This post contains spoilers for the third and final season of Squid Game, which is now streaming on Netflix.
Once upon a time, the cameo that comes in the concluding scene of Squid Game would have been thrilling, and very much in keeping with the Netflix drama’s status as the biggest, most talked-about show on the planet. Now, though — after a second season that mostly seemed to exist because its creator was badly underpaid (and lost teeth!) making the first, and at the end of a sluggish, underwhelming third season — it feels more like a relic of the phenomenon the South Korean series was in its first year. That, or like a cynical attempt to keep the franchise going, even though nobody seemed all that enthusiastic about Season Two.
But we’ll get back to the Very Special Guest Star, and what their presence may or may not portend for future Squid Game incarnations. First, we have to talk about the absolute fizzle of the season leading up to that cameo.
The problem with Season Two wasn’t just that creator Hwang Dong-hyuk seemed to have run out of things to say about income inequality and the monstrousness of the ultra-rich, as dramatized in the nasty, violent, winner-take-all series of exaggerated children’s games that its economically threatened contestants played. It was that the decision to split what was clearly designed as a one-season story into two utterly wrecked the relentless momentum and suspense that had made Season One so exciting, despite the bleakness of its subject matter. Games that once would have begun and ended in a single episode were sometimes spread over two, or episodes didn’t feature any games at all. And that season devoted, so, so, so, so much time to the survivors voting after each game on whether they should continue playing or split the current prize money equally.
Somehow, Season Three goes even more all-in on voting. There’s a vote in the first episode. In the third. In the fifth. At one point, the players stop to conduct a vote in the middle of a game. It’s staggering how much time is devoted to these things, especially since we know the game can’t end early or there’s no rest of the season. During one of the votes, we cut to the posh viewing room where the evil billionaire VIPs gamble on the winner, and one of them really says, “Watching the voting this year? So fun!” And another of them really says, “Oh, it was more exciting than the actual games!” It’s hard to tell if Hwang actually believes this, or if he put in that exchange as a sarcastic message about compromises he might have had to make on behalf of Netflix’s desire for more episodes spaced out over a longer period of time. Regardless, each vote sucks all the energy out of the show, and it never fully comes back later.
Only six months have passed since the release of Season Two, which is practically a coffee break in an era where the biggest shows (including Squid Game after Season One) can take multiyear hiatuses. But six months is still a long time to remember who everybody is on a show with dozens of speaking roles, most of them played by actors in identical jumpsuits, and/or wearing masks. Lee Jung-jae of course stands out as our hero, Seong Gi-hun, who’s been around from the series’ beginning. And a few of the newbies quickly come back into focus, like trans contestant Cho Hyun-ju (Park Sung-hoon) or the mother-son team of Jang Geum-ja (Kang Ae-shim) and Park Yong-sik (Yang Dong-geun). But a whole lot of the conflict leans on relationships that demand either a long YouTube explainer video or keeping a Wikipedia tab open at all times just to remember what happened in the previous season. One of the key events of this season’s final game involves the cowardly Park Min-su (Lee David) having a hallucinatory conversation with a player whom he let die in a Season Two game; good luck dialing into the emotion of the scene if you don’t know their relationship, chapter and verse. And somehow, most of the players who make it to the final round — other than Gi-Hun; the baby he’s taking care of on behalf of its dead mother; and the baby’s father, disgraced crypto bro Lee Myung-gi (Im Si-wan) — are relative nobodies, sucking much of the drama out of the beats where they inevitably betray one another. By the time Gi-Hun commits suicide so that the baby — who has been designated a “player” in the game, in place of its mother — will live, the whole season feels so airless that his sacrifice, and his final words (“We are not horses! We are humans! And humans are… ”) have much less of a visceral impact than they should, given how terrific Lee Jung-jae has been even in these weak later seasons.
Even the action subplots about nonplayers don’t amount to much. North Korean defector Kang No-eul (Park Gyu-young) fights her way into the office of the Front Man, a.k.a. Hwang In-ho (Lee Byung-hun), in order to burn up all the player records, but that accomplishes little, because In-ho blows up the entire Squid Game base upon learning that his cop brother Hwang Jun-ho ( Wi Ha-joon) has found the island and brought the Coast Guard there. Jun-ho briefly has a gun trained on In-ho, but he doesn’t shoot, and it’s not clear whether it’s because In-ho is holding the baby in his arms, or because even after all the atrocities that he’s seen his brother perpetrate, Jun-ho still can’t kill his own blood.
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There’s a fairly muted epilogue, where we see that No-eul survived her wounds and has a lead on the daughter she thought was dead. In-ho leaves the baby — and its massive prize money as the technical winner of the latest Squid Game — in the care of Jun-ho, then goes off to Los Angeles to give what’s left of Gi-hun’s winnings from the previous contest to his estranged daughter. He will get no comeuppance, nor will any of the VIPs, the guards, or anyone else. This perhaps is fitting given the themes Hwang was writing about, but it’s dramatically unsatisfying for a show with such a pulpy aesthetic.
While In-ho is being driven away from the home of Gi-hun’s daughter, he hears a familiar sound coming from a nearby alley, and looks over to see a woman in a suit and tie playing a game of Ddakji with a man whose clothes and demeanor suggest he’s every bit as poverty-stricken as Gi-hun and the others were when they signed up for the South Korean contest. In-ho seems surprised that this is happening at all, suggesting that even a man in his position within the organization knows only so much. He locks eyes with this new version of the Recruiter he used to employ, and she is… two-time Oscar winner Cate Blanchett. She eyes In-ho coolly — whether or not she knows that they’re kind of on the same team, he’s clearly too well-heeled to be a candidate to play — and returns to slapping her latest patsy across the face for his every failure.
Why is Blanchett here? Is she just a huge fan of the series? Has she instructed her agent to automatically sign her up for any role where she gets to wear a suit? (She didn’t win a third Oscar for Tár, but maybe the tuxedo was its own reward?) Is this Netflix throwing its weight around by showing that it can grab a celebrated movie star for a tiny role at the end of one of its signature hits?
Or is Blanchett here to help launch Squid Game: L.A.?
For what it’s worth, a source close to the show told me the finale wasn’t intended to set up any future stories “at this time,” a flexible phrase that could mean anything. Maybe “this time” is “June 2025,” and once everyone gets back from Independence Day fireworks, Netflix will announce an American spinoff. Maybe it’s an idea being filed away for the future, in case Netflix’s various Yellowstone clones like Ransom Canyon and The Waterfront can’t carry the subscriber base once the big hits like Squid Game and Stranger Things are gone.
Or maybe this really is just a fun little cameo by a famous fan, and also a way for Hwang Dong-hyuk to make clear that this kind of sin isn’t so easily wiped off the Earth. Squid Game will have to make itself scarce in South Korea for a while, but there are poor people everywhere, feeling the weight of an oppressive system designed to keep them down to benefit the kind of people who come to gamble on blood sport (and who for some reason get very excited by voting). It doesn’t quite make sense that this new Recruiter would have her marks play Ddakji, rather than a more distinctly American game, but a lot of the series isn’t meant to be taken literally.
Squid Game always felt designed to be a short, self-contained project. But it was made in a business where success is designed to lead to excess, and where a hit is rarely allowed to just leave the stage when it makes creative sense to do so. The idea doesn’t seem capable of supporting franchising, as we already saw with Squid Game: The Challenge, a reality competition show that missed the entire point of what Hwang was doing with the main series. The final scene implies that so long as there are desperate individual people, there will always be an opportunity for a Squid Game. And so long as there are desperate network and streaming executives, there will always be the chance of an unnecessary spinoff, even if none are officially planned at the moment.
From Rolling Stone US
