Squid Game, the ending explained

ATTENTION: spoiler on the fourth season of Squid Game.

Finally, the terrible killer game of the squid, Squid Gamehas come to an end (more or less). Netflix’s successful series on a group of oppressed Koreans playing a series of mortal games in the hope of winning a large prize ended after three seasons, closing a historical and record path. It was unlikely that the conclusion of the series could satisfy everyone: a fact of which the Creator Hwang Dong-Hyuk It seems to be fully aware while writing the last chapters of history. Hwang melts only a few knots and denies us the revenge we had for some time, instead opting for a cynicism perhaps more credible. What did you think, that those rich bastards would not get away with it?

If nothing else, there is some almost happy ending. Even if our tormented hero gi-hun (Lee Jung-Jae), aka the player 456, died, his daughter (with whom he was no longer on good relationships) received a remarkable sum of money that could, presumably, help her and her mother to make a life in Los Angeles. That money will also be imbued with blood, but given the circumstances has been gained in the most noble way possible. The sniper of the squid game, no-eul (Park Gyu-Young), goes to the search (perhaps in vain) of his daughter (perhaps dead), but with the satisfaction of having helped Gyeong-Seok (Lee Jin-Wook) to reunite with the son, whose health has improved. The most attractive detective of Korea, jun-hos (We Ha-Joon), did not closed the accounts with his brother, the leader of the game in-hos (Lee byung-hun), but somehow he rebuilt by locating the island (and conquering my heart).

For the rest, however, Squid Game It ended on a note of profound and desperate despair. Perhaps Hwang was evasive not to show us how, exactly, the entire staff and their Plutocrati guests have escaped the coast guard (or, in general, how it is possible that hundreds of people disappear every year from Korea without this disconcerting statistics attracting the attention of the authorities) but I believe that this choice has been more than a simple narrative device. Can any of us really look around, in the real world, and find some tests that the billionaires predatory and the executors of their orders meet some kind of justice, or even just a substantial opposition? By now they seem almost completely immune to the real consequences, and the same goes for the bad imagination of the series.

If Squid Game He had shown the outbreak of that protective bubble (for example, with no-eul who makes those monsters with pistol or jun-hus that arrests them) would certainly have been cathartic, just as it was to see a fictitious Adolf Hitler died riddled with shots in Bastards without glory. But such an ending would not have kept faith with the dark and infernal thesis of the series: that is, that in the real world many people are trapped in a sort of play of the squid, with little possibilities of actual escape. In the second season, Hwang allows prisoners to react, but the results are disastrous. In the third season, the only way to overcome the unhappy circumstances is with mutual help and personal sacrifice. Perhaps this message pushes the series beyond realism by trespassing in pessimistic fatalism, but Squid Game He never presented himself exactly like a series willing to bring comfort.

If there is a edifying message to be drawn from the series, it is a generic message on the upper values ​​of empathy and compassion. Hwang’s vision of the games (mostly played by greedy and bloodthirsty competitors, mitigated only by a few respectable people) has always seemed a little hard and built in order to demonstrate a predefined thesis. The social diagnosis of Squid Game It is in the balance between total nihilism towards human instincts and just anger for what economic inequality forces common people to become. Sometimes I share his opinions. Other times the cruelty and insensitivity of many competitors seem exaggerated to me: are there really so many people who would come to kill a newborn?

Well, maybe yes, in reality. Every day, more and more terrible people seem to emerge in public consciousness, who declare themselves proud to be. Perhaps Hwang’s evaluation is exact, and those of us who consider themselves at least largely morally will have to cling to each other while sociopathy, fueled both by selfishness and by effective necessity, advances more and more. Or we are bad like everyone else, only that we have not yet had the opportunity to prove it.

If there was still any doubt about Hwang’s vision in economic and social matters, the final scene (and a little bizarre) of the series confirms a tetra conclusion. Squid Game ends with none that Cate Blanchett In the role of an American recruiter who plays a ddakji With a scruffy man in an alley in Los Angeles, to suggest that, of course, the game of the squid is not relegated only to Korea. Although the series is particularly attentive to the dynamics of its country on class, debt and social mobility, Hwang also recognizes that the growing economic inequality is an endemic problem of many nations, perhaps above all of the great imperialist beast on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. Jun-I will also dismantled a cell, but apparently it was only a small part of a flourishing network.

If on the one hand this ending will certainly continue a deeper meaning to be grasped, on the other it leaves pragmatically (and cynically) the door open to a hypothetical US spin-off of Squid Game. Maybe there is no longer enough fuel in the tank of Squid Game To justify a return of some kind (we would limit ourselves to watching the games again, only that this time they would be in English?), But so far, in Hollywood, this has never stopped anyone. As far as I’m concerned, I think I landed on reality. And by this I mean the reality show of Squid Game on Netflix; I’m not making jokes about current affairs. Or maybe yes.