Spoiler-free review: Flawed, but Squid Game Season 3 is a beautiful, bleak reminder that the house always wins

Squid Game should have been a one-season wonder. The first chapter already summed up what it needed to say—how capitalism quietly rigs the game and pits us against each other to survive while the privileged look on for their amusement. It was a raw, ugly, metaphor that cut very close to home. However, it ends on a triumphant note, giving you hope that you can make a difference to beat the system—never mind that not everyone has main character aura and plot armour.

As harsh realities go, this is as good as an ending you can get. So why did we get seasons 2 and 3? 

The slow death of hope

While the first season leveraged the brutality of the games perfectly, we know that the same trick won’t land quite as hard this time. We’ve been conditioned to expect the shockingly brutal game mechanics and the emotional crux to come from the relationships between key players, all of whom will ultimately be crushed by the system.

And yet, despite the predictability, it subverts the first season and delivers a singular, soul-crushing message: nothing changes.

Squid Game once suggested that, in spite of all the horrors, we could make moral choices. Protagonist Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae), flawed as he is, represented that threadbare hope: that we could choose not to play the game, even at great personal cost.

In the sequel, that sliver of hope curdles into fatalism. Victory becomes performative at best. The system, untouched, continues to grind through our souls, indifferent to our epiphanies. But if you are lucky, you may yet find meaning in the act of living.

Don’t think, just feel

Seasons 2 and 3 suffer from contrived plot decisions, so don’t get hung up on logical discrepancies.

All you need to think about are the themes, especially Gi-hun’s journey, which has been set up as a redemption arc inside a redemption arc. It begins with someone believing that he has no choice but to take down a system, spirals into the hubris of revenge, then circles back to who he truly is—and what he believes in—when it matters.

The sequels rely heavily on symbolism, which means that individual story arcs may not deliver payoffs in the traditional sense. Most notably, Jun-ho’s (Wi Ha-joon) high-stakes journey of trying to save his brother In-ho (Lee Byung-hun) and end the games fizzles out without much resolution, leaving behind only an unspoken gesture from In-ho: Jun-ho can’t defeat the system to save In-ho, but he can help his brother save someone else.

You can’t beat the system

The mysterious Masked Man, who runs the games, is arguably the central pivot of the series. The ruthless and Machiavellian Devil’s Advocate is someone who recognises that the deck is stacked in the real world and devoutly enforces fairness within the rules. He embodies the flawed righteous man who believes that the trappings of the system and humanity’s selfishness cannot be overcome, and constantly tests Gi-hun to seek validation.

The uncomfortable truth is that the game works because too few are willing to fight back—the answer is hiding in plain sight, but the predictability of human nature keeps us enslaved.

Yet by the show’s end, even the Masked Man is moved to act out of turn. But it does not change his path. Nor does it change the system or the outcomes.

Squid Game reminds us that meaning doesn’t always come from results—it comes from intent. And in a world built to strip that away, small acts of humanity are the only form of protest we have left; maybe even the only thing that defines us.

The final twist?

The final cameo reveal is arguably the cheekiest, unintentional rug pull of all; perhaps an unironic meta wink and a nod that the show itself is now part of the allegorical machine it critiques. But let’s not kid ourselves—the prize pool is too big for Netflix to turn back now. The Game must go on.