The Coliseum is closed.

Squid Game S3 — 4/5

What a fun show to watch!! I think what the games allow for, more than a typical drama, is for you to explore the extremes of a person very quickly. Most entertainment work up towards scenes of catharsis, of character exegesis, and here they are, thrown into intense situations where they must quickly reveal who they are. Desperate, afraid, coward, decent, awful. And still more of them to discover in the rollout from there, confronted now with those things. The first couple of episodes of the show, I was worried that it couldn't retain the highs from season 1. Gi-hun does that thing that I fucking hate which is a character you love becomes dramatically different the next time you see them. Usually you see it in kids aged up, like in Slumdog Millionaire or Cinema Paradiso, the latter half of the movie showing young men with only a faint outline of the previous version you once loved. Here, similarly, he's dark and depressed, far removed from the desperate silliness he once was. But, while the show spends maybe too much time trying to find the island, once there it quickly enough introduces new people to surround him, each unique and interesting, and in only 7 episodes manages to successfully build a new world atop the old one.