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Don’t stop / Believin’ / Hold on to that feelin’ / Streetlight / People / Oh oh whoa / Don’t stop /
“Humans are…”
Television’s most (in)famous open ending has often been imitated, but never duplicated. Damon Lindelof can have a superpowered cop come centimeters away from walking on water before cutting to black all he wants, but the impassioned moral and even metaphysical debate over the fate of (SPOILER ALERT) Tony Soprano is in a class by itself. The questioning ending of (SPOILER ALERT) Twin Peaks: The Return, which in a way is as much a child of The Sopranos as The Sopranos was of Twin Peaks, is its only peer.
Until now, perhaps.
Obviously, unlike The Sopranos and Twin Peaks, Squid Game made the final fate of its surviving players pretty clear. Player 246 makes it to the mainland and reunites with his cherubic daughter, who’s cancer free. After paying him a visit — he has no idea she was the rogue Squid Game guard who rescued him— his savior, No-eul, embarks on an expedition to China to try to track down her long-lost daughter; she’s probably as dead as the Game archives indicate, but hope springs eternal.
Mr. Choi gets out of prison for breaking into evil Captain Park’s house and killing his dog. As cheerful as ever, he decides to get back into the loansharking business — putting a kinder, gentler spin on it, of course. But he misses the days when the abandoned hotel he plans to convert to his headquarters housed billions of won in a big Breaking Bad–style stack.
His friend and colleague, Hwang Jun-ho, is there to pick the guy up from jail, which is about as close to law enforcement as he ever wants to get again. But when he returns home, he finds Player 222’s baby waiting for him, along with a bank card in his own name, linked to an account containing the baby’s billions.
In far-off Los Angeles, the Front Man arrives at the house where Gi-hun’s daughter now lives. When he tells her he’s brought her something from her estranged dad, she wants nothing to do with it or him — until he reveals that Gi-hun has died, and left her with his only possessions. She looks inside the Squid Game–branded box and finds a bloodstained tracksuit…and a bank card.
Gi-hun is dead.
Myung-gi, his final ally-turned-enemy, is dead.
The island has self-destructed.
The Front Man, the VIPs, and the vast majority of the soldiers, drones, and officers are still at large.
And thanks to the new Recruiter (Cate Motherfucking Blanchett), the Game continues.
But Gi-hun’s verdict on humanity? That one’s up in the air.
Forced to kill Myung-gi, who’s willing to kill the baby to keep himself alive, Gi-hun kills himself by leaning backwards off the edge of the final, circular tower and almost floating to his death below. Before he does, he says “Humans are…” …and that’s it. It’s the title of the episode, so we know it’s important. We just don’t know what “it” is. Is he saying, to quote Anne Frank, that “In spite of everything, I still believe that poeple are really good at heart.” Or is he saying that humans are capable of dangling their own newborn children over a cliff’s edge and threatening, through sobs that seem to eject actual internal organ, to drop them? Or are we both?
The Front Man becomes instructive here. He saves the baby, at significant risk to himself, both from the timed explosives he set off and from the gun of his brother, Jun-ho, who’s broken into the complex to demand answers he never gets. The Front Man makes sure both the baby and Gi-hun’s daughter are taken care of financially, too. Either there’s some humanity left in him, or the Game’s skewed sense of fair play dictated it. It’s more or less up to you to determine.
We’ve got to hope it’s the former, right? I don’t know if that makes his actions as the Game’s head honcho more or less despicable, to be honest. But I do know, from by-now bitter experience, that legalism and proceduralism are meaningless in the face of a determined enemy of life and liberty, even if they lead to temporarily positive outcomes. After all, if Myung-gi had only cooperated, Gi-hun still would have killed himself to save the baby’s life, and father and son could have been reunited. But in the face of Myung-gi’s madness, the rules mean nothing.
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.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
English (US)