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Look alive – Squid Game returns this week! There’s still no sign of any squid, which is the kind of false advertising that ruined The Pink Panther. But that’s good, because squid are terrifying. Once, showing off on holiday, I offered to cook for a group of friends. I didn’t speak the language where we were, and ended up leaving the fishmonger with a big bag of tentacles. As I attempted to remove the head, guts, beak and skin of the creatures, their internal sacs burst, coating me in viscous black ink. I suffered an allergic reaction, don’t eat squid any more, and don’t see those friends.
Squid Game the TV show (Netflix, Friday 26 June) has proved even more traumatising. Set on a hidden island, the competition pits hundreds of desperate, indebted people against each other in a series of children’s games. The winner gets millions, while the losers are executed by guards, or die via gruesome, in-game accidents. The show’s brilliance is the way it amplifies the emotional stakes of each set-up. Players bond, form alliances, then have to murder each other to survive. The weak are ganged up on, cowards exploit loopholes in the rules to screw over everyone else, while those who make selfless choices are punished. Usually.
It’s hard to discuss Squid Game without spoilering it to Buckaroo. It is such an enclosed world, a Jenga puzzle of individual choices and group consequence. This third, final series was intended to be part of the second, and filmed back to back. Which is to say, don’t drop in here if you haven’t seen the first two. It’ll still be upsetting, it just won’t make any sense.
Let’s speak broadly of the characters, voluntary kidnappees on a starvation diet. The winner of the first Squid Game, who re-entered the second to take revenge on its creators, is now dealing with the fallout of a failed insurrection. They spend much of their time chained to a bunk, looking more haunted than a Coney Island funfair. Their nemesis is the Front Man – an overseer who wears a voice-distorting mask and looks like Kryten from Red Dwarf dipped in petrol. Other players include a drugged-up psychopath, whose simple pleasures involve watching the light fade in the eyes of the dying. There is also a mother and son, who probably won’t get to stay on the same team. Very upsetty, no spaghetti.
Sadly, the VIPs also recur. Members of a wealthy elite, who created the tournament for their amusement. Wearing golden animal masks to make it crystal clear they are ciphers of decadence, they spectate from a neon pot-planted chamber, betting on who lives or dies. Imagine if the participants of Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut ran a board game night. These flimsy characters deliver dialogue so wooden it could have fallen off the back of a Jewson’s lorry. If our world has shown us anything, it is that the evil billionaires are not lazy, grape-eating emperors. They are narcissistic businessmen who get up at 4am to ruin the entire world, not just one small island.
I’m also less engaged by the storylines of organ-harvesting guards, or the ongoing efforts of detective Hwang Jun-ho to locate the island and find his missing brother. Squid Game is compelling because of its games. These diabolical tests plumb the depths of avarice and selfishness, or offer occasions for self-sacrifice and stoicism, depending how they’re played. “Do you still have faith in people?” is a question the overseer poses the hero, who stands on the precipice of an impossible choice. As characters, they embody opposite answers.
Game theory, a branch of mathematics that analyses competitive strategies between rational actors, has proved that cooperation outperforms exploitation. In other words, it’s in all our interests to not be bastards. The problem is people are not rational; and having a gun to their heads tends not to help. Moreover, you know what a few rotten apples do to a barrel. This is why Squid Game grips us – we’re afraid of who we really are. We need to be shown ourselves, in the least flattering mirror, yet still be shown not all bad.
What will the show’s verdict on us be? There is such cruelty in its premise, vivid glee in its sadism, and previous seasons have hardly ended on an upper. But the game’s not over till it’s over. Let’s see, through a squid darkly.
