Spoilers

Squid Game Season Three dropped on Netflix yesterday and I was able to binge it on Saturday and what an emotionally ragged trip this show took us on over the last six episodes of the acclaimed Korean series.

If we are really being truthful, season three of Squid Game really should be considered the second part of season two, as season two left us with a huge cliffhanger and very little to nothing resolved. Season Two Part 2 or Season Three is really semantics, so who cares that much?

Season two had spent a lot of time building the characters participating in the Squid Game up, so we had connections to them and that we cared about them (or despised them, as the case may be). I guess we should have known that they were building up these characters in order to rip our hearts out in the last season… because that is exactly what happened.

Honestly, there were a few characters that I believed would survive this season because I couldn’t believe that the show would be that cold hearted. Unfortunately, the show could be that cold hearted because practically every character that I thought “no way do they kill them off” got killed off.

Seong Gi-hun (played by Lee Jung-jae) was the one I was sure would survive, but the show had a fate for him planned out. He was truly our hero of the show and he showed what an honorable man he actually was. His efforts to save the baby, as well as others along the way, made him the show’s breakout character.

Geum-ja was another character that I thought for sure the show would not kill off, and then she hanged herself, after stabbing her own son to prevent him from killing Kim Jun-hee moments after she had given birth. That round of hide and seek was just horrific and filled with tension and anguish. Hyun-ju was another who I was sure had a great chance of being safe, but she did not make it out of the hide and seek, despite the fact that she found the exit before anyone else. She returned to get Geum-ja and Kim Jun-hee, whom had been together the whole game, only to get killed from behind by Myung-gi, right in front of Jun-hee and his daughter.

The jump rope section was also just rough and showed the worst in the players of this game. In fact, the worst of them kept making it through and the characters that I cared about kept getting killed off. I felt satisfied by the end with the deaths of those rotten players though.

However, the VIPs arrived to watch the games and they all had zero accountability at all. Man, I really wanted those VIPs to pay some kind of price for their cavalier attitude toward the games and their downright cruelty and wickedness. Nope, they see the ending of the games when Seong Gi-hun threw himself off the large pillar to save the baby and the VIPs are just never seen again. I really wanted someone to burst into the room and blast them all with some automatic weapon.

Who would guess that Cate Blanchett would be involved in the recruiting for more Squid Games in the world? She made a cameo as an American recruiter playing ddakji with some guy in an alleyway.

The last ten-fifteen minutes was spent wrapping stories up, giving us some ideas on what the few surviving characters were doing, specifically those secondary characters, such as Seong Gi-hun’s daughter.

This was a rough final season as so many of the characters that we had bonded with are killed rapidly. As I said, I really wanted more of a final ending that does not make me think that the Squid Games could be brought back or continue on as the show outright implied. The VIPs needed some kind of comeuppance for me to feel completely satisfied. The sacrifice made by Seong Gi-hun was beautiful and packed an emotional wallop.

A powerhouse of a series.