DISCLAIMER: There are spoilers throughout this article.
After I saw the Squid Game series trend on social media, it grabbed my attention from how good the show looked. The plot intrigued me after seeing it had similarities to another favorite series of mine, The Hunger Games, so I decided I had to watch Squid Game.
Squid Game is a South Korean series that includes nine episodes where most of the episodes are about an hour long. Each of the contestants are competing in games for a tremendous amount of money. They are taken to an unknown location and they cannot leave until there is a winner, although the staff did show mercy. They let them take a vote to leave or stay and the majority voted to leave. However, many came back to the games when they realized how desperate they were to win the prize money.
The games they play are children’s games but in a more graphic tone. I say this because once they lose at a game and get eliminated, they are then shot to death by the guards. The death scenes in the show are overly graphic and go in detail. I found this eerie but at the same time interesting as they show a lot of symbolism. A few examples include Jun-ho’s brother’s Squid Game card being inside a box that is designed like the coffins they put the contestants in when they lose and that the characters who end up dying actually predict their own death.
Another character in the show, Sae-Byeok, is angry and holds a knife to a man’s throat who previously did her wrong. When Sang-Woo gets his chance, he ends up slitting her throat. She ended up being my favorite character in the entire series. From her backstory, I thought she deserved to win the money. Even though we first see her as harsh and defensive, I could understand why she was. She went through hardships as she lost her father, she worries for her mother’s safety, needs to get her brother out of the orphanage and goes through discrimination as she is from North Korea.
I expected a lot of betrayal from the series since it is a show where people compete and their next steps determine their fate, so it wasn’t surprising to me that Sang-woo betrayed Ali in the marble game. However, a betrayal I was shocked from was seeing Il-nam be behind the games the whole time as we assumed he died while playing the marble game with Gi-hun. I expected him to be an innocent character who meant well but we then find out by the end he decided to participate in the games for his own entertainment before he dies in the real world.
I would recommend the show except to people who can’t handle seeing gore. We see it all the time in movies and tv shows but in Squid Game specifically, they overdo it. It doesn’t bother me but I understand there are a lot of people who don’t like to see blood and internal organs. Besides that, the show gives a lot of great clues on what happens next and it’s easy to follow the plot which is the main reason why I liked the show.