When Squid Game first appeared, it shocked the world. It was violent, yes, and theatrical, but it had a certain elegance. It had a message, and it stuck to it. The poor were not just poor. They were trapped. And when given a chance to escape, they were handed the illusion of choice: a game where every path led to death or degradation. It was grotesque, but grounded. Unrealistic, but coherent.
Season one was not merely a survival story. It was a parable, albeit a familiar, left-wing one, the kind beloved by critics of capitalism. Its moral framework was reductive, but internally consistent.
The recently aired season three, by contrast, is less parable and more product. The show has become a victim of its own success. Each season since the first has had to live up to a mythology that was clearly never meant to be this large. And now, as the final season tries to land the plane, the result is a grim spectacle of narrative exhaustion. The plot twists are louder. The sets are bigger. The morals are blurrier. Like its contestants, it feels like the show is no longer trying to say something; it’s just trying to stay alive.
The brutality of the previous seasons made sense because they followed a coherent ethic, however warped. By season three, that order has collapsed. The games no longer feel like thought experiments. They feel like gimmicks. When a baby is introduced as a contestant, the show stops being merely horrifying and becomes ridiculous in its grotesqueness. The emotional stakes dissolve. What’s left is only provocation.
In a twist of irony, the show became exactly what it originally sought to critique. What began as an indictment of capitalist cruelty has become the embodiment of just that. Squid Game created a system so dehumanizing that death became preferable to debt. Now it’s merely content. Not just in the streaming sense, but in the factory-farmed sense, churned out, repackaged, and served to us via algorithm. The show that once forced its characters to barter their dignity now trades in plot devices and shock value. Somewhere along the way, the game stopped being a warning and started being a business model.
But the show isn’t the only one that changed. We watched. We asked for more. We posted memes of dead contestants, theorized about the symbolism of each colored jumpsuit, and applauded every twist. We wanted season two, then season three, then the American remake. And don’t forget the reality show competition.
We fed the machine with our views and likes and demand for explanation. And the machine gave us exactly what we wanted, until the story about exploitation became a spectacle of it. We’ve become the VIPs now: distant, amused, and faintly bored, sipping champagne while the bodies pile up.
There are still flashes of brilliance. But the storytelling has fractured. The various plot threads that once hinted at deeper connections never cohere. The main antagonist and his police officer brother, the insurgent henchmen, the VIPs, and the contestants; each arc drifts toward its own conclusion, as if written in isolation. The season gestures at convergence but never delivers it. What should have been a single, final reckoning instead dissolves into narrative scatter.
The protagonist Seong Gi-hun’s arc is given weight, even if it leans heavily on martyrdom. A few set pieces retain the grotesque tension that made the first season a cultural earthquake. But by the end, the show collapses under its own ambition. The finale is not cathartic. It is contrived. The twists feel forced, the resolution unearned. What was once sharp is now dulled. What was once a scream is now a murmur. And what was once a warning has become, grimly, inevitably, a brand.
