Note: This contains spoilers for Squid Game‘s final season.
As Squid Game’s third season wraps up with a finale titled “Humans are…,” we are left pondering how to complete that phrase. Looking back over three seasons of primary-colored sets splattered with gore, that open statement is also an open question to the audience.
Squid Game is the sort of show you can’t be too enthusiastic about enjoying. At its core, the spectacle is gladiatorial; it’s bloodsports, the sort of thing a modern audience can watch with good conscience only because it’s fictional. 456 desperate and indebted people are scooped off South Korean streets to compete in deadly children’s games, with each death adding more money to the pot; the last player standing wins an enormous cash prize. The melding of brutal violence with playschool aesthetics only amplifies the scenario’s perverseness.
Squid Game exists within that paradoxical genre in which some horror is portrayed and condemned, yet perpetuated season after season because, ultimately, the horror is what brings in the audience. Evil can never be completely defeated, because Netflix will always want more episodes. With the baton passed on to America at the close of season three, I am left feeling that South Korea got out at the right time. Yet for all the darkness in its concept, the heart of Squid Game’s narrative harbors a kernel of light.
Although Gi-hun is not a Christian character, he lives out the sort of self-sacrifice to which Christians are called.
Having won the games in season one, Seong Gi-hun (Player 456) returns in season two with the hope of shutting them down. We are on his side—of course we are—yet we know that he cannot succeed. For the show to exist and continue, the good guy must fail. We’re not sadists (hopefully); we don’t want to watch Squid Game because we enjoy watching people get violently murdered. We watch for the thrill of seeing a hero face deadly peril and overcome it. If Gi-hun died moments into the first game, we would very quickly lose interest.
Although Squid Game serves up a roster of sympathetic characters, it is Gi-hun whose arc takes us through the whole series to a sobering but satisfying end. He, alone of all the contestants, plays with no intention of winning the money. To willingly enter into a world of vice and violence in order to save those entrapped by it, knowing that it might mean your own death, is a very Christ-like thing to do. In spite of the darkness of the show’s theme—perhaps, in fact, because of it—Gi-hun’s goodness radiates throughout the narrative.
He is not a perfect picture of Christ, by any means. Caught out and foiled, disillusioned, compromised, and depressed, Gi-hun stumbles and staggers his way through gruelling episode after episode, embodying a much more relatable human experience.
Democracy is the twist in seasons two and three. After each game, the surviving contestants can vote to continue playing or end things there and split the current winnings. Gi-hun becomes the prophetic voice, pointing the way out of death and into freedom, yet like many of the Bible’s prophets, he finds himself in the minority. Greed and fear plague the majority, many of whom are happy to serve up another human sacrifice if it will help them pay off their own personal debts.
Let down by democracy, Gi-hun applies himself and a band of followers to the zealot route. As is echoed in so many modern superhero movies, the only way to beat violence is with violence. His rebellion though, is crushed. He is betrayed by a coward and a Judas and is returned to the games in abject defeat.
Before despair can set in, though, he is given a means to channel it. When season three opens, Gi-hun has, for the first time, stepped off the righteous path and surrendered to the demon of the games. In a slasher version of hide-and-seek, he has eyes only for vengeance, hunting down the cowardly Kang Dae-ho (Player 388), whom he blames for the failed coup. His vengeance, however falteringly, is fulfilled. Then comes his dark night of the soul. He entered the games hoping to free people from death and now he has blood on his hands. He is like many Christians who set out full of zeal for God but end up tripping over their own sins and flaws to find themselves sprawled in the mud with the rest of humanity.
Having hit rock bottom, Gi-hun is thrown an unexpected lifeline. While his mind had been set on vengeance, the other sympathetic characters were making their own sacrifices to protect the pregnant Kim Jun-hee (Player 222) long enough for her to give birth. New life enters the realm of death. With Jun-hee’s allies gone and her death all but guaranteed, she turns to our dejected hero to protect her child. Compassion delivers him and gives him a reason to keep going.
Gi-hun is presented, however, with one last chance at deliverance through violence. His once-ally reveals himself to be the games’ Front Man and offers him a knife. He can slay the other players in their sleep and walk away free with the baby. It is the same choice the Front Man was given when he played the games, but where he gave in to the way of the blade, Gi-hun refuses. To spare the wicked and endanger the innocent is a ludicrous decision in a world where the phrase “Humans are…” is followed by “…just bodies.” But for Gi-hun, as it is for the Christian, refusing to pick up the enemy’s weapons for what seems like the greater good is to emphasize the sacredness of human life.
When he enters the final game with baby 222 strapped to his chest, the odds do not look favorable. There are three elevated podiums and a long drop. Three deaths are required, one per podium. What could have turned into an uninteresting shoving match becomes a harrowing case study in mind games and barbaric negotiations. With each player eliminated the stakes are shifted, placing Gi-hun in various dilemmas until a last fateful decision. At the end of it all, he finds himself alone on the podium with the baby and one final death required.
There is, of course, only one right decision. Yet the cost is not so easily embraced. It is one thing to defend an innocent against violent attackers. It is quite another to know, in cold silence, that the only way the innocent can live is if you step out into nothing and plummet to the concrete floor below.
“Humans are…” he murmurs, and falls. He has given his answer.
Squid Game often shows humans at their worst, whether it’s the dehumanizing voyeurism of the VIPs, the twisted morality of the game makers, or the cut-throat avarice of the players themselves. In each of these examples, we see humans who have succumbed to their baser instincts. In contrast, Gi-hun walks the narrow path, the harder road, persevering through countless sufferings until he finally lays down his life so that another might live. He dies in obscurity, with only enemies watching him. The one he died to save will not even remember him.
Gi-hun is not Jesus, yet in many ways he bears the characteristics of the suffering servant spoken about in the prophets, an archetype fulfilled in Jesus and then, naturally, in those who follow him. The apostle Paul, in reflecting on his own experience of following the way of Jesus, describes it in ways I imagine Gi-hun would recognize: “We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed” (2 Corinthians 4:8-9).
Although Gi-hun is not a Christian character, he lives out the sort of self-sacrifice to which Christians are called. And if Christians are the first fruits of a new kingdom, that means the call is extended to humanity at large. “Humans are…” Gi-hun intones, before enacting humanity at its best. For those of us watching from the comfort of our living rooms, his final words are an invitation.
