoid at all costs, even at the point of a loaded gun: a cash grab…by all accounts, from those who watched with disgust.
“…In anthropology, we trace the evolution of tools, of rituals, of belief systems and economies, all changing with time, geography, and need. Among these shifting sands, one current flows unbroken: the instinct to love. Across every culture, every era, every origin story etched in bone and ash, humans have and always will seek connection…”
If only we saw this in the finale. The compelling, ever-changing, deserving characters sacrificed at the altar of Netflix entertainment, introduced at first glance — Gi-hun, Sang-woo, Sae-Byeok, Ji-Yeong, Abdul… — deserved at least that much, with or without a happy ending.
A happy, satisfying ending was never what I wanted. (K-dramas are notorious for fucking those up, btw, ask anyone.) I can be talked out of that, easily, provided other components remained intact for anything to be believed.
A thrill ride, sure. No wasted, boring, pointless fillers, of course. Dropped and raging plot holes, nope. Deep character development from the start (season one), always.
A k-drama thriller that was as beautiful, heart-rending, and brilliantly immersive as “When Life Gives You Tangerines,” “Money Heist,” “The Little Forest,” “WEAK HERO 1 and 2!,” “Moving,” “Light Shop,” “Our Unwritten Seoul,” and “Our Blues.”
(K-dramas can be noir, but it traditionally, historically has always been Korea’s soap opera version of ordinary people being dramatic.)
It can be done. It has been done.
It just wasn’t here.
https://thelastchord.substack.com/p/humans-are