Some major, but inevitable spoilers for the first half of the season.

Gi-hun’s rebellion has ended in bloody failure, but his punishment is not death – he will have to play the game to its bitter, deadly end.

It has taken me a while to catch up with the third season of Hwang Dong-hyuk’s Squid Game, and while I always do my best to avoid reading reviews before I put fingers to keyboard, it has been hard to escape headlines proclaiming that the show had finally ‘jumped the shark’. I’m shocked, I thought, shocked I tell you!!  Especially given how the whole thing was so plausible to start with. It’s a bit like the guy who, when watching foetuses rain down on Jack Nance in Eraserhead, commented, ‘well, that wouldn’t happen’.

What impresses me about this third tranche of Gi-hun’s story is quite how coherent it manages to be. I’m not going to attempt to summarise the story here – to do so would be to risk far too many spoilers – but given that Squid Game essentially relies on the repetition of the same ‘battle to the death’ idea looped ad nauseum, it’s to Hwang Dong-hyuk’s credit that he continues to find fresh nuances. It turns out that there really is more than one way to crack an egg – or to smash a skull on a concrete floor.

Having said this, the first two episodes of season 3 are particularly grim in terms of the raw brutality of the key game playing out in a concrete labyrinth decked out like a children’s playroom.

The middle episodes introduce a startling twist in terms of who can now compete, challenging the whole premise of what it truly means to ‘win’ these nihilistic games.

In the final acts Gi-hun is cast as a modern day Job – tested not in his belief in God, but rather in his belief in humanity. I found myself on the edge of my seat, not in terms of who would live or die, but on whether or not nihilism would triumph over hope, which is by no means easy to predict.

It’s gripping, twisty stuff – held together by the conviction of Lee Jung-jae’s central performance – marred only by the reappearance of the dreadful ‘VIPs’ who seem to have been cast from English speaking actors schooled in a style of acting toe-curlingly familiar to anyone who has ever seen a 1980s pornographic video.

Don’t ask me how I know this.

There are also some enjoyably naff echoes of early Connery era Bond, along with a rather lovely nod to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1942 thriller, Saboteur, as well as by far the best use of Cliff Richard in South Korean nihilistic ultraviolence ever to grace a streaming platform. I was slightly frustrated by a subtext to do with the schism between North and South Korea, but I confess that this is way beyond my paygrade. I can’t pretend to know whether or not this motif was profound and meaningful, or a piece of gratuitous local decoration.

Verdict: For anyone who has bought into the Squid Game premise from the off, this season is a more than decent third act. For the rest of you, well, it’s not hard to argue that, on the balance of probabilities, ‘that just wouldn’t happen’. 8/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com