SPOILERS FOR SQUID GAME EP 5

“A Fair World“

As we wrapped up the Tug O’War cliffhanger from last episode, the fifth episode took a deeper look at the organ harvesting operation being run out of the Squid Game. We found out that the whole organ harvesting and subsequent selling of organs to the Chinese was outside of the typical part of the game. The villain in the black mask knew what was going on, but he turned his eyes away from that aspect. He wanted to keep the fairness of the game, which had been tainted by the use of the Doctor, giving him inside information on what was the next game. This is a warped view of what was going on, but that is what makes the villain a good villain.

We also go into the story of the detective Ha-Joon and his search for his brother. This took some serious twists in episode 5 as Ha-Joon found himself in the records room of the Squid Game and he discovered that his brother was not among the current players but had been a winner in 2016. This makes me wonder if my rampant speculation from a few episode write-ups ago is going to turn out to be correct. Is the Black Mass boss man his brother? When he was looking at the records, the camera specifically darkens out the picture of his brother from the upper corner of the sheet, and I feel as if the brother is definitely here somewhere. I am unaware of who else the big boss may be otherwise as the show has definitely spent time to conceal that identity.

Back in the dorm room, Gi-hun is really showing how much growth he has shown in the short time he has been in the Squid Game. He is taking care of Number 001, humorously interacting with Sae-byeok, and playing reverse psychology with Deok-su. That scene with Deok-su where Gi-hun carefully plants the seeds of mistrust in Deok-su’s head toward his other team mates, suggesting that they may want to attack Deok-su because he is the strongest in the game. It was a brilliant maneuver and kept Deok-su from launching another attack in the night.

The doctor in the show, who had been harvesting the organs in exchange for info, continued to be shown as not the best of the medical profession. He was becoming irritated with the other soldiers around him in “his” operating room and he started yelling at people. His behavior only escalated when he discovered that the soldiers did not know yet what the next game was going to be. This turned into a huge chase with the doctor trying to get away, only to find death at the end of the road. He was an obscene character and I was glad to see him eliminated.

We start to see what may be the eventual downturn in health of Number 001. He broke into a fever during the night and Gi-hun tried to help cool him down. He was laying down when the soldiers had come over to him to have him move, Gi-hun tried to protect him, but the soldier pulled the covers away to reveal that Number 001 had urinated over himself in the night. Teh sadness of the scene was terrible as Gi-hun flashed his expressive face. I am worried that Number 001 may not be long for the series.

I am watching this much quicker than I initially had intended. I was going to watch maybe one a day or one episode every few days. Now I am done with five on Saturday (going to watch one more tonight before the Dodgers start) and will have only three left. I guess that speaks to the brilliance of the series as well as anything does.

SPOILERS FOR SQUID GAME EP. 5

Are you freakin’ kidding me?

Not fair! Not fair!

I’m talking about the tug o’war at first even though it ended the episode because of how it ended the episode. It was the cruelest cliffhanger cutaway that I have seen in a long time. When Gi-hun’s team was losing their mojo in the life or death tug o’ war match, they tried a desperate ploy that did not work on ABC’s Battle of the Network Stars back in the early 1980s. They were going to take three steps forward and then try and catch the other team off balance. Except the show went to break just as they did it and ended for the episode. I literally jumped out of my seat and yelled at the screen.

The strategy laid out by Number 001 as a way for their smaller team to win the Tug O’ War was fantastic too and there was so much anxiety during the matches that it was palatable.

And if that was the only moment in this episode, it would have been great. However, there was an insane riot in the bunk beds room too.

Set up by shorting the group their food, the Squid Game boss wanted the participants to attack each other, eliminating the weakest among the remaining people.

The riot was utterly breathtaking. I sat and watched with a stunned silence as they reigned violence down upon each other.

This was the best episode so far for Number 001. He gave us the range of emotion from fear to confusion to confidence. Actor Yeong-su Oh ha been a highlight so far in the drama, but in this episode, he just soared into the atmosphere.

Again this episode had the participants shoring up their allies/groups. Gi-hun invited the pickpocket Sae-byeok to come to their side before the chaos erupted when the lights went out. After the riot ended, the group exchanged real names in order to build more trust with each other.

Our villains were getting together more as well, including the doctor who continued to be getting secret messages in his food, letting him know what the next game is. We found out why in episode 4. He is doing the organ harvesting on the dead bodies of the participants, so he had worked out a deal to keep him alive. So we know that the Squid Game deals with selling organs, presumably on the black market.

This was, by far, my favorite episode of the series so far. The constant uneasiness is just pervasive through the show, but there are some excellent characters that are proving to be worth rooting for. They have several villains too that are just pushing every button right.

And then they had the cruelest cliffhanger….

SPOILERS FOR EPISODE 3 OF SQUID GAME

“The Man with the Umbrella“

Squid Game continued on in episode three with some of our characters forming alliances, a couple of people going undercover or stealthy, and a rousing and unbelievably tense game of Honeycomb.

I really enjoyed the forming of the team with Gi-hun partnering up with Sang-woo, Ali Abdul and Number 001. I will say immediately that Gi-hun has taken a huge step in likeability for me. For the first few episodes, he was not a character that I cared much for despite being our protagonist. Maybe it is more like I saw this character as a rotten person and I did not want to like him. However, in this episode, that took a turn as he became more than just the whiny, money grubbing jerk that he was. Just the smile on his face as he was interacting with his teammates really went a long way to making this character appealing.

And there is no doubt that I love Number 001 and Ali (Number 199). These two characters are going to be heart-wrenching if and when they die.

Honeycomb was this episode’s game and I cannot imagine how horrendous it would be trying to do this detailed work, trying to cut out certain shapes from the honey cookie, with people being shot all around them and dead bodies bleeding out on the ground beside you. All of the peripheral events could not be help to make you more anxious and less careful, I would think.

We are also beginning to get a look at the inside of Squid Game thanks to our friendly neighborhood detective, Jun-ho. He was able to tail the vans to the ship that would take the participants back to the island. He was able to jump one of the “guards” and take his place. He found the going to be very challenging considering that he was not sure of the procedures of the game and his job. There were several points where it seemed as if he was going to be caught, but he was able to slip through and survive.

This show has a combination Hunger Games/LOST feel to it. LOST because of the island aspect, plus how most of these people had bad lives before arriving on the island. In LOST, we got flashbacks showing how rotten the lives of the survivors were and how they were not good people. The characters on LOST many times were not very likable in their past lives and we get to see a new side once they were on the island. This is very much like most of these characters in the Squid Game. There is also the mysterious organization behind the whole thing, much like the Dharma Initiative.

Only six more episodes to go. I had really not intended to watch these as closely together as I have, but they are engaging and easy to consume. I did go back to the Korean language with English subtitles this episode (which I will do for the remainder of the season). It is just so much more emotional to hear the real voices that matched the lips and the facial expressions coming from these actors.

A few more items:

• What is up with the guy who got the message in his bread?
• Sae-byeok is one bad ass character.
• Our villain in the black mask is very mysterious. Wild speculation: Could he be Jun-ho’s missing brother?
• Poor young kid under that square helmet. What is the story behind these “guards?” Are they as much of victims as the players?

There are a lot of questions being raised about exactly what is going on here and how something this large and intricate can be carried out. I am excited to see where this goes from here with six more episodes to go.

SPOILERS FOR SQUID GAME EPISODE 2

“Hell“

So, with episode two of Netflix’s Squid Game, I tried something different. Episode one I watched with the subtitles in the actual Korean language. For episode two, I tried the dubbed version. Typically, I do not like the dubbed versions of entertainment, but I wanted to see if this would be an exception.

It wasn’t.

The dubbed version was considerably less engaging than the Korean language/subtitle version and, because of that, I just did not enjoy episode two near as much as I did episode one. I also think it was a major error in choice for me because episode two turned out to be so different than the first episode with the majority of the group voting to leave the Squid Game and return to their own lives.

Did not see that happening.

But, it meant that there was more emotional depth going on as we see the different characters and the horrible lives that they were living prior to being recruited into the Squid Game. With the dubbed version, these emotional bits did not land near as well. The original Korean may not be understandable, but the real voices and the sound of the voices were so much more real… so much more tonally correct than these dubs that it feels more like acting going on. It felt more cartoony with the dub and that did not work with the story that was being told. Watching a review of the episode on Preview’d with Jay and Adam, the scenes they showed were just so much more thrilling or powerful with the original Korean language than what I watched.

Moving forward, I will be watching the subtitled version from now on.

This episode dove deeper into the back story of most of our main characters, giving us an idea of what their lives were like. Our main characters decided that they had to go back, and were given an opportunity to do so. At this point, there will be less of a feeling of this being something that was done to them and more of something that they chose to do to try and escape the hell that their lives had become.

A few moments that stood out:

• The crushing of the hand. Whoa… brutal.
• The inclusion of the detective following the Squid game pick up van brings anew wrinkle.
• The pickpocket still being awake in the van after the gas at the very end of the show.
• Gi-hun and his interaction with his ex-wife’s husband. Another one of those powerful moments undermined with the dub.

Looking forward to everyone coming back to the land of the multiple bunk beds and seeing what happens next to out ensemble cast.

SPOILERS FOR SQUID GAME EPISODE 1

“Red Light, Green Light“

One of the cultural phenomenon in the world of pop culture over the last few months has been the 10-episode series, Squid Game, on Netflix. It seemed like the entire world was buzzing about this series. As I have said before, I have been having a difficult time to committing to watching new series, especially binging a series, lately. Especially because my time has been limited with school, the DailyView, the Dodgers and the regular movies that I am responsible to do.

However, I have had friends ask me about whether I have watched this yet, and so I was looking to plan out a time to get it done. It did not help matters that the episodes were mostly right around the hour in length. I considered a Thanksgiving binge, but I have decided that I would start this one tonight, but not worry about binging. I would do this one episode at a time when I could squeeze one in.

The first episode, entitled “Red Light, Green Light,” started in a black and white flashback with a group of kids playing a kids game called Squid Game. This was not a game that I was familiar with (I am not sure if this was made up for the show or if it were a real life game played in Korea), so I appreciated the outline of the rules. I assume this is going to come into play later in the series.

I guess I should say that I did watch this with the English subtitles on and without the dubbing. I am not a fan of dubbing English into the mouths of characters. I have heard that they do a good job with it, but it always is distracting for me so i would rather read the subtitles than put up with the dubbing. This series is, of course, made in Korea.

We get introduced to our main character, Gi-hun (Lee Jung-Jae), one of the kids we saw in the flashbacks, having much more success playing the kids game as a youth than he was having as an adult living life. He was just a slacker extraordinaire here, a divorcee, an absentee father, a gambler… as well as someone who would steal his mother’s ATM card to get money. Yes, he was getting the money to spend on his daughter (or so we think) but he was anything but likeable.

Thankfully, that means Gi-hun has quite a road to travel to find improvement in his character during this show.

The set up for the game is excellent. The whole face slapping was a funny moment, not knowing how sinister it would eventually become. The chance at changing the pattern of his life was just too much of a temptation to ignore. It was obvious right away that Gi-hun had wound up in above his head. I did enjoy the way the show began to introduce the secondary characters that will be involved in the games.

Then, with the dark version of Red Light, Green Light, we see how brutal the games were going to be. I was not quite ready for the bloody and tense children’s game. The giant girl robot was creepy and the execution of those who were caught moving was frightening. When the whole group freaked out at the start, you have to wonder what they were all thinking. I loved how into it Number 001 was too.

I enjoyed the first episode and I will be trying to find time in the schedule to watch more this weekend.