The Struggling Servant of Netflix’s Squid Sport

Observe: This incorporates spoilers for Squid Sport‘s remaining season.

As Squid Sport’s third season wraps up with a finale titled “People are…,” we’re left pondering the right way to full that phrase. Trying again over three seasons of primary-colored units splattered with gore, that open assertion can be an open query to the viewers.

Squid Sport is the form of present you’ll be able to’t be too keen about having fun with. At its core, the spectacle is gladiatorial; it’s bloodsports, the form of factor a contemporary viewers can watch with good conscience solely as a result of it’s fictional. 456 determined and indebted persons are scooped off South Korean streets to compete in lethal youngsters’s video games, with every demise including extra money to the pot; the final participant standing wins an infinite money prize. The melding of brutal violence with playschool aesthetics solely amplifies the situation’s perverseness.

Squid Sport exists inside that paradoxical style during which some horror is portrayed and condemned, but perpetuated season after season as a result of, finally, the horror is what brings within the viewers. Evil can by no means be utterly defeated, as a result of Netflix will at all times need extra episodes. With the baton handed on to America on the shut of season three, I’m left feeling that South Korea received out on the proper time. But for all of the darkness in its idea, the center of Squid Sport’s narrative harbors a kernel of sunshine.

Having received the video games in season one, Seong Gi-hun (Participant 456) returns in season two with the hope of shutting them down. We’re on his facet—in fact we’re—but we all know that he can not succeed. For the present to exist and proceed, the nice man should fail. We’re not sadists (hopefully); we don’t need to watch Squid Sport as a result of we take pleasure in watching individuals get violently murdered. We look ahead to the fun of seeing a hero face lethal peril and overcome it. If Gi-hun died moments into the primary recreation, we might in a short time lose curiosity.

Though Squid Sport serves up a roster of sympathetic characters, it’s Gi-hun whose arc takes us via the entire sequence to a sobering however satisfying finish. He, alone of all of the contestants, performs with no intention of successful the cash. To willingly enter right into a world of vice and violence as a way to save these entrapped by it, understanding that it’d imply your personal demise, is a really Christ-like factor to do. Despite the darkness of the present’s theme—maybe, in truth, as a result of of it—Gi-hun’s goodness radiates all through the narrative.

He isn’t an ideal image of Christ, by any means. Caught out and foiled, disillusioned, compromised, and depressed, Gi-hun stumbles and staggers his approach via gruelling episode after episode, embodying a way more relatable human expertise.

Democracy is the twist in seasons two and three. After every recreation, the surviving contestants can vote to proceed taking part in or finish issues there and break up the present winnings. Gi-hun turns into the prophetic voice, pointing the way in which out of demise and into freedom, but like lots of the Bible’s prophets, he finds himself within the minority. Greed and worry plague the bulk, lots of whom are comfortable to serve up one other human sacrifice if it would assist them repay their very own private money owed.

Let down by democracy, Gi-hun applies himself and a band of followers to the zealot route. As is echoed in so many fashionable superhero films, the one option to beat violence is with violence. His riot although, is crushed. He’s betrayed by a coward and a Judas and is returned to the video games in abject defeat.

Earlier than despair can set in, although, he’s given a method to channel it. When season three opens, Gi-hun has, for the primary time, stepped off the righteous path and surrendered to the demon of the video games. In a slasher model of hide-and-seek, he has eyes just for vengeance, looking down the cowardly Kang Dae-ho (Participant 388), whom he blames for the failed coup. His vengeance, nonetheless falteringly, is fulfilled. Then comes his darkish evening of the soul. He entered the video games hoping to free individuals from demise and now he has blood on his arms. He’s like many Christians who set out stuffed with zeal for God however find yourself tripping over their very own sins and flaws to search out themselves sprawled within the mud with the remainder of humanity.

Having hit all-time low, Gi-hun is thrown an surprising lifeline. Whereas his thoughts had been set on vengeance, the opposite sympathetic characters have been making their very own sacrifices to guard the pregnant Kim Jun-hee (Participant 222) lengthy sufficient for her to offer delivery. New life enters the realm of demise. With Jun-hee’s allies gone and her demise all however assured, she turns to our dejected hero to guard her little one. Compassion delivers him and offers him a cause to maintain going.

Gi-hun is introduced, nonetheless, with one final probability at deliverance via violence. His once-ally reveals himself to be the video games’ Entrance Man and affords him a knife. He can slay the opposite gamers of their sleep and stroll away free with the newborn. It’s the identical selection the Entrance Man was given when he performed the video games, however the place he gave in to the way in which of the blade, Gi-hun refuses. To spare the depraved and endanger the harmless is a daft determination in a world the place the phrase “People are…” is adopted by “…simply our bodies.” However for Gi-hun, as it’s for the Christian, refusing to select up the enemy’s weapons for what looks as if the larger good is to emphasise the sacredness of human life.

When he enters the ultimate recreation with child 222 strapped to his chest, the percentages don’t look favorable. There are three elevated podiums and an extended drop. Three deaths are required, one per podium. What might have become an uninteresting shoving match turns into a harrowing case examine in thoughts video games and barbaric negotiations. With every participant eradicated the stakes are shifted, inserting Gi-hun in varied dilemmas till a final fateful determination. On the finish of all of it, he finds himself alone on the rostrum with the newborn and one remaining demise required.

There’s, in fact, just one proper determination. But the price is just not so simply embraced. It’s one factor to defend an harmless in opposition to violent attackers. It’s fairly one other to know, in chilly silence, that the one approach the harmless can stay is when you step out into nothing and plummet to the concrete ground under.

“People are…” he murmurs, and falls. He has given his reply. 

Squid Sport usually exhibits people at their worst, whether or not it’s the dehumanizing voyeurism of the VIPs, the twisted morality of the sport makers, or the cut-throat avarice of the gamers themselves. In every of those examples, we see people who’ve succumbed to their baser instincts. In distinction, Gi-hun walks the slim path, the tougher highway, persevering via numerous sufferings till he lastly lays down his life in order that one other would possibly stay. He dies in obscurity, with solely enemies watching him. The one he died to avoid wasting is not going to even keep in mind him.

Gi-hun is just not Jesus, but in some ways he bears the traits of the struggling servant spoken about within the prophets, an archetype fulfilled in Jesus after which, naturally, in those that comply with him. The apostle Paul, in reflecting on his personal expertise of following the way in which of Jesus, describes it in methods I think about Gi-hun would acknowledge: “We’re stricken in each approach, however not crushed; perplexed, however not pushed to despair; persecuted, however not forsaken; struck down, however not destroyed” (2 Corinthians 4:8-9).

Though Gi-hun is just not a Christian character, he lives out the form of self-sacrifice to which Christians are referred to as. And if Christians are the primary fruits of a brand new kingdom, meaning the decision is prolonged to humanity at massive. “People are…” Gi-hun intones, earlier than enacting humanity at its greatest. For these of us watching from the consolation of our dwelling rooms, his remaining phrases are an invite.