Squid Game’s second season was a dud. Can the third save Netflix’s killer Korean hit?

Squid Game (season three) ★★★★

For anyone who found the second season of Squid Game a huge disappointment, here’s some good news: the third and ostensibly final season is a big improvement. But there’s a caveat. I have seen the first five of six episodes, so not the finale, because Netflix is concerned about the risk of spoilers. And that means I can’t tell you if it sticks the landing or not.

Lee Jung-jae as Seong Gi-hun in season three of Squid Game.Credit: No Ju-han/Netflix

On the basis of those five episodes, I’m hopeful – but it wouldn’t be the first show to flub it. And without knowing how it plays out, any judgment can only be provisional.

Season two veered all over the place in tone (especially in its first two Keystone Cops-esque episodes), lost momentum every time the action shifted to the boat, and felt repetitive in the game play within the arena.

At its cliffhanger ending, Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae), player 456, was a deflated mess. His ambitious plan for a rebellion had left most of his co-conspirators dead. Worst of all, he discovered he had been stooged all along by Player 001, Oh Young-il (Lee Byung-hun), who was in truth the game’s controller, Front Man. He was never an ally, always a saboteur in waiting.

Oh Young-il (Lee Byung-hun) has been unmasked as Front Man in Squid Game.

Now, as we enter the home stretch, the key question is whether Gi-hun can rouse himself enough to (a) survive, (b) choose between vengeance and compassion, or (c) destroy the game once and for all.

There are, of course, secondary storylines, the most important of which are twofold: the quest of policeman Hwang Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon) to locate his brother In-ho, whom he now understands to be the Front Man; and the efforts of North Korean defector and guard Kang No-eul (Park Gyuyoung) to save the man she worked with at the amusement park (Lee Jin-wook), who entered the game hoping to fund his young daughter’s cancer treatment.

It’s the nature of Squid Game that most character storylines ultimately come to a literal dead end. That’s in keeping with the central premise – players are eliminated, so that one may gain all – and its thematic concerns. People don’t matter. The system is heartless. You cannot win, at least not without sacrificing your decency and humanity and compassion.

Creator Hwang Dong-hyuk’s view of the world – or at least of late-stage capitalism as viewed through the prism of South Korean society – is remorselessly bleak. Good people are crushed. Bad people rise and are rewarded. Compassion is seen as weakness, cruelty as strength. It doesn’t even matter if the boss is toppled because, as Front Man says at one point in season three, someone else will take their place. It’s the system that’s the issue, not the CEO.

Park Sung-hoon as Cho Hyun-ju, Jo Yu-ri as Kim Jun-hee, Kang Ae-sim as Jang Geum-ja, Yang Dong-geun as Park Yong-sik in a scene from Squid Game season three.

Squid Game’s first season was so perfectly conceived and executed that it felt entire unto itself. When a second season was announced it felt like the system had won – it was product for its own sake. And so, to a degree, it proved.

But this third season (which, in truth, is merely the second half of a 13-episode second season) has much more to offer. Jun-ho’s search for his brother – to free him, arrest him or kill him? – is better integrated into the story, Gi-hun’s ethical dilemma (to seek bloody vengeance or to embrace forgiveness) is more urgent, Front Man’s vestigial humanity just about tangible.

Will it stick the landing? I have no idea. But here’s hoping.

Squid Game (season three) streams on Netflix from June 27.

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