Contains spoilers for Season 2 of “Squid Game.”
“Squid Game” is back for what is said to be its final round, with a six-episode third season on Netflix. If only all beneficiaries of free-floating, pandemic-boosted nihilism would fade away as quickly.
The South Korean drama’s creator, writer and director, Hwang Dong-hyuk, had a couple of very profitable insights: that what was missing from “Survivor”-style competition shows was machine guns; and that greatly increasing the pool of contestants — the show’s dour hero, Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae), is No. 456 — would increase the amount of blood that could be shed while simultaneously giving most of the deaths an anesthetizing, video-game irrelevance.
He then gave his package an Instagram-friendly visual wrapping of bright colors, gargantuan toylike structures and massed minimalist costumes, and replaced plot with a series of elaborate variations on children’s games. No candy was ever designed and marketed with greater effectiveness.
But the series wasn’t strictly a consumer product, and it wasn’t a reality show. As a work of fiction, it needed to do something to surprise us to merit a second or third season (they are really 2A and 2B). Most television shows may be formulaic to one degree or another, but it is harder not to notice when the formulas you are repeating are ones that you just created.
The last batch of episodes picks up halfway through a set of the games in which debt-ridden proletarians are killed, or kill one another, as they compete for an ever-increasing pot of cash, all for the entertainment of anonymous, hyper-rich spectators. The previous winner Gi-hun, whose attempts to halt the spectacle and unmask its ringleader have failed miserably, is battered but alive. Sixty players remain for the final three games.
The proximity to a resolution of Gi-hun’s fate gives this season a tension (artificial as it may be) that the show’s second installment, released in December, lacked. Otherwise, it is “Squid Game” business as usual.
The characters, types drawn from the long history of westerns and war movies, are as one-dimensional and predictable as ever. The search by Jun-ho (Wi Ha-jun), brother of the games’ orchestrator, for the island where they take place remains TV’s most pointless subplot, right through to its conclusion. The scenes involving the masked V.I.P.’s are, if anything, even more cartoonish than before, and they also lead nowhere.
Hwang still orchestrates the action competently, though there, too, his imagination comes up short — the last couple of games are bare bones in their conception, the only suspense coming from the choice of victims. And throughout, after having made Gi-hun’s guilt and his attempt at atonement the framework of the story, Hwang strains to bring those feelings to life, to make us believe in them. Here Lee, who gives a glum, one-note performance, shares the blame.
Whether or not “Squid Game” works as drama, or as glorified game play, many of its fans appear to appreciate it primarily as a metaphor for life under late capitalism — a “Lord of the Flies” for our era. It is that, and its depiction — or the picture it hazily suggests — of the masters of the game resonates with people who find their business and government leaders’ behavior contemptuous and cynical.
But it’s a backdrop, not a vision. Some honest nihilism, on the one hand, or some old-fashioned, nuanced melodrama and compassion, on the other, could make it matter. Lacking those, we’re left with a body count.
Mike Hale is a television critic for The Times. He also writes about online video, film and media.
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