"Squid Game," Season 1: review

Sang-woo, Gi-hun, and Sae-byeok

[WARNING: big-time spoilers if you're the only person never to have seen this series.]

"Squid Game" was the Korean phenomenon that took the world by storm, and I missed watching it back when it was popular. It received tons of praise and was discussed everywhere, with all sorts of videos and articles devoted to it. As a result of this media storm, which included plenty of reaction videos on YouTube, I ended up learning all about the story by a sort of osmosis. Even without having watched the nine-part first season, I still ended up learning all the major plot points. This past week, I finally sat down and watched the show.

For the one person left on the planet who doesn't know what "Squid Game" is all about, here's a one-paragraph explainer. Released in September 2021, the Netflix series was created, written, and directed by Hwang Dong-hyuk, who says he was inspired by certain animé stories as well as by the current social crises involving wealth disparity, unsustainably high cost of living, and the rat-race nature of life in modern South Korea. Season 1's main cast includes Lee Jung-jae, Park Hae-soo, Wi Ha-joon, Jung Ho-yeon, O Yeong-su, Heo Sung-tae, Anupam Tripathi, Kim Joo-ryoung, and Lee Byung-hun. There are two main stories: the A story follows Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae), a former laborer and chauffeur who has fallen on hard times and become a gambling addict betting on horse races. The B story involves Officer Hwang Jun-ho (Wi), who is looking for his missing older brother. These two plot lines intersect only at the beginning of the season; aside from that, they run parallel to each other. Both Gi-hun and Jun-ho find themselves immersed in a secretive society that takes financially desperate people off the streets and has them play simple games, the loss of which results in death. There is, however, the promise of an enormous cash prize at the end to act as a motivator. We meet a varied cast of characters along the way: among the desperate gamers are Seong Gi-hun the ex-chauffeur, Cho Sang-woo the corrupt investor (Park), Kang Sae-byeok the petite-but-tough North Korean defector (Jung), Oh Il-nam the elderly man with a brain tumor (O), Jang Deok-su the gangster evading his bosses (Heo), Ali the Pakistani migrant worker (Tripathi), and Han Mi-nyeo (Kim). The so-called Front Man running the games (Lee Byung-hun) is always masked, always cool and collected, speaking with an altered voice that reminds me a lot of the computer voice from those hilarious Pyeon-gang Haniweon commercials.

Explainer done, let's talk details. The show invites us to learn about and care for many of the characters in what will be, horribly, a steadily dwindling cast. The people in the game were all hooked in pretty much the same way, including Gi-hun: they were invited to play a game of ddakji, in which you throw a folded square of paper down at the opponent's folded square on the ground, the object being to hit the opponent's square hard enough to cause it to flip over. Lose, and you either owe W100,000, or you receive a slap across the face (everybody chooses to be slapped as they already owe too much money). Win, and you win W100,000 in cash on the spot, and an invitation to participate in an unnamed, but much higher-stakes, game. Most of these people, hard up for money and motivated—like most gamblers—to win more, end up accepting the invitation to participate in the larger game. They are all gassed and taken to a remote island off the peninsula, where an enormous complex exists. The complex includes sleeping and gaming areas for the gamers, labyrinthine stairwells and underground chambers serving multiple purposes, including the disposal of dead participants via cremation. The masked guards who keep order also live a rigid lifestyle and have their own monitored quarters. Along with all this is a great deal of luxurious space devoted to guest VIPs who might want to watch some or all of the games. 

Day One of the games starts with 456 participants (Gi-hun, our protag, is #456) and a game known in the West as red-light-green-light, but known in Korea as The Rose of Sharon Has Bloomed. To everyone's horror during the very first game, losers are mercilessly shot down by unseen snipers, and thus do the players discover the true nature of the venture they've joined. The idea is to win six of these games. A clause exists in the contract that every player signed: if a majority of players does not wish to continue, the games will end, everyone will be sent home, and no one will receive any prize money. Early in the series, the players all do decide to take a vote, then vote to leave. What happens next is very interesting: back to their previous, desperate lives, the players all come to realize that living regular life is actually more hellish than participating in the games. Almost all the people who abandoned the games end up returning, and the games—morbid as they are—continue.

The second game involves trying to extract a shape that has been imprinted in a piece of honeycomb candy. The third game involves getting into groups of ten, then playing a deadly version of tug-of-war. The fourth game involves selecting a partner, which the players gladly do, thinking they'll be with someone they've gotten close to. Instead, the players must play marbles against each other, with the loser being shot. The fifth game involves trying to cross a fragile bridge made of randomly placed regular and tempered glass panels: one false step, and you plummet to your death. By the end of the fifth game, only three people are left; they are given a steak dinner and, after eating, are left with a single steak knife each and no instructions as to what to do next—the assumption being that someone needs to kill someone. The final game, with only two contestants remaining, is the eponymous Squid Game itself—a Korean game played by children with one side as "offense" and the other side as "defense," with the offense trying to maneuver across a geometric space that looks vaguely like a squid to reach the squid's very tip and win.

While all of this is happening, we follow Officer Hwang Jun-ho as he searches for his missing brother, sneaking onto the island, masquerading as various compound guards, breaking into the fortress's files, and looking for any information that can help Jun-ho find his sibling. The Front Man becomes aware that an intruder is loose on the island, so Jun-ho's time turns from mere information-gathering to a tense game of cat-and-mouse as the island's faceless guards are sent in search of the policeman.

There are a lot more subtleties, details, and subplots that I simply don't have the space or the energy to cover. A lot is going on in "Squid Game," which has a very ambitious narrative, but the story is always structured in a way that is easy to follow. "Squid Game" has learned a great deal from Western TV and cinema: many scenes will remind viewers of similar tableaux seen over and over in Western films and TV shows. You might have, for example, a slow-motion sequence in which dozens of contestants are being cruelly gunned down, and as bodies fall and blood artistically flies through the air in ribbons and gobs, something like soothing classical music plays in ironic counterpoint to the horrifying action. How many times have you seen that trope in Western cinema? The story itself, especially as it gathers momentum, inherently provides its own tension as we come to like certain characters and hope they make it through the next game, and the next. While it's never explicitly stated, the idea seems to be that only one person can win the entire game. This is not how it's put to the players, at least at first: they're merely told they need to win six games to receive the cash prize. Even by the end, with only three players left, two of the players talk about possibly splitting the prize money and doing good things with it.

uniform colors are hard to take seriously

"Squid Game" can be read as many things—a criticism of cutthroat capitalism is one of the most popular interpretations, given how money drives the plot, although I've seen several articles and videos representing a school of thought that aggressively denies the series is about capitalism at all. Some have mused that the series forces us to confront the often artificial nature of choice by showing us scenario after scenario in which choices always lead to someone's death, as if life were a zero-sum game. I myself am tempted to put "Squid Game" on the same shelf as a whole wave of Korean TV and cinema that seems to see modern Korean society through a Marxist lens (see my review of "Parasite"). It's possible to see how a Marxist might appreciate notions of class struggle shown in the series, but as I thought it over, I began to realize that the Marxist angle, while plausible, is somewhat superficial. Marx was concerned, in his writings, primarily with the working poor—the proletariat. He saw the proletariat eventually rising up and breaking its own chains in a revolutionary, eschatological struggle. But in "Squid Game," while Jun-ho the policeman makes an effort to undermine the system he discovers, it's not at all obvious the system has toppled. In fact, the final episode ends with a one-year time jump that shows the mysterious island is still busy hosting yet more games. So "Squid Game" doesn't give us a Marxist revolutionary eschaton. There's no triumphal overthrowing of the system. Also: the people in the game are not the sort of poor folks Marx was thinking of: I chose my words carefully, above, when I described the participants as financially desperate. One of Gi-hun's childhood friends, Sang-woo the unscrupulous investor, isn't what I'd call "poor." He'd lost his money, sure, but he still belonged to the privileged, white-collar class.  The gangster Deok-su is another character who started fairly rich and fell on hard times. Tellingly, in the final episode, Gi-hun is able to ask the Front Man what this was all about, and the Front Man tells Gi-hun that, for the runners of the game and the VIPs who came to watch it all play out, it was like betting on horses. The human participants in the game were, essentially, horses from the point of view of the game's controllers—playthings made to struggle for others' amusement, often in unpredictable ways. (Recall that Gi-hun bets on horse races at the beginning.) None of this really gibes with a Marxist interpretation of the series. If anything—and this is an insight I'm stealing from my buddy Charles, who has made a study of Korean literature—I'm guessing there's a more fundamentally Korean dynamic at work: the idea of being small and helpless in the face of much larger forces like nature, fate, or God. I think a deeper reading of "Squid Game" needs to lean in a more Korean direction. Western viewers and critics, in reaching too quickly for the Marxism button, potentially blind themselves to a text's deeper truths.

At the same time, writer/director Hwang has said he doesn't view his creation as particularly profound, and he was indeed explicitly critiquing various aspects of Korean society, from the cold nature of business to the blasé actions of the police (when Gi-hun, temporarily away from the island, tries to report what happened to him, the police don't believe him) to the fixation on money to how foreign workers are treated (the character Ali, a Pakistani who speaks Korean with a heavy accent, is offered as something like a symbol of the plight of many foreign workers who find themselves in the muck of Korean blue-collar jobs: early on, before he ends up in the game, Ali accidentally injures his Korean boss, who had been refusing to pay Ali for his work). The series does seem to want to say quite a few different things, so it's not entirely wrong to view it, on some level, as social commentary.

I admit I was a bit worried after I'd watched the first episode. The first episode, which starts before the games begin in earnest, gives us Gi-hun and his family situation: he's a bum with a gambling addiction; he's separated from his wife, who has remarried, and he has a daughter he loves but doesn't really know how to care for. (In fact, Gi-hun's selfish and self-undermining personality made it very hard for me to feel much sympathy for his plight. He has moments of niceness and begins to think deeper thoughts, but any changes in his character are prompted by the horrible things happening to him, not by any natural empathy or curiosity. He's very Scrooge-y in that sense, and I don't trust his end-of-season metanoia. Then again, maybe Gi-hun is intended to be an anti-hero.) Gi-hun's also got a mom who needs radical medical treatment for advanced diabetes, but Gi-hun apparently doesn't feel enough urgency to get a real, steady job to help her pay her many bills. All this family drama is something I've seen before on various Korean soap operas, along with the yelling, the screaming, and constant fucking crying. I cannot emphasize enough the extent to which Koreans love melodrama—something a fellow online reviewer has frequently called "misery porn." Maybe Koreans see themselves as perpetual victims, as small and helpless in the face of much larger forces. Whatever the reason, Koreans love weeping, shouting, and overacting in their TV shows, and the first episode of "Squid Game" made me think I might be in for more of that. Luckily, I turned out to be wrong. Except for a few later episodes and plot lines involving the foreign VIPs, most of "Squid Game" is fairly tightly written, with a compelling narrative that gathers its own momentum and keeps us from mawkishly dwelling too long on any one catastrophe. Sure, there's plenty of screaming and crying toward the end, but by that point, the histrionics are justified by the circumstances: everyone's been put through the wringer.

The acting throughout the first season is generally good, although Korean actors have certain tics and mannerisms that produce twinges of annoyance in me. As a Westerner and a non-fluent Korean speaker, I sometimes can't suspend disbelief when these things happen. It's hard to give examples of what I mean, but I'll try. First, take characters who rant and yell loudly, then end their rants by suddenly cutting themselves off, as if such a gesture makes what they say more impactful. (Imagine someone yelling, "You dirty son of a—!" and stopping right there, but not because anyone interrupted them. Not to say there's no swearing in this show; there's plenty of foul language. But the whole yell-and-cut-yourself-off thing is a vexing aspect of many Korean dramas. I guess it's just a cultural quirk that I dislike.) The actress playing Han Mi-nyeo struck me as overacting quite frequently, bug-eyed and mugging in an exaggerated way, so her presence was grating, and I was glad when she met her fate. A lot of Korean acting seems geared more toward the stage than toward the screen, and the acting isn't helped during those occasional moments when the story itself falls down: certain story beats in "Squid Game" are a little too easy to predict because they follow the typical rhythm of Korean dramas. All that aside, most of the principal actors did a fine job in their roles, and many of the actors in minor roles did as well.

The cinematography and set design of the show are very interesting. You, as the viewer, definitely get a feel for the weird surreality of being on an island, with strangers, and having to play deadly games. Some of the games are played in roofless, walled-off areas where the walls have been halfheartedly made to look like fields and open sky. And while some parts of the compound are huge and capacious, other parts are labyrinthine, claustrophobic, and serpentine, with twisty, particolored, Escher-like staircases, random offices, and a plethora of secret doors leading to unpainted, brick-and-stone sections of the compound.

the Squid Game court, with basic shapes

"Squid Game" also contains plenty of symbolism and iconography; I'm sure, in fact, that my ignorance about certain aspects of Korean culture probably kept me from seeing some things that would be obvious to Korean viewers. Among the symbols, especially in the first two episodes, are squids themselves, which appear as we pass certain markets early on. Also very prominent are circles, triangles, and squares. When placed together, these basic shapes form the squid-like field or court for kids who play the Squid Game. The masked guards at the compound all wear face shields that have a single circle, square, or triangle painted on them, possibly indicating rank. (The guards' uniforms apparently became hugely popular among both cosplayers and Halloween celebrants.) It's safe to say that a lot of thought went into the world-building—the sets, the uniforms, the overall ambiance.

The series isn't without some major questions and problems, though. For me, one interesting question, which occurred to me after the Season 1 finale, is who's running the show now that the secret society's leader is gone?  The games are obviously continuing, and the whole motivation for this secret society that takes desperate people and makes them play deadly games comes from the founder's belief that both the very rich and the very poor need to have suspense, fun, and excitement reinserted into their dull, oppressive lives. It's implied that this secret society has been around for years, so maybe, by now, it has its own momentum and can continue even with the founder dead. But who's actually running the show, now? If the Front Man was the true second-in-command, then I can see how he might become the big bad for Season 2 as the new leader of the organization. But that leads to another question/problem: this organization is huge, and... what? No one noticed its existence or all the missing people? A third problem is the B story. I simply didn't find Jun-ho's search for his brother—which involved a lot of skulking around inside the compound—nearly as compelling as the A story, which follows Gi-hun and his fellow terrified gamers. Jun-ho's ability to infiltrate such a secure compound struck me as massively implausible, and I didn't buy into his ability to pass as one of the guards after stealing a guard's uniform and inhabiting the guard's CCTV'ed dorm room. Jun-ho's casual murder of several compound workers also had me questioning what sort of policeman he was. Fourth: besides the B story, there was a weirdly meta moment in which two characters are discussing their fantasies when one mentions a film with the actor Lee Byung-hun in it. Now Lee Byung-hun is in this show, playing the Front Man, so does this mean we're in some weird universe where both Lee Byung-hun the Front Man and the actor Lee Byung-hun both exist? There was also a large subplot involving organ harvesting, but by the end of the season, that subplot seemed to have gone nowhere. I was also annoyed, to some extent, by the portrayal of Ali as a simpering, constantly over-bowing foreigner (generally, Muslims don't bow as bowing is reserved exclusively for God). How many times did the poor guy have to say "Kamsahamnida!" (thank you) to a dude who would eventually fuck him over? Other aspects of Ali were interesting, but I got the impression that the Korean writers (I guess that's mainly Hwang) didn't quite know how to handle foreigners. Which leads me to my and everyone else's main peeve: the goddamn VIPs. The VIPs arrive to watch the games right around the time the players are negotiating the bridge made of glass (but why not be there from Day One?). This group of mysterious elites, also masked, is mostly American and European, with one Chinese man thrown in for good measure. The dialogue for these characters is written in plausibly decent English, but it's so inane. Almost no one says anything deep. This is one of those times when a screenwriter ought to respect his own limits and seek other people who know the subject matter better. Just as Ali was written poorly, so were the VIPs, and I can't say they added much to the overall show. A little Tarantino-ish wit would have been nice. Then there's the matter of Sae-byeok's severe injury at the end of the glass-bridge game. Why did the game end with explosions? How were the explosions in any way a part of the game? I also couldn't help noticing that Gi-hun, at the very end, is suddenly imbued with a sense of mission, but this mission means he has to neglect his little daughter yet again. Gi-hun seems utterly unable to transcend his own selfishness, and this problem may be partly due to bad screenwriting. Finally—and I'm not sure whether this actually counts as a question or a problem—by the end of the season, we still don't know if there's any deeper purpose to these games. Could it really be as simple as the founder's conviction that the very rich and the very poor need to spice up their lives to relearn the value of existence? Does it make sense that the reward for this insight is death for most contestants and cash for the lone survivor? I'm still not sure, philosophically, how all of this is supposed to hang together.

The show nevertheless makes for good, compulsive bingeing. Like the TV series "24," it ruthlessly follows a formula guaranteed to ratchet up tension: put characters we like into situations where they are forced to make morally repellent choices. Many of the characters on the show are indeed well written and complex, and the psychology of the situation seems at least somewhat plausible to me. I also forgot to mention one very important plot point: the players discover early on that there's no penalty for just killing each other. This leads to a few Lord of the Flies-type situations as the strong prey on the weak, and as with "Cobra Kai" and "Better Call Saul," the whole wolf/sheep dynamic is a recurrent theme. Players die; masked minions come in with ready-made coffins, and then it's off to the crematorium. The season ends with a bunch of loose ends, and while a second season hasn't been confirmed as of this writing, I'd say the first season did a good job of giving us a whole sinister world to explore. What will happen now that Officer Hwang knows who the Front Man is? What will become of this secret society once it's no longer a secret? What made a group of people put themselves in the godlike position of deciding what humanity needs or doesn't need? If Gi-hun is really now on a crusade to take the society down, how far can he get with no training? That last question is a real poser. Gi-hun, by the end, is still basically the same flawed asshole he was at the beginning. Can he transcend things like gambling addiction and a bum's life to become the kind of man who can take down an enormous secret society? And with the society's founder now dead, what justice or revenge can Gi-hun hope for?

There's also an uncomfortably personal angle to "Squid Game" that may be worth exploring. When I was little, I was horribly cruel to insects that were unlucky enough to stray within reach of me. I had a particular fascination with ants, and one of the more dastardly things I used to do was to create a Play-Doh island inside a shallow bowl, fill the bowl with dish soap (if only Mom knew how much soap I wasted that way), then drop captured ants—dozens of them—onto the Play-Doh island to see what they'd do. A fascinating and morbid pattern began to emerge as I did this exercise over and over again: the ants would all eventually try to swim off the island, becoming mired in the dish soap and suffocating as they followed some genetically programmed imperative. I must have killed hundreds of ants this way, and for no reason other than sick curiosity. And once I'd figured out how inevitable the ants' behavior was, the exercise became even more interesting. This must be what it was like for the VIPs in "Squid Game" as they watched the frightened contestants figure their way through the various games and/or try to kill each other. Human behavior, especially in groups, tends to follow its own inevitable logic. I can see how, in a twisted way, it might be fun to watch that logic play out. But also, much later in life, I knew what it meant to be financially desperate, to live from paycheck to paycheck, and to have to weigh questions like Do I take the bus home or get a meal now and walk? I was once in such a low place that I almost signed for a payday loan. If you don't know what that is, it's basically a deal with the Devil: you agree to receive your requested sum—say, $1500—and you must pay it back with interest by your next payday. The catch is that the loan's APR is set, not around 18% like for a credit card, but at 400%-600%. If you're deep in debt, and you sell your soul for a payday loan, you're on the hook to the loaner for a long, long time. It's an impossible pit to crawl out of, and I was this close to damning myself. So while I know that it's like to watch helpless little beings in a deadly situation of my making, I also know what it's like to be so desperate that I'd do almost anything for even a little relief. I've lived both sides of "Squid Game," in a way, and I hope never to do that again.

"Squid Game" is a good, complicated series, and I can see why it generated so much discussion. As a text, it can be read on many levels. It's got social commentary, some elements of the Marxist critique of capitalism (at least superficially), and a whole dollop of culturally specific man-against-cosmos ideas. Unfortunately, it also killed off almost all of its characters by the end, leaving me to wonder just who will appear in the next season. And as the seasons progress (assuming Season 2 does as well as Season 1), what will the show really be about?