“Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”
― G.K. Chesterton
Once it was a global cultural phenomenon. Now Squid Game has become one of the most bitterly polarized IPs in recent memory. The reason is simple: the ending.
Audiences can forgive almost anything. What they can’t forgive is a terrible ending. While hailed as ‘dark’ and ‘realistic’, the ending of the final season of Squid Game left much of the fanbase disappointed.
As a professional storyteller, I am even more disappointed: with a few minor tweaks, I could have given it the ending it deserved.
(Major spoilers ahead.)
The first season of Squid Game concluded with a powerful ending. Seong Gi-Hun, having survived the Squid Game and becoming rich beyond avarice, chooses to forsake his own happiness to stop the games once and for all. This segues into the second season, in which he re-infiltrates the games, this time with help from the outside.
Then everything goes wrong.
Things going wrong is not inherently bad. It is the foundational ingredient for tension and suspense. The enemy always gets a vote, and an entity as long-running as Squid Game would surely have countermeasures against detection and infiltration.
Viewers continue watching because, having invested themselves in the story, they want to know how the heroes get themselves out of their latest fix. They want to see the heroes triumph over adversity. They want to discover who the heroes truly are when their values are put to the test.
Every story is a contract between the storyteller and the audience. The audience invests time, energy, and money. The storyteller delivers a tale worthy of their investment. With every story beat, that contract is renewed. The storyteller is promising that the audience will get their payoff, if only they stay just a little longer.
The original Squid Game delivered on its promise. That was one of the reasons why it became massively successful. Seasons 2 and 3 did not.
Season 2 sets up four primary story arcs. The first is Seong Gi-Hun’s quest to end the Squid Game. The second is Detective Hwang Jun-ho and Choi Woo-seok partnering with Seong to discover the island where the Squid Game is played. The third involves North Korean defector Kang No-eul, also known as Soldier 11, working to bring her daughter across the border. The last is the Front Man’s participation in the Squid Game, and his attempts to manipulate the game and Seong. Season 3 was supposed to deliver the payoff for all four arcs.
Instead, all but one fizzled.
Hwang and Choi’s efforts came to nought. Nothing they did had any influence on the story. The only real contribution they made was calling in the Coast Guard, and even the presence of the authorities did not stop the game.
The Front Man’s participation meant little in the end. This arc mirrors Season 1, in which Oh Il-Nam, the founder of Squid Game, also participated in the games. In Season 1, this story arc ends with Seong facing off with Oh in a clash over their respective beliefs. In Season 3, the audience had every reason to believe there would be another such clash. What they got was an anticlimactic conversation—one that barely even touches on Seong’s participation in Season 2.
Hwang and Choi’s arc disrespects the audience. Without a payoff worthy of the audience’s time, it is reduced from a desperate hunt to meaningless filler.
Likewise, the Front Man’s arc is disappointing. In Season 2, the Front Man pretended to be an ally to gain Seong’s trust. When he unmasked himself during their meeting, there was no sense of recognition of their previous history in the games. Further, Seong’s reaction to experiencing yet another betrayal was too understated. Instead of bracing the Front Man, Seong just got up and left.
The confrontation was an attempt at subtlety. The charitable interpretation is that the final game was an extension of their last conversation. Both characters chose to express their perspectives through deeds, not words. But previous episodes showed the degeneration of the games into aggression and brutality—not to mention Seong himself.
In the penultimate game, Seong murdered a fellow player for cowardice. It was the first time Seong had killed someone in Squid Game for a reason other than self-defence. It should have been a watershed moment, changing his psyche forever. Being more willing to use violence, he should have been more willing to openly confront the Front Man. This was the story—and the marketing materials—was building up to. Instead, the viewers got a lack of drama. It marked an unnatural break in tone between this confrontation and the rest of the show.
Audiences don’t mind subtlety. But that subtlety has to be earned. It has to be contiguous with the rest of the story, or it will come off as underwhelming.
The one arc that did not fizzle out was Kang’s arc, because she managed to escape the games and learn about her daughter’s fate. With only one of the arcs ending at least semi-satisfactorily, it’s small wonder that many viewers were left unhappy.
Real life is messy. People drop in and out of your life. People make promises and fail to live up to them. You don’t always get what you want. People know this. This is why they turn to fiction.
Fiction promises the satisfaction you don’t get in real life. Without satisfaction, there is no point in fiction—especially if you have to spend significant amounts of time, money and energy to get to the end.
The key conflict in all three seasons of Squid Game is about the nature of man. Is man a wolf to man? Or is man flawed but still fundamentally good?
Squid Game is founded on the former. Seong Gi-Hun embodies the latter. This clash of ideologies informs the core conflicts in every game in all three seasons, as well as the meta-conflict between Seong and the organisers. In the high-pressure environments of the games, the characters reveal who they are inside.
Squid Game is built on a deceptively simple set of rules. Hundreds players participate in a series of life-or-death games for a sum of prize money. Those who fulfil the game conditions survive, those who fail die. Every player death increases the size of the cash pool. At the end of each game, players vote to continue or end the game. After the conclusion of the game, the survivors split the prize among themselves.
However, while the rules are ironclad for most players, certain players receive special privileges. Player 001 will survive, as they are inside men. Eventually this privilege is extended to Seong for some reason, even though he rebelled against the game.
Squid Game cleverly leverages game theory, greed and crowd psychology. The ideal outcome is for players to cooperate to minimise deaths and end the game as early as possible. But every player has his own motivations for participating. Greed and desperation drives them to defect, to act selfishly and manipulate others to increase the prize pool and ensure their own survival.
The games are designed to drive the players into making the worst decisions through a slow escalation. The first game is played as individuals, but these individuals can sabotage other players. Future team-based games require cooperation, but open the door to defection.
Player deaths are initially indirect. Either the Squid Game soldiers or the game environments kill players who fail the games. In later games, once players are accustomed to the idea of killing by proxy, players are pitted directly against each other. Now they are forced to bloody their own hands.
Squid Game is the prisoner’s dilemma on a large scale. If everyone cooperates, everyone wins a little. If someone defects, that person wins a lot, while the others lose a lot—including their lives. But if everyone defects, everyone loses.
Squid Game encourages defection by dangling the cash prize in front of the players and not punishing anyone who defects. Player 001 ensures the game will continue by manipulating other players and voting for continuation. This makes Seong Gi-Hun so remarkable.
In the first season, despite his desperate situation, he refuses to act selfishly. In the second season, he goes back into the games and tries to encourage cooperation. Most players reward him by defecting over and over again, or forming factions based on greed and selfishness.
Seong Gi-Hun defies a system designed to turn men into wolves. This is what makes him the hero.
And the hero dies in the end—for nothing.
The bad guys walk away. The good guys either die or fail to achieve their goals. And the Squid Game continues in America.
Supporters say this is the realistic ending. The rich and powerful always get their way in the end. But this misses a point: the audience already knows this.
From the Epstein files to the Panama papers, recent history alone tells us that the rich and powerful have the means to escape justice. We already know that there are dragons out there. What we need to believe is that the wicked will be punished and the good will be rewarded.
Because this also happens in real life.
Despite their wealth and power, Osama bin Laden, Hassan Nasrallah and Elizabeth Holmes were brought to justice. Stanislav Petrov, Scott Ruskan, the Chernobyl suicide squad, and others were recognized and rewarded for their heroism.
We live in a world that still recognises the value of justice and courage. This world is only possible because we still uphold these values, even if the elites try to undermine them.
It is fashionable to pursue dark, depressive and subversive endings. These are the endings that Hollywood and Netflix favour these days. But this is not the ending that the audience want and need. More importantly, such endings are not what stories need.
A Song of Ice and Fire was yet another IP that first became an international sensation, and is now in danger of falling flat on its face. Despite the darkness and brutality pervading the series, it had the perfect setup for a classical fantasy ending. Jon Snow ascends to the throne, unites the warring houses under his leadership, throws back the White Walkers, and ushers in a golden age for all of Westeros. That would have made the grimdarkness of the series worth it.
Instead, author George R. R. Martin insists on subversion over sincerity, moral greyness over moral clarity. In so doing, he has written himself into a corner. He cannot find a way to provide a satisfying ending. This is why, after 14 years and counting, he has yet to write another mainline Game of Thrones book.
Unlike Martin, Squid Game promised an ending, so it had to deliver. But like Martin, Squid Game chose darkness and subversion. What should have been an epic ending was reduced to a teaser for Squid Game America.
The greatest tragedy was that the original ending of Squid Game delivered on its set up.
Squid Game creator Hwang Dong-hyuk disclosed that in the original ending, Seong Gi-Hun and a few others would have survived the game, and Seong would go on to meet his daughter. This would the classical ending, the ending fans expected.
Instead, Hwang decided to revise the ending. Through Seong’s sacrifice, the Front Man had a change of heart, realising that he was wrong about humanity being inherently evil. It also subverted audience expectations.
Audiences don’t mind subversion. They’ve been trained to accept subversion since the days of A Song of Ice and Fire. An entire generation has been raised on Hollywood and postmodern creators pulling the rug out from beneath them at the last minute. Subversion is the new normal.
What audiences do mind is lack of satisfaction—and the subversive ending failed to deliver.
It threw away most of the key story arcs, making most of the earlier episodes pointless. It dumped the characters that the audience had grown to love by minimising their impact on the story or forcing them into making bad decisions.
The true disappointment is that, with a few key tweaks, Squid Game could have delivered on its premise while still respecting the audience.
The final game has three rounds. In each round, players must eliminate at least one player to progress. The survivors of the third round then share the prize money.
However, players must manually begin each round. Eliminations before the round starts do not count. Each round only ends when the timer runs down. Eliminating a single person does not end the round.
Through a series of poor decisions—players being eliminated before the round starts or ends—Seong Gi-Hun is left alone with Player 222, the baby, in the last round. In the original ending, Seong sacrifices himself to save the infant.
A golden ending would defeat the ideology of Squid Game, the idea that man is a wolf to man. Seong would cooperate with the baby’s father, Player 333, to defeat the other wolves participating in the game. Perhaps other players could join them too. For a touch of tragedy, Player 333 could sacrifice himself in the third round, trusting Seong to look after the baby.
Squid Game is designed to reduce 456 players to a single winner by encouraging defection at every turn. By having multiple survivors who win through cooperation, Seong’s ideology prevails.
Detective Hwang reaches the island and links up with Kang and Seong. Together, they confront the Front Man and the VIPs. The Coast Guard rescues the survivors and arrests the criminals. Squid Game is shut down and Seong reconnects with his daughter. Then he spots the American Squid Game recruiter.
This ending satisfies everyone. The story arcs are closed neatly. The characters receive their just deserts: the good ones are rewarded, the evil are punished or earn a chance for redemption. It grants Seong’s character arc a beautiful symmetry. In Season 1, he falls and rises, but doesn’t see his daughter; in Season 2 and 3, he falls again, then rises into triumph, and sees his daughter in the end and tries to be a better father.
And for the Netflix executives who want to turn the IP into a franchise, they get their satisfaction too, with the appearance of the American recruiter.
Squid Game shows what happens when a creator tries to force a subversive ending into a story that is not set up for one. Entire story arcs are cast aside, drama becomes pointless, characters make stupid mistakes, and the audience is left disappointed.
Audiences don’t mind dark, depressive, even nihilistic endings. The entire genre of film noir demonstrates this. What they do mind is a story that does not support such an ending. For a nihilistic ending to work, Squid Game should have showed from the start that everyone, without exception, is destroyed by their flaws, the way film noir does it. Instead, by setting up for a good ending in Season 2, the ending of Season 3 leaves fans bitter and acrimonious.
Hwang Dong-hyuk claimed that the ending of Season 3 is thematically consistent with the tone of the series. But Season 2 did not set up this ending. This made the series internally inconsistent. Audiences care about that, and their wasted time, money and energy, than thematic consistency.
In wasting the audience's time, Squid Game reneged on its contract and betrayed the audience.
Did Hwang make an error by revising the ending? Perhaps, but let' us look's look at the bigger picture.
In 2023, Squid Game reportedly made Netflix over $900 million, but Hwang received none of the residuals. His only earnings was the money he made from selling the rights to Squid Game to Netflix.
He claimed that the final season of Squid Game was meant to be a single season, but it was too long, so it was split into two. This makes no sense, because each of the two final seasons runs for only six episodes. Modern TV series, even those with hour-long episodes, run to around ten to twelve episodes per season, at a minimum. But if he sells two separate seasons to Netflix, he might make more money than selling a single season. Likewise, Netflix might make more money in subscriptions by promoting what is essentially the same season twice.
The success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe encouraged major IPs to set up franchises and universes. Squid Game is no exception. A franchise means more opportunities to make even more money. Already there is talk of multiple Squid Game spinoffs, of which Squid Game America is only one of them.
You cannot have a franchise if the heroes shut down Squid Game.
Squid Game was a commentary on capitalism and human nature. By pursuing profit and betraying the trust of the viewers, it became what it had set out to critique.
