spoilers, naturally, but also truly who gives a shit, it's awful anyway cuz tldr: not just bad, but also uninspired and boring.

my partner and i just today finished watching season 3 of squid game, in a somewhat generous definition of the word "finished." we got to the end of the third-to-last episode before giving up, and to be honest i kind of wish we had just given up sooner. squid game seasons 2 and 3 are some of the most cynical and/or misguided attempts at political commentary that i've seen in a long while.

to preface: i liked season 1 and i thought it was phenomenal.

i didn't expect to have a lot to say about this but i am now editing this paragraph from deep into writing this because i ended up writing a lot actually.

seasons 2 and 3 both bad and boring, with the latter being ultimately the reason that we dropped season 3. we did read up on the rest of what happened online, though, and to be honest if i'd known that the ending would have cate blanchett as american squid game recruiter, i don't think i would have had even a morbid curiosity-level interest in watching season 3.

my biggest problem with squid game seasons 2 and 3 is that it's genuinely difficult to interpret the message of the story as anything other than "poor people are evil."

in season 1, the players initially don't know that it's a death game, and so, after the first game, they demand to be let out, and are offered a vote to end the games while receiving none of the prize money, and this vote passes; the players, who are all selected because they're in desperate need of money, choose to end the games because their lives and the lives of the other players is not worth the money. everyone is reinvited, and many people rejoin the games because they are absolutely in need of money. importantly, this decision is on an individual basis: the players are staking their own life in rejoining the games. no more voting is offered after this point.

season 2 then doesn't want to steal this exact concept, but decides to rework it: after every game, the players vote on whether they want to end the game there and then, with majority rules. side note but it plays comically inappropriate jubilee-esque music every single time and it's INSANELY jarring. the important difference is that in this, the players are offered the choice to end the games at any point while still receiving their portion of prize money.

this vote never passes. no matter how much money is added to the pool, no matter how big the individual share of the money gets to, this vote does not pass at any point in either season. for context, each player is "worth" 100 million won, which is about 73k USD; so, with half of the players eliminated, this would mean 73k USD for each person. with each vote that is an absolute landslide victory for "keep going," it basically gets more and more baffling. the players who vote for "keep going" are, generally, not shown to be at all desperate, but are relishing in the deaths of other players.

the majority of these people, who are all generally impoverished, are shown as basically actively evil. any poor people who display any level of sympathy or kindness are in the EXTREME minority, and any kindness is generally met with punishment. by the final game in season 3, gi-hun is basically the only person left who isn't actively looking to serial murder people. they gang up to try to kill a fucking baby (long and dumb story you wouldn't care) and are only stopped by the guards, and then they vote to continue the game quite literally because they think they'll be able to kill the baby easily. mind you, each person would get 4 million dollars if they stopped by the last vote, but alas, you forget: poor people evil.

squid game season 2 and 3 are basically just cynical to an unbelievable, uninteresting, and upsetting degree, and misrepresents the struggle of lower class people in a way that only a gazillionaire could manage. season 1 portrays rich people as the facilitating and forceful hand of suffering, creating a situation that forces a fight for life that is inescapable: your choices are play the game and participate in capitalism, or die. seasons 2 and 3, on the other hand, twist this into something malicious; rich people are now portrayed as merely creating the circumstances in which suffering will occur, while the majority of poor people are portrayed as the ones perpetuating their own violence and suffering.

is it poor people who create dangerous working conditions for underpaid employees? is it poor people who increase the price of goods far beyond the cost of manufacturing for basically no reason but to get more profits? are poor people CEOs who are giving themselves gigantic raises amidst layoffs? obviously the fuck not. poor people don't just sabotage each other for no reason. anyone who has worked a minimum wage knows that generally people are in it together. the assholes who try to step over their peers are NOT the majority, or even close to it.

for a show that is trying to be about political commentary, it's hard to conceptualize what this could possibly ever be trying to say when it has the group of poor people be essentially directly responsible for their own suffering as well as the suffering of others.

i think that most people are good, actually, and would not choose to harm innocent people even if it meant they got a fat paycheque. controversially, i also think that the hyper-wealthy are not good people, and might actually even be the REAL problem with society. sorry if that's too liberal or woke or leftist or something! being really sarcastic if it wasn't clear!

anyway that's really most of what i had to say about that. there are also a wealth of other problems that make these seasons just really stupid and bad. my favourite is The Drug That Makes You Evil: one dude has drugs and they make him evil and he kills and hurts people for fun. then another dude gets it (after guy 1 dies) and then he immediately becomes evil and he kills and hurts people for fun (and also briefly refers to himself with the previous dude's name because drugs). another is the cop who spends the entirety of seasons 2 and 3 trying to find Squid Game Island, and in season 2 he literally does not make any progress. nothing happens in any of these scenes. in season 3 it takes until basically the end for him to find it, and nothing comes of it. like what was the point of all that.

anyway to conclude: squid game seasons 2 and 3 were some of the worst tv ever made to an offensive degree, and aren't worth watching for even a little bit. i'd say that season 1 is probably also not watching at this point because man what's the point.

my next blog post will be about things that i liked this month, but i needed to vent about how much this sucked complete ass. i hope you are doing well if you made it this far somehow! it was a cooler day today which was a much appreciated break from the evil heat. it's going to be getting hotter next week which i am not appreciative of, but what can you do. thank you for reading xoxo