In this show, where 455 contestants (plus Hwang Jun-ho, the cop who was trying to investigate the Game) have been murdered for wealth, power, and amusement, the parable of the fallen man in the snow points out the show’s biggest theme: Is living in this flawed world, containing so many monsters, worth the pain? The good people do can be as simple as intervening to keep a man from dying. The evil people do in Squid Game is sometimes heightened, with characters eagerly murdering each other, but at other times, it just takes the form of apathy to others’ suffering. The two men are the poles of the show: One believes people are inherently good, the other that people are inherently evil. The short game is played out in a long scene, with 30 show-reality minutes passing as Il-nam explains the Game, while Gi-hun alternates between staring out the window and checking the clock. Gi-hun, the most humane man in the show besides the fallen player Ali, takes the bet, insisting someone will stop for the fallen man. Instead of sending someone to collect the man, Il-nam observes him from his stories-high perch, believing that no one will help the man he sees as “that disgusting, stinking drunk, little piece of trash.” In his last moments, he bets with Gi-hun on whether someone will help. He explains that the man fell a while ago, possibly passed-out drunk. When Gi-hun arrives, the bedridden senior points out a man passed out on the street below. “I know that I’m not going to have as much fun watching as playing,” he says.Įven Il-nam’s final scene is a game, where he toys with a person’s life. After years of spectating, Il-nam really is facing the deadly brain tumor he told Gi-hun about, so he decided to enter the game. He founded the Game for his equally disaffected peers, who became the VIPs who see the players as avatars, chess pieces to move and manipulate. In spite of his unassuming exterior, he has so much money that he no longer feels joy over anything but the most extreme, extravagant spectacles. The man turns out to be Oh Il-nam, the old man Gi-hun befriended during the Game. The series’ deeper explanation, and the resolution to its moral conflict, finally arrives when he’s summoned to a meeting with the founder of the Game. A year after the game ends, Gi-hun is living as a beggar, refusing to spend his winnings due to his guilt. In familiar K-drama fashion, the finale fast-forwards from there. It’s the same here, but we bet on humans. He compares it to Gi-hun’s own gambling: “You bet on horses. On the ride back to Seoul, the Front Man (Lee Byung-hun) tells Gi-hun that the Game is simply entertainment for obscenely wealthy spectators. Though the audience has seen most of the game’s machinations by the finale, they don’t learn about the VIP Game Masters’ motivations until Gi-hun does. Once he gets home, he discovers his elderly mother, whose medical care he was trying to pay for, died while he was off at the Game. Gi-hun is dropped back off in Seoul with billions of Korean won on a debit card. He fatally stabs himself in the neck, leaving Gi-hun to collect all the winnings. After defeating Sang-woo, he tries to end the Game - rather than letting Sang-woo die, he’s willing to let them both walk away penniless.īut Sang-woo refuses to face the hell waiting for him if he returns to his old life without the huge cash windfall he was hoping for. But in spite of his moral weakness around gambling and making promises he can’t keep, he’s a good-hearted soul who becomes the series’ moral center. Gi-hun fell into poverty after a disaster at his old job, which led him to borrow a life-ruining amount of money from loan sharks.
The series’ Game - six rounds of competitions based on popular children’s games, where elimination means a swift execution - ends with divorced gambler Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) fighting to the death against his childhood friend, disgraced banker Cho Sang-woo (Park Hae-soo).
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But as bleak as the series gets, and in spite of the particularly misanthropic twist in its finale, Squid Game ends with the hope that people can still save each other. It’s worth wondering what the millions of people worldwide have taken away from the central humanistic message of Netflix’s most-watched international release ever. There isn’t some authoritarian state forcing them into homicide these desperate people have volunteered, gambling their lives for about $38 million in U.S. In the show’s Battle Royale-inspired competition, players either kill or are killed for the chance to pay off immense debts. The Korean death-match drama is easy to binge, with excellent pacing that makes the episodes melt into each other, but digesting its brutal insights on humanity’s capacity for homicide is much harder. Netflix’s international hit series Squid Game is a devastating watch.
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