After hundreds of deaths, several twisted children’s games, and a meteoric ascent to the top of Netflix’s charts, Squid Game comes to a characteristically bloody end.
In its third and final season, the series throws a major wrench into the Squid Game competition: player Jun-hee (Jo Yu-ri) gives birth to her baby mid-games, and following her death, the Front Man (Lee Byung-hun) and VIPs decide to let her newborn child play in her stead.
The choice causes major chaos within the remaining player group. Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) does his best to protect the baby, because he’s 1) not a monster and 2) promised Jun-hee he would protect her child. Other greedy players want to kill the baby outright and take hers and Jun-hee’s portion of the prize pot.
The argument about the baby comes to a head in the vertigo-inducing „sky Squid Game,“ during which every player except for Gi-hun, the baby, and the baby’s father Myung-gi (Yim Si-wan) dies. But as the show’s penultimate episode comes to an end, there’s still one round of the sky Squid Game to play, which means one of these three has to go. Who prevails, and what happens to the rest of Squid Game’s sprawling cast? Let’s break it down.
Who wins the sky Squid Game?
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Gi-hun and Myung-gi duke it out on the final platform in a knife fight that’s very reminiscent of Gi-hun and Sang-woo’s (Park Hae-soo) last fight in Squid Game Season 1. In the end — and after threatening to kill his own baby — Myung-gi plummets to his death, leaving Gi-hun and the baby as winners.
Except, not. Gi-hun and Myung-gi didn’t press the button in the center of the platform in order to trigger the start of the round, meaning Myung-gi’s „elimination“ didn’t count. Instead, once the round starts in earnest, either Gi-hun or the baby has to die.
It feels like the world’s most savage trolley problem: save your own skin, but live forever as a cowardly baby murderer? Or save an innocent newborn who has a whole future ahead of them and die?
Gi-hun promised Jun-hee he’d protect her child with everything he had, so for him, the choice is an easy one. He chooses to sacrifice himself, leaving the baby, Player 222, as the sole survivor and winner of the Squid Game.
What do Gi-hun’s last words in Squid Game mean?
Credit: No Ju-han / Netflix
Gi-hun doesn’t agonize before letting himself fall off the last Squid Game platform (a mirror of Jun-hee’s death, when she stepped off the jump rope platform). Instead, he turns to face the Front Man, whom he now knows posed as his false ally Young-il in Season 2, and says, „We are not horses. We are humans. Humans are…“
Horses have been a common motif across all three Squid Game seasons. In the very first episode of Season 1, Gi-hun bets on horse races. Once in the games, he realizes that he and the other players are essentially racehorses being bet on by the VIPs. (Like lame horses, losing players are killed in similarly unsparing fashion.) The VIPs even use horse head tokens to represent each player on their game models, further emphasizing the comparison.
By bringing up the horses, Gi-hun takes his last moments to reaffirm to the Front Man that he and his fellow players aren’t the animalistic „trash“ everyone believes them to be. The appeal to the Front Man also calls back to their arguments about whether there’s still anything redeemable left about humanity, including In-ho’s blunt season 3 question, „Do you still have faith in people?“
Time and again, In-ho has tested Gi-hun in these games, pushing his faith in humanity but also trying to get him to be selfish, to step over others to get a bigger piece of the prize pot. At some points, Gi-hun has proven In-ho right, like when he decided to sacrifice some of his own Team X members when Team O attacked them at night. But Gi-hun’s death is his final way of proving a point: Some people are capable of giving up their lives (and 4.56 billion won) in order to save someone else. And Gi-hun clearly has enough faith in people — maybe even In-ho specifically — to think someone will care for the baby and give her a good life once he is gone.
Gi-hun’s choice also calls back to the first episode of Season 3, when he agonized over why he was left alive following his failed rebellion. Protecting Jun-hee and her baby became his „why“ as the season went, and this last choice is the final hurdle for fulfilling what he came to see as his purpose.
His death is the ultimate martyr move, but does his message get through to the Front Man? Gi-hun seems to hope it will, perhaps leaving his final statement of „humans are…“ open-ended so that the Front Man will fill in the blank on his own.
The Front Man ties up loose ends in the Squid Game Season 3 finale.
Credit: No Ju-han / Netflix
Gi-hun’s death’s impact on In-ho isn’t immediately clear, because right when Gi-hun dies, Detective Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon) finally gets off that damn boat and makes it over to the island where the games take place. He arrives just in time to have a one-sided conversation with his brother In-ho („Why? Why did you do it?“) before the games‘ self-destruct mechanism kicks is. Glad we waited two seasons for a confrontation of nothing.
Despite the explosions, several characters make it off the island: In-ho grabs the baby and skips town, while Jun-ho, No-eul (Park Gyu-young), and Gyeong-seok (Lee Jin-wook) also escape alive.
Cut to: six months later. No-eul heads to China to look for her daughter. Gyeong-seok is still working at the amusement park, and his daughter has recovered. Plus, in a sweet callback to Seasons 1 and 2, Sae-byeok’s (Jung Ho-yeon) brother reunites with their mother. The moment is a reminder that Gi-hun kept not only his promise to Jun-hee, but also his vow to Sae-Byeok that he’d keep her brother safe.
Meanwhile, Jun-ho is wondering who in the world stole the remains of Gi-hun’s winnings from his lair at the Pink Motel. Turns out it was none other than In-ho, who leaves Jun-hee’s baby in his brother’s apartment, along with a credit card linked to the baby’s 4.56 billion won. (The PIN for the card is 0222, a reference to her and her mother’s player number.)
But that’s not the only credit card In-ho is dropping off. He flies out to Los Angeles, where he visits Gi-hun’s daughter Ga-yeong (Jo Ah-in). He tells her of her father’s passing but also leaves her a credit card tied to Gi-hun’s remaining winnings. Oh, and also Gi-hun’s bloody track suit, because that won’t stir up a ton of questions or trauma!
In-ho trying to give the baby a good life and give Ga-yeong closure on her father’s death seem like he’s trying to make amends for the harm the games have wrought — at least, when it comes to Gi-hun. (Sidebar: Thank goodness he gave the baby away because imagine being raised by the Squid Game organizers. No therapy in the world could fix that.)
The Front Man stumbles upon a recruiter in Los Angeles, played by a bonkers guest star.
Credit: No Ju-han / Netflix
But perhaps the most telling detail about In-ho’s stance on the games following Gi-hun’s death comes in the show’s final moments. When driving through Los Angeles, he passes a Squid Game recruiter, played by Cate Blanchett in a WTF cameo that puts The Bear’s stunt casting to shame. She’s playing playing ddakji with a prospective player, preparing for a U.S.-based game. That promise of a Squid Game being run outside South Korea potentially sets up David Fincher’s English-language Squid Game spin-off. (Can you believe they’ve MCU-ified Squid Game, of all things?)
As In-ho watches Blanchett’s recruiter do her job, he looks concerned, maybe even a tad remorseful — enough to make you wonder whether he’s still affiliated with the games. He’s not remorseful enough to do anything to stop the recruiter, though, and she seems to know who he is, suggesting that he’s still involved in some way.
Instead, In-ho rolls up his window and looks away. There’s a sense of resignation in the action, an acknowledgment that while Gi-hun’s sacrifice proved to In-ho that some humans have good in them, it ultimately failed to change the games. Like In-ho said in Season 3, episode 4, nothing would change even if Gi-hun killed him. Someone else would take his place, and the cycle would continue, because the very systems of inequality that allow the games to happen in the first place remain unchanged.
So it goes here — although based on the Blanchett cameo, that Squid Game cycle will be continuing in English.