Squid Game S3 — 3/5
Aw. I love the 'Squid Game' format. It, like 'Survivor,' is an infinitely repeatable format. New people, new inventive games, and a scooch closer to the truth at the heart of it. Had they just embraced this as a long-form show, I would have continued to enjoy it for years on end, and so much expectation wouldn't have been riding on it to end well. Oh well! Calling this a S3, instead of a back half to S2, does this season a disservice (while also doing that season a service) as, just a couple episodes in, the people we were left with weren't the people we had grown most attached to. The North Korean guard and the boat people were, ultimately, just stories that forked off of the story we cared about, without coming back to meet. And the story we cared about was now filled with people we barely knew. And a baby!!!! Who we have to be attached to because it's a baby, right? ¯\ _(ツ)_/¯ So much of Squid Game — unlike, say, Walking Dead, and its repeating cycles of 'every good thing we do only ends up hurting us' — was this cynical world that had very deep shades of hope in it. But by the end, who grows? What changes? We're just stuck in this cynical world of repeating cycles. The only thing gained is money. I suppose, for Hwang Dong-hyuk, the only way to stop it was to stop it. But, perhaps unfortunately for him, he introduced an idea, and you can't put a cork in that bottle.
This review was chaotic, I'm sorry. I had a lot of thoughts I couldn't thread together. Oh well!
