Squid Game

The Currency of Desperation

I remember the first time *Squid Game* really locked me in, and it wasn't subtle. A giant robotic girl turns her head, scans a field full of terrified adults in green tracksuits, and starts a massacre to cheerful playground music. After that, the room feels different. Not quiet, exactly—more like the air got heavier.



We've now spent three seasons inside Hwang Dong-hyuk's candy-colored meat grinder, and looking back from the show's definitive conclusion in 2025, it's weird to remember how totally *Squid Game* swallowed the culture. The tracksuits were everywhere. People were making those brittle honeycomb cookies in home kitchens. (I destroyed two baking sheets trying to do the same, which is a pretty pathetic way to honor a fictional nightmare.) What sat beneath all that meme energy, though, was a brutally cynical machine. Hwang built an allegory for late-stage capitalism so sharp that capitalism immediately turned it into merchandise. I don't know if he expected the irony to hit that hard, but he definitely put it to work in the later seasons.

The first "Red Light, Green Light" game still says almost everything you need to know. Hwang plays the scene for spatial terror, not speed. He lingers on the bright, shadowless sand, the weirdly blue painted sky, the childlike scale of the walls. Then one player moves and gets shot. No merciful cutaway. The body drops, everyone freezes, and you can see the exact second the lie evaporates—they are not contestants on a game show. They are livestock in an abattoir. The sound mix strips everything back until all that's left is the mechanical whir of the doll's neck and the swallowed, ragged breathing of the crowd.



At the center of all of it is Lee Jung-jae as Seong Gi-hun. If you mostly know Lee as a suave leading man from South Korean cinema, the wrecked physicality of his first-season performance is almost shocking. Gi-hun slumps. He smiles like he's apologizing for existing. He comes off as a man fully aware that he has failed and praying nobody makes him say it aloud. Watching Lee harden over the three-season arc is where the tragedy really lives. By the final episodes that defeated slouch is gone. His face is set. He moves with the stiff, almost mechanical focus of somebody who has seen too much and paid far too much to keep breathing.

IGN's review of the third season said the final episodes "cleverly (and punishingly) illustrate the long-lasting ripple effects of a capitalist hellscape." I think the "punishingly" is dead on. Hwang never lets Gi-hun off easy. He drags him back into the system and makes him try to break it from the inside. That part gets messy. Sometimes all the expanding mythology around the VIPs and the Front Man pulls attention away from the cleaner, nastier psychological terror of the games themselves.



Maybe that sprawl was unavoidable. You can only keep throwing rats into a maze before you have to show who built it. But *Squid Game* was never at its best because of lore, and not even because of the body count. Its real power was always in the horrible pauses between rounds, when people understand that their shot at a better life may depend on the breath in somebody else's lungs. I'm not convinced a TV series can genuinely change the way we see the systems that run our lives. Probably not. But *Squid Game* leaves a mark, and it doesn't wash off easily.