‘Squid Game’ ends on a squishy note

Note: This review contains mild spoilers for Season 3 of “Squid Game.”

You started watching “Squid Game” because everybody else was doing it when the first season dropped in the fall of 2021. Well, that and also its intriguing, deeply bingeable premise. The South Korean drama, which has become one of the most-watched series in Netflix history, follows the outcomes in an underground competition where financially desperate players battle one another in a series of children’s games. The last-standing winner potentially walks away with millions. Lose during one of the rounds, though, and you might not walk away at all. The show dared to ask the question, “Hey, what if we play Red Light, Green Light, but in this version, you get shot in cold blood if a thigh muscle so much as twitches?” Then it showed us that version.

“Squid Game’s” brutal violence and often discordantly cheery aesthetic naturally captured the public’s attention. But creator Hwang Dong-hyuk, who writes and directs every episode, also undergirded the show with enough commentary on classism and economic disparity to give it some narrative heft. When it debuted roughly eight months into Joe Biden’s first and only term as president, there certainly were parallels between this more-twisted iteration of “The Hunger Games” and the actual, One-Percenter-dominated world. But back then, “Squid Game” landed more like fiction than a direct reflection of reality.

In June 2025 — roughly five months into Donald Trump’s second presidential term and the moment when the third and (purportedly) final season of Hwang’s nerve-rattler is landing on Netflix — let’s just say that “Squid Game” hits a little different. Picking up exactly where Season 2 left off, in the middle of the second bloody elementary school field day that Netflix subscribers have been invited to witness, players continue to vote after each round to determine whether to continue the game. Which means that many of the characters in “Squid Game” must helplessly observe as their fellow citizens voluntarily elect to put them in positions that could result in their own deaths, as a part of a shadowy system controlled by an enigmatic figure — the Front Man, a.k.a. the leader and former Squid Game champion whose actual name is Hwang In-ho (Lee Byung-hun) — and sometimes observed by masked elites who sip champagne while they watch the bloodshed from a safe, cocooned distance. Well. This doesn’t feel like a slightly different, admittedly exaggerated iteration of the world we are living in at all.

“Do you still have faith in people?” our protagonist, Seong Gi-hun (Emmy winner Lee Jung-jae), is pointedly asked at a critical moment in this six-episode swan song. Gi-hun does not give a clear answer. Which points to a central issue with these concluding episodes of “Squid Game”: As gripping as they can be, they ultimately don’t reflect with any satisfying degree of depth vis-à-vis the show’s central point, which is whether human beings are inherently good or bad, especially when faced with the prospect of becoming extremely wealthy at the expense of others.

To be clear: Hwang is under no obligation to provide straightforward resolutions to his storylines. Life usually doesn’t explain its ambiguities, and television shouldn’t be expected to, either. In fact, sometimes it’s better when it doesn’t. (Hi, “Severance”!)

But an Emmy-winning, critically acclaimed series should craft an ending that carries emotional weight. “Squid Game” ultimately whiffs on that front, opting to close out with a final scene that contains an extremely high-profile actor making a cameo appearance — and no, I won’t spoil it — rather than leaving its audience with anything genuinely surprising or profound to ponder.

This final season follows three primary plot strands to their inevitable collision: Gi-hun and his fellow competitors on their journey through this iteration of Squid Game; police officer Hwang Joon-ho (Wi Ha-joon) and his crew’s attempt to locate the island where the games take place; and the efforts of Kang No-eul (Park Gyu-young) to learn about her estranged daughter’s whereabouts by working undercover as one of the armed, pink-jumpsuit-clad guards in the game. We watch knowing these strands will eventually intersect, yet when they finally do, there’s something anticlimactic about it. Instead of fireworks going off, it’s like one sad sparkler lights up, then quickly fizzles out.

This is unfortunate, because there are some genuinely suspenseful and moving moments in the episodes that lead up to that conclusion. The push-and-pull between doting mother Jang Geum-ja (Kang Ae-sim, in a deeply heartfelt performance) and her grown, irresponsible son Park Yong-sik (Yang Dong-geun) provides some of the most wrenching moments in the series. An extremely depraved version of hide-and-seek, which really should be called hide-or-get-murdered, fully succeeds in its attempt to raise the blood pressure of the audience. It also takes place in a beautifully rendered space deliberately evocative of Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night.” Production designer Chae Kyoung-sun continues to build wildly imaginative sets that adhere to the general “Squid Game” aesthetic, which is best described as part-Stanley Kubrickian dystopia and part-Barbie’s Dreamhouse as designed by a slightly deranged Mattel employee. The games themselves — including a jump-rope challenge in which contestants fall from a great height to their own death if they miss a skip — still succeed in making recess seem far more diabolical than we ever dared imagine.

But as eye-popping and shocking as “Squid Game” can be, it ultimately never reaches any conclusions about humanity that weren’t depressingly obvious from the jump. Con artists gonna con. Society is always going to place the poor and disadvantaged at the bottom of its priority list. The privileged and wealthy will always view such people with disdain and indifference. And yes, the purely decent folks will continue to do their best, sometimes even from beyond the grave, to try to inject hope into this sick and diseased ecosystem. If only those righteous souls could stop people from hurting and killing each other, and stop the rest of us from watching all that hurting and killing as if it’s entertainment instead of what it actually is: an ongoing tragedy.