Cora

GENERAL OVERVIEW:

I genuinely don't even know where to START because I binged this entire season in one sitting and I feel like I've been emotionally hit by a truck except not in a good way? Like my brain is just firing off random complaints in twelve different directions because WHAT was that finale?? Gi-hun literally dies. For a baby. THAT ISN'T EVEN HIS. I'M SORRY?? I know what the show is trying to say, hope and humanity and sacrificing yourself for the next generation, blah blah blah, but I just could not stop thinking about the fact that this entire season is basically built around a promise he made to Jun-hee, a woman he barely even knew, while Myung-gi, the baby's ACTUAL biological father, is standing right there being... whatever the hell THAT man was supposed to be.

And honestly, Jun-hee not trusting him? Queen behavior because she clocked him correctly from a mile away. This man spends the ENTIRE season proving he deserves zero trust from anyone with functioning brain cells. He murders Hyun-ju in cold blood literally right after she saves multiple lives, happily teams up with Nam-gyu and the rest of the murder squad to butcher the Blue Team because oooh bigger jackpot money yay greed, basically leaves Jun-hee to die on the jump rope bridge without a single useful idea, and then in the finale he has the audacity to dangle HIS OWN DAUGHTER over the edge of a tower like a bargaining chip and the show still wants me to entertain the idea that he's this tragic father just trying to protect his child?? Protect her FROM WHO? YOU??? Every bad thing that happened to that baby somehow circles back to you.

I don't care how many close-up shots we get of him looking conflicted, how dramatic the music gets, or if he sheds a little tear. He spent 6 episodes proving he is an irredeemable selfish loser! Zero remorse. Zero depth. Just greed wearing a sad face. Honestly the writers themselves seemed to know they'd written him into a corner, because during the Blue Team pact to kill Gi-hun and the baby he basically blends in with Player 100 and Player 203 as just another money-hungry psychopath willing to murder an actual infant. Not a single ounce of individuality there.

And speaking of characters that completely lost me... DAE-HO?? Did I miss like four episodes between S2 and S3? Because HOW did we get here? One minute he's crying, panicking, making pathetic promises, wanting to switch sides, acting completely broken after the rebellion failed... and literally the next minute this man is cackling while chasing Gi-hun around with a knife acting like he's become the Joker overnight. WHERE was the build-up? Where was the PTSD? Where was literally ANYTHING that explains this personality transplant?

There isn't one. He just wakes up one morning and decides "actually I'm evil now." It felt so unbelievably lazy because the writers clearly just needed Gi-hun to snap and kill somebody, so they picked the easiest disposable target and threw away every interesting thing Season 2 set up about him. ALL of it gets tossed straight into the trash so Gi-hun can choke him to death and then... nothing. It means nothing. His death doesn't ripple through the story. Nobody cares. The plot immediately moves on. Incredible. Amazing. Spectacular waste of potential.

Honestly this season has a real talent for introducing interesting ideas and then immediately abandoning them the second they become complicated.

And don't even get me STARTED on the women because I am STILL MAD. Hyun-ju, Geum-ja and Jun-hee are practically the only consistently decent human beings in this entire cast. Loyal, compassionate, brave, selfless. And apparently in Squid Game that means you're contractually obligated to die in the most miserable way possible.

Hyun-ju gets stabbed in the back by the same disgusting excuse for a man she spent precious time trying to save. Geum-ja survives abuse, survives betrayal, survives watching her own son disappoint her over and over, only to hang herself overnight and we don't even get a proper goodbye scene, just a coffin rolling by in the morning like she's become set dressing. ARE YOU SERIOUS?? And Jun-hee gives birth MID-GAME while hiding from murderers, survives THAT, only to get told there's "no time" to save her, so she jumps to her death asking Gi-hun to raise her baby.

Why does every decent woman in this franchise exist only to emotionally motivate a man. Sae-byeok died so Gi-hun could feel guilty. Jun-hee dies so Gi-hun has a purpose. Hyun-ju dies so Myung-gi can become even more hateable. Geum-ja dies to make everyone sad for five minutes. It's less a shocking storytelling choice at this point and more a franchise tradition, and I'm tired. Every time a woman started getting development I just assumed she was dead within the next episode.

And while we're talking about predictability, can we discuss how painfully obvious the final three became? By Episode 4 I was sitting there going "okay it's obviously Gi-hun, Myung-gi and the baby." There was literally no suspense left. Every death after that felt like checking names off a grocery list, which made the supposed tension in Episodes 5 and 6 feel kind of empty because the destination had become obvious long before we got there.

And can somebody PLEASE remove Nam-gyu from my television forever because if I had to hear that man whine about his pills one more time I was going to lose it. I understand addiction, I understand it's tragic, I GET IT, but there is only so much "WHERE ARE MY PILLS???" I can tolerate before I stop seeing a tragic addict and start seeing the human equivalent of a migraine.

Same goes for the Shaman, because once the whole "the spirits told me" thing gets exposed as nonsense during Hide and Seek she just... exists? Surviving way longer than she needed to. Then Min-su, hallucinating half the season because he's completely fried, kills her in what's supposed to be a huge emotional moment and I'm just thinking "...okay?" because it felt more like the writers cleaning house before the finale than an actual payoff.

Poor Min-su honestly got done dirty too, because there IS a genuinely interesting addiction spiral buried somewhere in there. Watching guilt, grief and drugs completely destroy someone could've been heartbreaking. Instead we get three hallucination scenes and then he's dead. Another potentially interesting storyline thrown into the "maybe next draft" pile.

Player 100 betrayed literally every person who ever trusted him across two episodes, and by the time he finally died I didn't feel satisfaction or sadness. Just relief that I no longer had to watch him switch allegiances every twenty minutes.

Now, trying VERY hard to be fair here, the Hide and Seek episode? THAT was so good. For one glorious episode I remembered why I loved Squid Game in the first place. The three-key mechanic was genuinely fun, not knowing who was Red Team or Blue Team added actual tension, and Player 96 sabotaging people right before the finish line on the jump rope bridge made me physically angry in exactly the way the show wanted. It reminded me of Season One's marbles and glass bridge, where every choice felt stressful and unpredictable. For one shining hour I thought, "oh, maybe they're actually pulling this off."

And then they immediately undercut it with the dumbest twist imaginable: making a literal newborn an official player. I KNOW THE SYMBOLISM. Capitalism exploits people from birth, innocence gets consumed by broken systems, blah blah blah. WE GOT IT. It was so heavy-handed I actually rolled my eyes, like the writers were poking me in the ribs going "LOOK HOW EVIL THE SYSTEM IS. DO YOU GET IT YET???" Yes, three seasons ago.

And yes, the VIPs betting on a newborn's survival is horrifying, but it crossed a weird line where instead of feeling disturbed by THEM I started feeling manipulated by the WRITERS. Speaking of the VIPs, why are they simultaneously the funniest and most pointless part of this show. Evil rich foreigners making terrible jokes while betting on human suffering, both unintentionally hilarious and completely unnecessary. Every time they appeared I either laughed at the goofy dialogue or sighed because we were wasting screentime that could've gone anywhere else.

Can we PLEASE talk about No-eul because OH MY GOD she carried half this season on her BACK. Every time the show cut to her I instantly became interested again. Sneaking Player 246 out, trying to save his daughter, uncovering the trafficking operation, confronting the officer in the elevator, finding out her own daughter died in North Korea, burning the archive, nearly taking her own life until the baby's crying stops her. THAT was compelling. THAT had actual emotional weight that wasn't just "what if someone sacrifices themselves again."

Park Gyu-young absolutely understood the assignment and deserved twice the screentime she got, because every second with her felt infinitely more engaging than another Nam-gyu tantrum. I would've happily traded half the VIP scenes and three quarters of Myung-gi's sad close-ups for more No-eul.

And then there's Jun-ho. Sweet merciful GOD what did this man do to deserve this writing. TWO ENTIRE SEASONS chasing his brother, risking his life, hiring mercenaries, surviving explosions, dealing with Captain Park secretly being a previous winner infiltrating the operation, which honestly was a decent twist, I'll give them that. Woo-seok gets attacked by a DOG trying to expose the guy. The mercenaries get slaughtered. People die left and right getting Jun-ho to that island.

He FINALLY gets there. He FINALLY points a gun at In-ho. I am SAT thinking "THIS IS IT, THIS IS THE PAYOFF." And then absolutely NOTHING. In-ho calmly leaves with the baby while Jun-ho stands there looking mildly inconvenienced. THAT'S the confrontation? Two seasons of buildup for the television equivalent of someone saying "oh okay then" and walking away? Genuinely one of the most anticlimactic confrontations I've seen in years. I felt like I got pranked.

And then Gi-hun dies. I have complicated feelings here, because Lee Jung-jae absolutely sells the physical exhaustion in those final moments, the score is beautiful, the cinematography gorgeous. On paper it SHOULD work. But emotionally I kept circling back to "this is still the exact place you swore you would destroy." S1 ends with Gi-hun refusing to board the plane because he's going to bring this organization down. S3 ends with him dying inside it while it continues functioning exactly as before. What changed? The games continue. Nobody responsible pays. That's narrative stagnation.

And THEN In-ho decides the appropriate thing to do is show up in LA carrying a bloodstained tracksuit and a bank card, like "here's your dead dad's hoodie, have fun." That poor girl didn't need a souvenir, she needed her FATHER. Imagine a random stranger handing you your dead dad's bloody clothes and a debit card like it's closure.

And then the Cate Blanchett cameo. I literally laughed, not because she isn't fantastic, but because it was SO obviously "hey guys don't forget about the American spinoff." We just watched three seasons of characters insisting they were going to destroy this machine, and the grand finale is "actually the machine has expanded overseas." It's almost funny, except I don't think it was supposed to be.

Even the little epilogues felt rushed. Woo-seok gets out of prison and decides to renovate the Pink Motel with Kim, cute, lasts about ninety seconds. Sae-byeok's family gets reunited, cool, here's one scene, next. Everything feels like someone speedrunning unresolved plotlines because the credits are approaching, none of it landing as hard as it should because the show is already halfway out the door teasing future content instead.

That's probably my biggest issue with S2 and 3 as a whole. S1 worked because it KNEW exactly what it was: desperate people trapped in a nightmare trying to survive. These last two seasons keep trying to convince me this is some gigantic global conspiracy thriller with billionaires and secret organizations and undercover missions and trafficking rings and revolutions, and it becomes TOO MUCH. The scale keeps getting bigger while the emotional core keeps getting smaller.

Jun-ho never once felt like a threat to this organization because it's one exhausted cop versus a billionaire empire. Gi-hun spends an entire season talking about bringing the system down only to die inside it. If the writers never intended to let anybody make a dent in the machine, what exactly was the point of stretching this into a trilogy.

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FINAL THOUGHTS:


I genuinely think this should've ended after Season 1. Not a hot take anymore, but after all three seasons it's painfully obvious how complete that original story was. These last two seasons introduce bigger stakes but end up feeling smaller emotionally because so many deaths exist purely for shock value instead of genuine payoff. Every twist felt like it was trying to outdo Season One instead of understanding WHY Season One worked.

I don't hate everything, because I really don't. No-eul's storyline was fantastic, Hide and Seek absolutely slapped, the jump rope bridge sequence had me STRESSED, Park Gyu-young gave one of the best performances in the franchise, and the final confrontation between Gi-hun and Myung-gi, despite me despising Myung-gi with every fiber of my being, was genuinely tense. Lee Jung-jae still delivers when it counts. The production design is incredible, the music fantastic, and visually the show is still operating at an absurd level.

But none of that can save writing that keeps throwing away interesting characters, rushing emotional payoffs, mistaking shock value for depth, and refusing to commit to the themes it spends three seasons building.

I'll never rewatch this. Every character I genuinely cared about got discarded or sacrificed, almost every villain escaped meaningful consequences, the Jun-ho and In-ho storyline fizzled into nothing after years of buildup, Gi-hun's entire mission collapsed into the exact outcome he spent two seasons trying to avoid, and instead of an ending that feels like a conclusion, we get a teaser trailer for another franchise expansion nobody asked for.

I miss when Squid Game was just desperate people making impossible choices instead of a giant cinematic universe.

Anyway I'm going to go stare at a wall for a while because I can't believe I waited this long just to end up missing S1 even more than I already did.