The Squid Game Finale: Long Live the Bumfight, Death to the Allegory

Last Friday, Netflix dropped the third and, thankfully, final season of Hwang Dong-hyuk’s one-shot political allegory Squid Game. Remember the sheer hype when Squid Game burst onto screens in 2021, when COVID still had us all stuck indoors? It was barely two years after Bong Joon-ho made Parasite (The New York Times best film of the 21^st century) and the commentariat thought South Korea had cracked the code on anticapitalist art for the streaming era.

Now Bong Joon-ho is making films like Mickey 17, and Hwang Dong-hyuk’s one-off neon tracksuit experiment is the defining moment of his career. Season 3’s tone is the same mishmash of adorably bright, childlike sets contrasted with horrific violence we’ve all come to expect. It’s hard to begrudge Hwang Dong-hyuk for the cash grab, given that he was barely even paid for the first season, but it doesn’t mean that there was an artistic reason for this last one.

The presentation is still pretty good. Tracking shots feel like a claustrophobic first person shooter, and the game theory is much better developed . Indeed, the games are better designed in general: the outcomes less arbitrary, even if the skills required to succeed in them still are. Meaningful strategy is involved, with characters portrayed rationally — though the end point of that rationality is consistently voting their way into a certain death sentence.

But all the show’s gleeful violence can’t transcend the limits of the core allegory. The original thrill of Squid Game was watching grown adults stomp each other to death in playground games, all for a chance to clear crushing debt that, in the current iteration, was mostly caused by bitcoin gambling. This was meant to be a metaphor for how capitalism dehumanizes us, except the show never bothered to offer anything deeper than “rich people bad, poor people desperate.” Squid Game is less an argument against capitalism and more an argument against specific terrible rich people being allowed to put on overly elaborate bumfights.

The latter two seasons are 50% longer than the first, but mostly use the extra screentime trying to make the logistics of the death games more “plausible” — as if you can hide a guy acting like a psycho in a public park in a world where everyone carries a camera. No matter how hard Hwang Dong-hyuk works on the continuity, the conceit just isn’t plausible which wouldn’t matter in a one-season-and-done show.

Squid Game has always operated on the quaint but flimsy idea that these murder-thons are diabolically hidden so that the secret won’t be found, revealed and ended. In reality, powerful people don’t need to hide their atrocities behind elaborate puzzles. Jeffrey Epstein had a private island with teenage girls and a Rolodex full of billionaires, he didn’t exactly keep it quiet. A dark irony of Squid Game‘s final chapter, hiding in plain sight, is Oh Dal-soo cast as an obviously untrustworthy ship captain. There’s layered hypocrisy in the show facilitating the comeback of an infamous figure whose career was gut-punched by #MeToo.

Actual South Korea hasn’t lived up to the promise of radical revolution promised by its own popular culture. The vibrant South Korean democracy impeached one incompetent, superstition-addled president in 2017 only to be rewarded with yet another incompetent, superstition-addled president a mere five years later, and an impeachment process so clownish it nearly made Squid Game look plausible. Hwang Dong-hyuk could hardly be expected to incorporate that, to be fair, given how long it took to produce the latter two seasons. All the same, Squid Game seems weirdly uninterested in South Korea’s dysfunctions. The villains are faceless foreigners; the system is just a rhetorical prop. It’s capitalism as a Halloween costume, not a real monster.

Squid Game wants us to believe it’s probing deep, existential questions about what people will do when pushed to the edge. But mostly it’s about absurd moral dilemmas like whether it’s justifiable to murder a baby for prize money. While acting as if this is all the fault of capitalism, in practice, Squid Game consistently denies the agency of nearly anyone who isn’t a main character by just making psychopaths seems like life’s natural winners.

All of which brings us back to the fundamental question: what is Squid Game actually saying? The real answer is: nothing that sticks. It never seriously asks why so many people are so ruinously in debt, or how to change it. Instead, it shrugs, points at a cartoonishly evil billionaire in a gold mask, and says, “If only these sadistic Western perverts would stop making us poor people fight to the death!” That’s not an anticapitalist parable, it’s a half-baked Hunger Games knockoff. Even Mr. Beast figured out you could turn Squid Game into a family-friendly challenge with zero fatalities and just as much tension. The real twist? The capitalist hustle always wins.

And yet… Squid Game still works, sort of, if you squint. The games are gnarly fun. The sets are so bright they’d make a preschool jealous. There’s something grimly satisfying about watching people turn on each other in a sugar-coated labyrinth. But as soon as you step outside the pastel murder pit, you’re left with a show that’s failed its proof of concept. Far from encouraging a deeper understanding of the social structures that enable evil, oppressive class warfare, Squid Game’s hero pretty much just acts like he’s chasing down a bogeyman. And he is, to all practical intents and purposes.

Netflix will tout the “final season” as a bold ending to an era, but make no mistake. Squid Game is just another brand now. The ending (guest starring Cate Blanchett!) practically bends over backwards to give Netflix the option to make further spin-offs. Whatever credibility Squid Game once had will only continue to wither, its truth to power only sounding that much more hollow with each new iteration. Squid Game doesn’t critique the system. It just turns it into a carnival ride. And maybe that’s the real game: cashing in on the big anticapitalist trend, comfortably secure that the real fantasy of Squid Game is the idea that our institutions are merely too weak, rather than actively disinterested, in picking fights with big money.