Letter #123: Squid Game

Good morning, Erin.

Bet you didn’t see this coming!

Yeah, neither did I. But, after my disappointment (the depths of which I can never properly relay to you) at Park Gyu-young’s Ji-su not reappearing in Sweet Home 3 like I predicted she would in my Sweet Home 2 letter, and after remembering that Park Gyu-young had been cast for the second season of Squid Game, the part of my brain that’s been trained to make decisions based on pretty Korean actresses rather than interesting-sounding concepts kicked in and told me I should probably prep for Squid Game 2 (which they just announced is coming out on December 26th) with, y’know, Squid Game 1. 

Plus, I recently had a disagreement in the YouTube comment section with one of the hosts of the (mostly) K-date podcast I listen to about whether or not Business Proposal was good or horrendous—and, if you think about it, wasn’t that struggle between strangers to assert which characterization of the show was correct its own kind of Squid Game?

…it was just time I got to it, basically, is what I’m saying. 

And so, here I am, finally catching up to the rest of the world. From three years ago.

If you’d like to join me, just call the number on the back of this letter. ○△□

1. I really enjoyed this show. Much like with zombie outbreak shows, “forced into a death game” series come with a certain advantageous level of tension and structure built into the premise, which typically earns an early degree of audience investment that some other stories don’t get: every character you meet is immediately in danger of being killed. This doesn’t mean you can’t do a terrible job of it, of course, but it doesn’t take much to do it well enough to succeed. But, even considering that, Squid Game is quite, quite good. It’s not perfect—which we’ll get to—but it’s a darn entertaining show. And what it does right (which are many things), it does quite well. 

2. The aesthetic is inarguably incredible (regardless of whether most of the specific details make sense in-universe or not), so it’s a feast for the eyes at every turn, with at least half of the design choices being totally iconic—even to people who haven’t seen the show. (The pink-suited workers, the giant piggy bank, the red light/green light girl, the floor with everyone’s picture on it—I mean, take your pick.)

3. The creme de la creme, though, is the characters. Wowza, what a fantastic group—particularly for a death game. None of them is good (...well, okay, Ali is good), but they run the gamut from nice guys with notable flaws to absolutely vile people, from good sports to heartless survivors. They’re all compelling and very easy to root for—even the ones you hate—and I didn’t want to part with any of them. 

3A. Now, the interesting thing about this (to me, at least) is that I don’t think I can tell if the actors playing these characters are good or not. By which I mean, the characters are brilliantly performed by all the actors, but I don’t know how much of the success there is attributable to the actors and how much to the writing. Or, put another way: were these actors good or just perfectly cast? Which…I dunno, maybe that’s a weird point to make or is just very specific to me, but it’s something that struck me pretty early on and, as such, that I spent most of the show trying to figure out.

3B. …with one exception: the girl playing #240, who is teamed up with the Pickpocket (#067) for the marble game. The, like, 10-second speech she gives the Pickpocket after losing the marble game about how she doesn’t have anything worth winning the game for was easily the best acting in the entire show. The writing is incredible, obviously, but the way she delivered those lines was masterful. I know we’re supposed to cry because she dies, but nothing was sadder to me than seeing how sure she was that her life was over long before she’d given it up for the Pickpocket. Good as the dialogue was, that was the actress. 

3C. I genuinely don’t know who my favorite character is. That said, if pressed, I feel confident I’d end up picking one of the following:

• Gi-hun (#456), our protagonist. He’s the absolute perfect lead character for this series: seriously flawed but a decent person; soft-hearted and positive but not totally naive; the kind of genial disposition that makes him the natural leader to a band of misfits without having to do anything overtly leaderly. Whatever he is in the outside world, he’s exactly the kind of person you want to see have to deal with the horrors of this situation, and I defy you to find someone who wasn’t rooting for him the whole time.

• The Pickpocket (#067). Clever, resourceful, badass but not invulnerable. She probably has the fullest (if not quite a satisfying) arc of any of the characters, and, despite being so quiet and standoffish for so long, just the tension in her body as she sat by herself was enough to make her seem interesting. Plus, cleverly, one of the first things the show does to establish her is to have her be at odds with the vile and brutish Thug (#101). With each new episode, you get just a little bit more of who she is, and it’s hard not to like her more with each new layer we get. She has one—wait, actually two of my least favorite moments of the series, but that’s not her fault. And, I mean, she also has one of my favorites, so it kind of balances out.

• #240, the girl mentioned above for teaming up with the Pickpocket during the marble game. We get very, very little of her, but what we get is incredible. From the moment she comes into frame for the first time, she’s the most obvious “red shirt” in a show made up mostly of characters who are supposed to die around our central characters, but she’s just got it, y’know? You definitely get bang for your buck, with her, and her time in the marble game is good enough that I don’t think I needed much more for her to be in consideration for my favorite. 

• #212, the lady whose only real skill was weaseling her way into someone else’s orbit to survive. And I f***ing loved her. She’s not terribly sympathetic, and, in fairness, I’m pretty sure I wasn’t especially keen on her for most of the show—but the moment it seemed possible that she might die, it hit me just how much I didn’t want to see her go. And then, once we got to see that she’s fine, I literally cheered. So, apparently I was quite fond of her. She also gets probably the most satisfying sendoff of any of the characters. 

3D. Which is not to say I didn’t also love Ali (#199), Sang-woo (#218, the dickbag friend), the Old Man (#001), and the Thug (#101). Whether I liked them “as people” or not, they were well-written, dynamic, and added something great to the show. (Even the throwaway competitors are more than just functional. Which is great.) Certainly one of my favorite ensembles ever. 

3E. But which is absolutely to say that I could not give less of a crap about the characters outside of the game. At all. Well, I mean, the families back outside were fine. I’m talking about the non-competitors involved with running the game. They suck. 

4. Pretty early on, I noticed a lot of Hyundai logos, which made me quite happy. But that happiness was dulled slightly by the realization that we were very, very, very unlikely to get a Subway sponsorship scene. 

5. I swore I knew the voice of the Square manager guy, but…the internet tells me no. Maybe. Who knows. 

6. Yes, show, I caught how the prize Gi-hun gets his daughter from the claw machine is in a black box with a pink ribbon. Nice touch. Or…possibly a confusing touch? I’m not sure. But I saw what you did.

7. And don’t think I didn’t remember that being able to cut across the “squid” in the squid game makes you the “secret royal inspector”—that is, it makes you an undercover agent. Clever. 

8. And how the cop and his brother shoot each other in mirror-image shoulders. Saw that, too. 

9. I knew quite a few people in this—some much more deliberately cast than others:

• Sol from the awful Star Wars series The Acolyte as Gi-hun (#456)

• awesome #bestgirl food blogger from Chicken Nugget as the Pickpocket (#067)

• Mr. Goblin from Goblin as the recruiter man in the suit

• Good Boy’s special old lady friend from Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha as Gi-hun’s mom

• the main girl’s older sister from Thirty-Nine as Gi-hun’s ex-wife

• Mr. Wharton College Man from Little Women as the cop

• the snooty girl from All of Us are Dead as #240

• someone’s husband(?) from Goodbye Earth as #118 (who dies in Ep 1, I think)

• the creepy teacher with the awful hair from The Glory as Circle Mask #28

9A. Technically, I haven’t seen Lee Byung-hun, who played the Front Man (the dude in the special mask overseeing the games), in anything, but I know he’s super-famous and stars in Mr. Sunshine, which I’m supposed to have watched by now but haven’t. But, like, I know who the actor is. (And that #240 literally references him in her marble game chat with the Pickpocket, which is…curious. But whatever.) 

10. It’s interesting how differently I felt about Gi-hun’s and Sang-woo’s actions in the marble game, when they were essentially both being equally as duplicitous. I know the two situations aren’t identical, and I know they’re both equally desperate to survive—but I can’t decide if it’s their individual personalities or actions up to this point that makes me judge them differently, or if the show is deceptive enough in how they are duplicitous (with Sang-woo being more actively underhanded and Gi-hun almost being backed into it). All I know is that I was mad at Sang-woo, and more understanding of Gi-hun—and then immediately said, “Uh, wait, why?” Which I’m sure is something the show wanted me to do. Probably. 

11. Literally everything to do with the cop storyline is ridiculous and stupid. Like, legitimately, it’s so full of contrivances that it doesn’t make sense. Like, he starts by tailing the minivan on an empty, dark road with his headlights still on and things just get dumber (and more reckless) from there. Awful.

11A. No, seriously—why in the f*** did you think you could impersonate a Square Mask?! They give orders, you twit! You don’t know ANYTHING about what’s going on! Ugh. So stupid.

12. The organ harvesting plot? Also stupid. Probably half as stupid as the cop stuff, but it also intersects with the cop stuff, which makes is doubly-stupid. Which I think means it’s just as stupid as the cop stuff. Like, mathematically. (Though, at least they try to handwave how they’re able to get away with running an organ harvesting operation out of this heavily-monitored facility: the Front Man knew all about it and didn’t care. Which…helps, as far as making sense goes.)

13. And then there’s the VIPs. Hooooooooooly smokes. I mean, I thought they were hilariously bad (in terms of writing, dialogue, and acting), but they are functionally detrimental to the story. They’re thinner than cliche stereotypes would have been and, worse, muddy the waters on what the game is designed to be. Or, alternatively, the Front Man loudly claiming that the game is some twisted kind of response to the inequality and unfairness of the outside world muddies the waters on what the game is designed to be. Because the one thing the VIPs are shown not to be interested in is fair play—which he seems totally fine about going along with. One way or another, the VIPs are at the center of that seeming inconsistency, and they suck. (Though, again, that they were somehow incapable of sounding like real people made me laugh. I’ve watched enough K-dramas to know this wasn’t a unique circumstance…though, this may have been the worst instance of it, whether because of how long they are in the story or just because of how badly they were written…who’s to say.)

14. Neither of the bathroom scenes makes a lick of sense. I mean, in fairness, I’m not sure how the bathroom situation works generally, so there’s a lot to answer for, with the bathrooms. But the smoking/vent scene and then the sex scene…come on, guys. What the hell?

15. And let me just say: I can’t believe I saw a flash of a woman’s nipples on a Korean TV show. The absolute scandal of it. 

15A. “Daryl, didn’t you watch The Handmaiden, in which Kim Tae-ri and another actress repeatedly—”

THAT’S DIFFERENT IT WAS A MOVIE THAT MEANS IT’S ART.

16. There were three instances where I said something should happen in the show, and then the thing happened immediately after I said it:

• When the Pickpocket is with the coyote, he smugly tells her that she’s going to have to pay him even more money if she wants him to try to smuggle her mother into South Korea again. And I said, “Ugh, she should throw the boiling water in his face.” And then she did! 

• When the Thug is telling his lackey the plan for going back into the game and robbing the place, the lackey gloats that he’s ratted him out to the gang he stole from. And I said, “Pfft, he should stab you for that, dumbass.” And then he did!

• When the Thug is trying to guess #212’s age, he starts with saying she’s 49, which she doesn’t like. So he chuckles and says she’s 39—which she also doesn’t like. And I said, “Heh, you should say she’s 19.” And then he did!

17. We get that moment of Gi-hun stopping to feed the stray cat in Episode 1 as a way of showing what kind of person he is, but I felt it was almost too much when we had already gotten the scene where he’s running for his life, accidentally knocks (who we later learn is) Pickpocket to the ground, then takes the time to check on her and help her even though he’s literally running for his life. But, y’know, I guess they really wanted to make it obvious for anyone who didn’t make the connection in the earlier scene. 

18. I cannot believe they let everyone go home at the start of Episode 2. Like, I get the idea is that they’ll definitely get people to return and that this will in some sense mean that it’s the contestants’ fault for choosing to participate in something that will likely kill them, but I really don’t understand why that matters to either the people running the game (see my previous “fairness” point) or the narrative. As far as I can tell, the only reason to have this happen is so that A) the cop can follow Gi-hun to the game, B) the Pickpocket can smuggle her knife into the game, and maybe C) Sang-woo can try to kill himself and, as a result, come back into the game with a more cutthroat perspective. Now, don’t get me wrong: I love all of the character backstory scenes we get for the main characters, but I really don’t think we needed to have them go home and come back for those to be in the show. Just have them be flashbacks to how they decided to join in the first place. I mean, yes, there are too many things that can go wrong with letting them go, just in a practical sense—but, to me, the biggest issue is that it absolutely kills the momentum of the show. Like, we’ve just come off the shock of Red Light/Green Light…and you follow it up with everyone going home and having slow character stuff for 45 minutes? Why?! This can’t possibly be the best way to have done this!

19. I don’t know that the way #212 takes out the Thug by throwing them both to their deaths makes sense, but I thought it was rad as f***, so I’m not going to question it. 

19A. That is, I don’t know that I quite think they earned the idea that she was happy to throw her life away just to exact her revenge. But, again, I really liked how it made me feel, so I’m choosing not to think too much about it. 

20. One of the best moments in the show is when the Thug beats that guy to death for trying to take back the food that he stole. As everyone looks to the guards to step in and restore order by punishing the Thug, the game just celebratorily adds the dead guy’s share of the money to the pot. The entire tenor of the game (and, by extension, the show) changes in the moment. You can feel it in the air, even just watching at home. Absolutely blood-chilling. Loved it. 

21. Don’t lie to me, subtitles: I clearly hear Sang-woo tell Ali to call him hyung, not “Sang-woo.”

22. Did the participants have to take off their shoes for the glass bridge game because each choice was supposed to be like jumping to your death, and the popular understanding is that people who are about to kill themselves remove their shoes? Or…was there another reason I just didn’t catch?

23. I 1000000% call bull**** on exploding the glass bridge after our three main characters make it across. I know that time has expired and that this means anyone still on the bridge would need to die—but the only reason it explodes like that is so that a big chunk of glass can impale the Pickpocket…so she can be so close to death that Sang-woo can conceivably justify “putting her out of her misery” when, really, he’d be happy to kill her off anyway…so that way we can just have the final round between two people. It’s total nonsense, a terrible way for an obvious favorite to go out, and I hate it. 

24. I mean, the whole glass bridge game is a narrative can of worms, to say nothing of how the VIPs’ reaction to it—and the Front Man’s reaction to their reactions—calls the entire theme into question, but…

25. For the record: Gi-hun could have won the squid game, like, four separate times and just doesn’t. Like, he’s not more concerned with beating the snot out of Sang-woo as revenge or trying to run and slipping in the mud or too hurt to move—he just…doesn’t run over to home plate or whatever. It’s a really contrived sequence, and they really needed to do better with it. 

26. For the record: when Pickpocket asked Gi-hun what he’d do with the prize money, he listed a bunch of things—but nothing to do with helping treat his mother’s diabetes, which is the biggest reason he returned to the game. 

27. Everything after Gi-hun wins the game is…strange. Like, not just his hair, but…y’know, as far as codas go. I’d probably have taken another whack at it, were I the writer. 

28. …that said, I’d been skeptical about the need for a second season of Squid Game going into it—but what I had not considered was that Gi-hun would be so traumatized from the game that, even a year later, he was “still there.” Seeing that the game is still going and being unable to let it go makes perfect sense to me, and I’m perfectly satisfied with the idea that there could be more story to tell. (Whether there is or not.)

29. …that said, the phone conversation Gi-hun has when he calls the Squid Game number before he gets on the plane has a major hiccup in it: the person on the phone sounds like he’s worried about Gi-hun trying to return to the game—but he should be very happy to hear that they could have a past winner come back. Think about how exciting that will be for the viewing audience! There’s no reason for this organization to think that Gi-hun is some kind of threat. I can understand them offering him the chance to back out, actively giving him the choice to see his daughter or to return, but they should be thrilled with this unexpected turn of events. 

30. …but, hey, I’m still excited for a Season 2. So, y’know, the ending clearly wasn’t all that bad. 

And we can end it there. I’m sure I haven’t said anything too new or different from the undoubted hundreds of videos you’ve come across at the height of the Squid Game craze. And, if I did, maybe this has been a helpful refresher before we get to the Boxing Day rush to not be spoiled by the internet. 

And then Season 3 in 2025. Apparently. 

Fingers crossed Park Gyu-young makes it through.

…

Sigh.

More soon. Specifically Miss Night and Day, if you want to prep. 

—Daryl