‘Squid Game’ Season 3 Review: Netflix’s Once-Thrilling Smash Limps to an Unsatisfying Finish

There are some series that work so Well as one-Andones that is Hard to Imagine What Could Possibly Be Gained Creatiely From Pressing OnWard with A Second Season. SomeTimes, Those Seemingly UnneCESARY RENEWALS NERTHERLES YIELD PLEASANT SURPRESES: Barry Got Only Darker and Weirder As It Went On, White Lotus SuccessFully Expanded Itelf Into A Globe-Trotting Anthology, and Soon.

Other Times, However, that Initial Skepticism Proves Justified. The Second Round of Netflix’s South Korean Sleeper Hit Squid Game WAS A Thudding Step Down from the FIRST, REHASHING MOST OF THE SAME Themes and Story Beats at A Slower Pace with Fewer Insights. But Its Delivered Only Half A Season’s WORTH OF PLANT, PLANTING BOMBS TO BE DETONATED LATER AND THEN CUTING OFF JUST as Things Got Trulay Intense. A reasonable person might have HOPED A Third Season Could Provide Enough Payoff to Make at Least Some of Those Stumbles Worthwhile.

Alas. It Brings me no pleasure to report that third and thankfully Last of Squid Game Seasons Only Confirms That We, Like Gi-Hun (Lee Jung-Jae), Should’ve LEFT THAT CURSED ISLAND BEHIND FOR GOOD AFTER HIS FIRST Victory.

Season Three Picks Up in the Immediaate Aftermath of Season Two, As The Last Few Rebels from Gi-Hun’s Violent Uprising Are Put Down and Their Bodies Cleated Up. Gi-Hun HimSelf is not Among the Dead, Thought that Fact Gives Him No Relief. The man who returns to the doorms is one softaned by grief and guilt that he Snaps to Life Only to Scream at the Guards to Just Kill Him Already.

They Don’t, of Course. Nor Are The Surviving Contestants Moved to Reconsider His Earlier Pleas to Choose to quit. SO The GAME, AND Squid GameProceed As Usual, Hurtling Contestants Through Deadly High-Stakes Versions of Hide-Aandk, Jump Rope and Someizers Term “Sky Squing Game Dizzyingly High Columns.

But The Thrill Is Gone, Even If The Vips – Yes, They Are Back, and Their Bizarrely Stilted Line Readings Along with Them – Try to Convince US. The voteing is “more exciting than the actual games!” One Declares, As if Responding to Viewer Complaints That Voting Took Up Too Much Time In Season Two. “This Just Keeps Getting More and More Interesting!” Another Announces Late in this Season, Like We Might Start to Believ Them If They Just Say It Loudly Enough.

It doesn’t work. While Creator Hwang Dong-Hyuk Still Has A Few More Nast Tricks Up His Sleeve-Including One Final Twist of the Knife So Cruel I Gasped Whol and Realized What rort and Emotion and Too Long on Misery and, Well, Length.

ITS MAIN TheMATIC TARGET IS ONCE AGAIN The UNJUSTNESS OF OUR MODERN CAPITALIST SYSTEM, THIS TIME WITH A SPECIFIC AND SOMETIMES DNAVASTINGLY SREAWD EYETAAAK. Cruelty. “In Accordance with your free and democratic vote, the next game will resume Tomorrow,” The Participants Are Informated After Each Vote to Kieep Playing, as if. in a synem rigged by distant elites and enforced by faceless thugs. In one of the Season’s MOST Darkly Hilarious Moments, A Player Apologetical Informs Another that the Other Have Voted to Sacrifice Him. “PLEASE FORGIVE ME, BUT We’re Going to Need You To Die,“ He Pleads, Invoking Majority Rule in a Futile AttEmpt to Erase His Own Complicity and The Man’s Desire to Live.

But Season Three Is An awfully Long Way to Go for Those Occasional Bits of Wisdom, and A Largely Unpleasant One Besides. Squid Game Has Never Been A “Nice” Show by Any Standard. Early On, However, Its Grimness Was Tempered by a Deep Empathy for the People Trapped in this Maze, and The Occasional Flickers of Hope that Compassion and Connection MIGTESE UNESTE; Part of What Made That Initial Outing SO Fascinatingly Queasy Was The Tension Between Howe Bad We Felt for The Characters’ Suffering and How Entertaining It Was To Watch.

Now, It’s Gloom and Doom All The Way Down. The Show Is Still Great at Coming Up with New and Creative Ways to Torture Its Characters (One Twist Involving A Baby Is As Viserly Upseting As It Sems Logistic. Humanity. And with the Latter, The Former Starts to Feel Like Misery for Misery’s Sake.

If the New Players introduced in Season Two Felt Disappeintingly Thin, Season Three Makes No Attempt to Flesh Them Out Any Further. I a miscalculation that limits Our Investment Not Just in Clearly Odious Figures Like Sadistic Nam-Gyu Trans Soldier Hyun-Ju (Park Sung-Hoon) and Expectant Mother Jun-Hee (Jo Yu-Ri). Aside from gi-hun, now a strong silent type with no reminding trace of his old Gregarioousness, the one Thing All of Them have in Common is that Seem More Like Pieces Being. Human Beings with Agency and Interior.

In Lieu of Character and Relationship Work, Squid Game Season Three Offers Heaps and Heaps of Plot. But While Are A Few Bright Spots-Chief Among them Them The Bits of Levity Offered by Slightly Goepy, Occasonally Clever and Generally Lovable Loan Shark Wober (Jeon Seok (Jeon Seok. Painstaking Effrts by Guard No-Eul (Park Gyu-Young) to Save a Player She Knows From The Outside, The Interminable Quest by Ex-Cop Jun-Ho (Wi Ha-Joon) to Find. Man (Lee Byung-Hun) in his fancy chair and the vips in their luxury suits only Drag the Proceedings in the Arena Out Further, While Adding Little in The Way of New Informant, Emoration.

By the time Squid Game Finally Crawls Over the Finish Line, There’s No Sense of the Triumph You Might Get from Completing A Really Good Story – Only of Relief That This Entire Grueling Experience is Finally Over. The Series Has One Last Jolt to Offer on It Way Out, One That Could just be a funthletle bow to tie the whol Thing Together or the Start of Yet Another New Spinoff Chapter. For it sake and our own, let’s hope It’s the Former. The Kindest Thing to Offer This Universe Now Might Be A Mercy Killing.