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5 hours ago
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Spoiler warning: before we start, I need to make it clear that I’m about to discuss the ending of Squid Game. If you haven’t seen it yet, stop reading now. But if you have seen it, my goodness – what the hell just happened?
We knew the signs weren’t great going into the final season. Prior to its release, Squid Game creator Hwang Dong-hyuk – a man who takes his role so seriously that he lost eight teeth during the production due to stress – said that the series wouldn’t have a happy ending, going as far as calling it “bleak”.
But it’s only in the final couple of minutes of the final episode that the bleakness revealed itself. Shave those off and you could argue that Squid Game concluded on something vaguely upbeat. True, this is all within the parameters of the programme’s moral universe – very few shows could murder 500 people, let the baddies get away with it and still be considered uplifting – but if you lay all the elements out, then a happy ending is what it was.
Because, in the end, Gi-hun (the player who won in season one and returned to take down the entire system) ended up making the noblest sacrifice possible. The slightly improbable introduction of a newborn baby as a numbered player brought out the worst in almost everyone. Never in television history have so many characters attempted to throw a baby off a cliff for money. So Gi-hun first became her protector and then, by killing himself to let her win the prize money, her benefactor. In his final moments, his actions went some way to making up for being a horrible absentee father to his own daughter.
But more than that, it gave him an ideological victory over the Front Man. For the last two seasons, the two had been locked in an argument over the nature of humanity. Gi-hun saw people as good-intentioned and collaborative, while the Front Man wanted to demonstrate that we are all violently self-interested. But Gi-hun’s decision to kill himself so a baby could thrive seemed to unlock something in the Front Man. After the finale, he collected the baby, delivered it to the people he knew would keep her safe, and gave her a life of unimaginable wealth. And when he delivered Gi-hun’s belongings to his estranged daughter in Los Angeles, he seemed to be genuinely grieving the death of his worldview. So in that respect, the good guys won. There is hope for humanity after all. A happy ending.
But then came the bleakness. Because as the Front Man was driving away, he saw something he’d only ever seen on the streets of Seoul: a suited figure flinging a cardboard square to the ground, then slapping a stranger across the face. This, as any good Squid Game fan will know, is how players are recruited to the game. Only this time the recruiter was Cate Blanchett.
There she was, an Oscar-winning actor, one of the world’s best, coming out of absolutely nowhere, slapping strangers in the face in what has to qualify as the least-expected cameo of all time. Her appearance was so out of the blue that you probably spent the entire length of the credits contemplating its meaning. On one hand, to watch it was to realise that Squid Games happen across the world all the time, and that we are all pawns at the mercy of the callous billionaires who control our lives. On the other hand: yikes, Cate Blanchett must really need the money.
Before the season began, the expectation was always that Hollywood would find a way to encroach on to Squid Game. When I interviewed the actors who played season one’s VIPs – the masked westerners who would bet on the outcome of each game – their assumption was that they wouldn’t return for subsequent seasons because the show would be able to hire George Clooney or Brad Pitt. In the end that didn’t come to pass, perhaps because Squid Game preferred the idea of lobbing in one of the world’s most recognisable women for a gratuitously inconsequential hello at the end.
Of course, the truth of Blanchett’s appearance is that Netflix isn’t done with the programme yet. At the end of the year, the streamer is going to start making Squid Game: America, an English-language remake of the show written by Dennis Kelly and directed by David Fincher.
And that’s the real unhappy ending. Squid Game is a global sensation, the most-watched TV show in Netflix history. And yet that isn’t enough. We live in a world where a property like Squid Game cannot just ride off into the sunset. Instead, it has to be exploited until its back breaks and everyone starts to resent it for outstaying its welcome. That’s why Cate Blanchett showed up at the end. And that’s why it’s the bleakest ending imaginable.
