Netflix’s Korean Hit Limps to a Close

There are some collection that work so properly as one-and-dones that it’s arduous to think about what may presumably be gained creatively from urgent onward with a second season. Typically, these seemingly pointless renewals however yield nice surprises: Barry acquired solely darker and weirder because it went on, White Lotus efficiently expanded itself right into a globe-trotting anthology, and so forth.

Different occasions, nonetheless, that preliminary skepticism proves justified. The second spherical of Netflix’s South Korean sleeper hit Squid Recreation was a thudding step down from the primary, rehashing a lot of the identical themes and story beats at a slower tempo with fewer insights. Nevertheless it additionally delivered solely half a season’s value of plot, planting bombs to be detonated later after which chopping off simply as issues acquired actually intense. An affordable particular person may need hoped a 3rd season may present sufficient payoff to make not less than a few of these stumbles worthwhile.

Alas. It brings me no pleasure to report that the third and fortunately final of Squid Recreation seasons solely confirms that we, like Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae), ought to’ve left that cursed island behind for good after his first victory.

Season three picks up within the instant aftermath of season two, as the previous few rebels from Gi-hun’s violent rebellion are put down and their our bodies cleaned up. Gi-hun himself isn’t among the many lifeless, although that truth offers him no reduction. The person who returns to the dorms is one so flattened by grief and guilt that he snaps to life solely to scream on the guards to only kill him already.

They don’t, in fact. Nor are the surviving contestants moved to rethink his earlier pleas to decide on to stop. So the sport, and Squid Recreation, proceed as ordinary, hurtling contestants via lethal high-stakes variations of hide-and-seek, bounce rope and one thing the organizers time period “Sky Squid Recreation,” which is actually a shoving match atop dizzyingly excessive columns.

However the thrill is gone, even when the VIPs — sure, they’re again, and their bizarrely stilted line readings together with them — attempt to persuade us in any other case. The voting is “extra thrilling than the precise video games!” one declares, as if responding to viewer complaints that the voting took up an excessive amount of time in season two. “This simply retains getting increasingly more fascinating!” one other declares late on this season, like we’d begin to imagine them if they only say it loudly sufficient.

It doesn’t work. Whereas creator Hwang Dong-hyuk nonetheless has just a few extra nasty tips up his sleeve ­— together with one ultimate twist of the knife so merciless I gasped once I realized what was taking place — its newest run is just too brief on shock and emotion and too lengthy on distress and, properly, size.

Its major thematic goal is as soon as once more the unjustness of our trendy capitalist system, this time with a particular and typically devastatingly shrewd eye towards how the pretense of democracy can paper over unspeakable cruelty. “In accordance along with your free and democratic vote, the following sport will resume tomorrow,” the members are knowledgeable after every vote to maintain enjoying, as if there could possibly be something “free” about such a selection being made in a system rigged by distant elites and enforced by faceless thugs. In one of many season’s most darkly hilarious moments, a participant apologetically informs one other that the others have voted to sacrifice him. “Please forgive me, however we’re going to want you to die,” he pleads, invoking majority rule in a futile try and erase his personal complicity and the person’s want to dwell.

However season three is an awfully lengthy option to go for these occasional bits of knowledge, and a largely disagreeable one apart from. Squid Recreation has by no means been a “good” present by any commonplace. Early on, nonetheless, its grimness was tempered by a deep empathy for the individuals trapped on this maze, and the occasional glints of hope that compassion and connection may come up even underneath the harshest of climates; a part of what made that preliminary outing so fascinatingly queasy was the strain between how dangerous we felt for the characters’ struggling and the way entertaining it was to look at.

Now, it’s gloom and doom all the best way down. The present remains to be nice at arising with new and inventive methods to torture its characters (one twist involving a child is as viscerally upsetting because it appears logistically implausible), however much less so at digging into their humanity. And with out the latter, the previous begins to really feel like distress for distress’s sake.

If the brand new gamers launched in season two felt disappointingly skinny, season three makes no try and flesh them out any additional. It’s a miscalculation that limits our funding not simply in clearly odious figures like sadistic Nam-gyu (Roh Jae-won) or grasping Jeong-dae (Tune Younger-chang), but additionally in sympathetic souls like trans soldier Hyun-ju (Park Sung-hoon) and expectant mom Jun-hee (Jo Yu-ri). Except for Gi-hun, now a robust silent sort with no remaining hint of his previous gregariousness, the one factor all of them have in frequent is that they appear extra like items being pushed round a chess board than difficult human beings with company and interiority.

In lieu of character and relationship work, Squid Recreation season three presents heaps and heaps of plot. However whereas there are just a few vivid spots — chief amongst them the bits of levity supplied by barely goofy, often intelligent and usually lovable mortgage shark Woo-seok (Jeon Seok-ho) — the tempo is lumbering. Painstaking efforts by guard No-eul (Park Gyu-young) to avoid wasting a participant she is aware of from the surface, the interminable quest by ex-cop Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon) to search out the island, and the frequent cuts again to the Entrance Man (Lee Byung-hun) in his fancy chair and the VIPs of their luxurious suites solely drag the proceedings within the enviornment out additional, whereas including little in the best way of latest data, emotional affect or thematic depth.

By the point Squid Recreation lastly crawls over the end line, there’s no sense of the triumph you may get from finishing a very good story — solely of reduction that this complete grueling expertise is lastly over. The collection has one final jolt to supply on its method out, one which may simply be a enjoyable little bow to tie the entire thing collectively or the beginning of yet one more new spinoff chapter. For its sake and our personal, let’s hope it’s the previous. The kindest factor to supply this universe now could be a mercy killing.