“Squid Game” S3 Is a Lesson in Martyrdom

In a time where we need it most, the Netflix series shows us two opposing paths to take in the face of apparent hopelessness.

Squid Game S2 felt like it was building to some big meaning, some air of finality where we would finally have all the answers we once sought. But Squid Game has no interest in feeding our capitalistic desire for instant gratification, rather, it has bigger fish to fry and more existential demands to interrogate. Gi-hun’s last words, “humans are…”, say everything that needed to be said. More on this later.

The ways parenthood is explored have really come full circle in Squid Game. When we first met Gi-hun in S1, he was being a fairly shitty though not intentionally cruel father to his young daughter, whose mother ultimately decided to take the child away to the states with her new stepfather. I wrote in my article reviewing S2 about how the underdog protagonist is forgiven in the eyes of the show for his fatherly misgivings as he fearlessly protects his fellow players, even when his joining of the games meant abandoning a visit to his little girl in America. He was then able to be a hero in bigger ways, more cinematic ways. We almost forgot that there was a child out there waiting for her dad to come see her, because her dad was out here being our hero.

Themes of parenthood are etched into the story slowly in S2, then forcefully as S3 begins. We have Player 222/ Jun-hee, whose pregnancy that was reaching a summit as we finished S2 is finally wrapping with the birth of a beautiful baby girl, naturally during a game where the stakes are life (for now) and death (for ever). Player 222 chose to enter the games seriously knocked up, which naturally begs the question, is she really considering her baby’s safety? I think the answer has to be no. On a logical level, which might be the only level that matters in the eyes of CPS, no good parent would risk their child being born in that situation, or risk dying when their child was almost to term inside of them. It seems as though 222 is living this pregnancy in a sort of reckless state, willfully ignorant to reality. But everything changes when the baby is born and her mother lays eyes on her. Suddenly she is prepared to be a martyr, as mothers are expected to be.

We see a lot more between players 222 and 333, the mother and father of the baby, respectively, where space in S2 was taken up with characters like Thanos, Gi-hun’s close friend Jung-bae, and Front Man disguised as a player. The ultimate dramatic irony and emotional weight of this season begin to crescendo when Jun-hee has her baby in the knife and key game, one of many zero-sum games that the show portrays, and ultimately Geum-ja (the older woman who has been helping her through the pregnancy the last few days) has no choice but to kill her own son, Yong-sik, to save the new mother and daughter who Yong-sik is preparing to attack.

But when a baby girl is born into the hellscape they’ve all willingly stepped into, everything winnows into focus. They’re all fighting over fairness, as the game demands. But innocence. Innocence demands self-sacrifice. It demands a sharpened lens. And ultimately it demands that both Jun-hee and Gi-hun surrender themselves, letting the baby into the unknown with only a naïve glimmer of hope that she will be cared for. Because somehow that glimmer of hope has become the guiding light, the humans are, the chance for goodness somewhere in the dark.

A genius twist is when Front Man decides to make Player 222 come back as her baby, therefore also making the baby a player. This changes everything. The stakes are completely shifted. Nobody necessarily wants the baby to die until she is a threat to their bag. This creates such a clear good versus evil contrast between the people willing to die for her and the people willing to let her die; self-sacrifice versus complacency. In the final game, many of the players going up against Gi-hun and the infant strapped to his chest say things like, “we don’t want to kill the baby, but”. Always the “but”. They aren’t inherently vindictive, but their selfishness and complacency make them so.

The final game is a culmination of all the lessons Squid Game wants to teach, with twists and turns to twist the knife in our metaphorical hearts. It’s simple: there are three pillars, and players must kill at least one person in order to move onto the next. Whoever is left alive on the third pillar after this gets to split the money. Players must press a button to start each round, which is essential, because when all the players except Gi-hun, the baby, and the baby’s biological father die/ throw themselves over the edge on the second pillar, it becomes very clear that one of these three will have to die on the third pillar. The only problem is that the men start fighting before remembering to press the button.

At the beginning of this game, I was fully convinced that the baby’s father, Player 333/ Myung-gi and the creator of online channel MG Coin, was going to have a redemption arc. I thought he was working with the rest of the men because he had a plan to turn on them once he earned their trust and keep his daughter safe. Then as options dwindled, I thought Gi-hun was going to sacrifice himself so the baby could be with her father. But it became clear very fast that Player 333 was more than willing to kill his daughter for a chance at winning all the money. The money was more important to him than her, and he wasn’t comically evil – if he could have had all the money and the baby, that might’ve been a decent option. But once she became a player, therefore with the opportunity to have some of the money for herself, she had to go. The whole series is about zero-sum games, making something that might in another context be gray very black and white. And the whole time Gi-hun is grappling with trying to save everyone and also save himself, minimizing harm to others while also staying alive, and when he realizes he can’t, there is only one option.

Gi-hun only directly kills one person (not counting clear self-defense) in all his time in the games. That person is Dae-ho, the younger man who lied about his military experience and inadvertently contributed to the failure of the rebellion at the end of S2. Between Gi-hun’s anger and grief and his need to end someone’s life in order to make it through the knife and key game, he ends up choking Dae-ho to death despite his pleas. This is Gi-hun’s sole murder. That’s notable because at the end of S1, Gi-hun’s final opponent Sang-woo plunges a knife into his own neck when Gi-hun refuses to kill him. And in S3, Front Man gives Gi-hun a knife and the opportunity to kill everyone while they’re drunk and sleeping, allowing himself and the baby to emerge victorious come morning. It’s his only way to guarantee they both live, and he comes close, but ultimately visions of Sae-byeok (the third runner up from S1) telling him this is not who he is change his mind. Gi-hun dies in the finale knowing he was as good of a person he could be, shocking the VIPs who fully expected him to throw the baby off the edge.

I thought the third season was heartbreakingly beautiful. I’ve seen some complaints about it, particularly the apparent cash grab for a US spinoff (with… Cate Blanchett???) at the end, but I feel like the final episodes on the whole did well to tie up a series that was originally supposed to be only one season. “We are not horses,” Gi-hun says in his final words, a reference to the first episode of the series where we see him lose money betting on horse racing. A show where nearly every person must die can’t necessarily have a happy ending, but it can and does have a message of hope, of humanity in the face of death, debt, violence, terror. In the political era we are currently living, it’s more valuable than ever to have a reminder of what humans really have the capacity to be, and our hero Gi-hun shows us that.