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Malay Mail
07-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Malay Mail
Of ‘Squid Game' and family trauma
JULY 7 — Note: There are no spoilers ahead. I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that the real appeal of the Korean mega-series Squid Game (Season 2 was released earlier this year and the final season just dropped last week) is not the fact that contestants are gambling their lives via children's games; it's the fact that their deadly participation in said contests refracts the trauma and breakdown in modern family life. Freudian-inclined philosophers like Slavoj Žižek, Richard Boothby, and Alenka Zupancic have argued that popular media serves as a cultural mechanism for registering and working through complex emotions and societal tensions. As such, shows like Squid Game — and in fact almost every major movie or TV series — may be offering audiences a way of 'processing' frustration, pain and tragedy in the family by way of entertainment and fantasy. Consider how commonplace are the troubles in the family with regards to the show's main characters. As such, shows like Squid Game — and in fact almost every major movie or TV series — may be offering audiences a way of 'processing' frustration, pain and tragedy in the family by way of entertainment and fantasy. From the first season, we learnt that the chief protagonist, Gi-Hun, is a degenerate gambler who lives with his mum after being estranged from his wife. He loves his daughter deeply but is close to losing her as his ex-wife and her husband plan to migrate to the States, thus taking the daughter away from him. Although scared shitless about everyone dying from the first game, Gi-Hun continues playing after learning about his mum's growing health problems and the prospect of never seeing his daughter again. In Season 2, the family nightmares continue. No-Eul is a North Korean defector traumatised by the loss of her husband and, especially, her daughter. Thus, as one of the 'workers' on the island where the games are played, she risks her life to help one of the participants with a cancer-stricken child, too. Probably the most difficult situation parent-wise was when Geum-Ja joined the games without the knowledge of her son, Yong-Sik, because she wanted to support or even save him given how his massive debts spurred him to sign up to play as well. Finally, an arc which is brought forward from the first season, policeman Jun-Ho's pursuit of his long-lost brother In-Ho (the 'Front Man' of the games). When I reflected on my experience of the series, I noticed that the most moving parts for me were precisely these moments of family precariousness. There are many people in our own communities going through similar struggles and problems; to view such difficulties presented and played on the screen cannot help but add that extra all-critical 'spark' to such films. Any parent with a child struggling with poor health can easily relate to a character dangerously breaking rules to help another sick child. Likewise, we all can relate to the trauma of having intensely 'murderous' feelings towards our siblings whilst at the very same time being obsessed with their well-being. It's almost as if the horror of the Games mirrored the breakdown in the characters' family relations. Freud 102 I suppose we'll never understand why the film industry requires broken families for successful movies. But perhaps Freudian theory can help. Sigmund Freud suggested that we're all made up of a type of supra-biological DNA. As children, everybody had to negotiate our entrance into the world of law, order and norms. This transition, from childlike Paradise to an adult's world of rules 'screwed us up' psychically. We are all infected with a loss necessitated from 'growing up', it's a wound that never leaves us, a condition through which we experience the world. Now guess who are the first individuals we need to interact with in relation to this 'primordial' loss? Bingo. Our loved ones, the very first people we know aka family. So anything which reminds us of this loss and the people inextricably linked to it will 100 per cent grab our attention. Ditto, superhero movies and awesome TV shows about people getting shot because they can't stand still when the giant doll says Stop. There is something about family trauma and brokenness which 'endorses' a show's plot, granting it a kind of validity and 'urgency' which few other issues can provide. Even movies like Armageddon, Deep Impact and 2012 needed the frame of broken families to 'make sense' of global catastrophe; it's as if the world coming to an end just wasn't enough to spur the plot along! Does this all make sense? I think it's certainly worth reflecting on. Whatever the case, we're a long way from A Little House On The Prairie, aren't we? * This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
Forbes
04-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
‘Squid Game' Creator's Alternate Season 3 Ending Is Way Better
Squid Game If you didn't love Squid Game season 3 or its ending in particular, you're not alone, as in the end, it became something of a muddled mess with unsatisfying ends to many storylines, Gi-hun's included. But we could have fixed that, it seems. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, creator Hwang Dong-hyuk explains the other idea he had for how the series would end in season 3: But this is why he changed it: Not to tell the creator of the series he's wrong, but he's wrong. Gi-hun's ending was a poor finale, given that he ended up killing himself to 'save' the (computer-generated) baby when if another few minutes had passed, the entire game would have ended with the Coast Guard's invasion, and the idea that he or the baby would be killed at all would go out the window. So his sacrifice was really for nothing with the way that ending was structured. Squid Game However, that original ending would have been a much better bookend. In it Gi-hun's ending would mirror the choice he was given at the end of the first season, move on with his life and money, or seek to destroy the game. Seeing the recruiter would tell him the games were still continuing, but even still, he finally chooses his family over pursuing its destruction. That would have been way better! Season 3 ended with a rather dismal 50% audience score, the lowest of any season and a far cry from season 1's 84%. Questions still remain about whether the show will continue, as Hwang has pitched a prequel series starring Gi-hun set between seasons 1 and 2. The door is also open for another future season, and there's a lot of chatter about an American Squid Game spin-off that has yet to be confirmed. But I think we all hoped that the current iteration of the show ended better, and as it turns out, it could have. Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Bluesky and Instagram. Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
Time of India
04-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
Squid Game 3: Lee Jung Jae's Crazy Transformation Will Blow Your Mind (And Your Diet!)
The Ultimate Glow Down_Lee Jung Jae's Transformation for Squid Game 3 So, you thought prepping for exams was tough? Wait till you hear what Lee Jung Jae just did for Squid Game 3. The man literally went full beast mode-no parties, no cheat meals, and a whopping 10kg drop on the scale! Imagine skipping every single shaadi, college fest, and chai party for a year just to nail one role. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now That's not just dedication, that's next-level K-drama madness. No Party, No Problem_The Secret Behind the Diet While most of us are out here struggling to say no to that extra samosa, Lee Jung Jae was on a strict "no fun, just work" policy. For a whole year, he skipped every team dinner-yep, not even one! His secret weapon? Good old lunchboxes. No fancy food, no midnight Maggi, just healthy packed meals every single day. If this doesn't make you rethink your next late-night food binge, what will? Squid Game 3_What's Cooking This Season? This season, things are getting even crazier. Gi Hun (Lee Jung Jae's character) is back in the game, but this time, he's got a personal mission-and he ends up losing his closest friend. Meanwhile, the mysterious Front Man is sneaking around with his identity hidden. The stakes? Higher than ever. If you thought the last season was wild, get ready for even more drama, betrayal, and jaw-dropping moments. When K-Drama Dedication Hits Different Honestly, seeing Lee Jung Jae go this hard for a role makes you wonder-would any of us skip a year's worth of parties for our dreams? In a country where every festival is a reason to celebrate (and eat!), this kind of focus is almost unheard of. But hey, maybe it's time we take a page out of his book-at least until the next big Netflix binge. You know, watching Korean actors transform for their roles always hits home. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now It's like when your favorite Bollywood stars do insane workouts before a big movie. The hustle, the sacrifices, the "no pain, no gain" attitude-it's something every young dreamer can relate to, whether you're in Seoul or Surat. Hats off, Lee Jung Jae. Next time you skip a party, just remember, you're not alone!
Malay Mail
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Malay Mail
‘Squid Game' ends with a bang: Season 3 shatters Netflix records with 60 million views despite mixed reviews, entire franchise storms Top 10
SEOUL, July 2 — Squid Game Season 3 dominated Netflix's weekly charts by a significant margin, Yonhap news agency reported the streaming platform said Wednesday. The third and final season of the Korean original show claimed the top spot of Netflix's non-English chart, drawing a staggering 60 million views during the June 23 to 29 period. The season's viewership was nearly 10 times that of its closest competitor, the Spanish series Olympo. The latest season's immense popularity also sparked renewed interest in the entire saga. Season 2 and Season 1 entered the chart at No. 3 and No. 6, respectively. The phenomenon wasn't limited to non-English shows. Squid Game Season 3's viewership single-handedly surpassed the 34.5 million combined total of all top 10 English-language series. It towered over the leading English show, The Waterfront, which captured 11.6 million views. The final six episodes, released last Friday, brought the global acclaimed story of Gi-hun and the deadly competition to its dramatic conclusion. — Bernama-Yonhap
Yahoo
01-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Squid Game is back—and done wasting time
[Editor's note: The recap of episode two publishes June 28.] Who do you hurt when you can't hurt the person—the system, the world—that's hurt you? Who do you kill when your enemy is, by its very nature, untouchable? That is the question on the table as we return to Squid Game for this not especially premiere-y season-three premiere. We're picking up in the immediate aftermath of last December's 'Friend Or Foe'—which, fittingly, didn't feel all that much like a true season finale, either. Series creator Hwang Dong-hyuk has been upfront about the fact that the Netflix show's second and third seasons were initially conceived as a single unit, and that's abundantly clear as we watch the fallout of the failed attack on the Games' command center. Nothing has been meaningfully resolved: Jung-bae is still dead, the X team has now been decimated, and the only survivor who made it out of the worst parts of the fighting desperately wishes he hadn't—as the Front Man's goons drop a literally gift-wrapped Gi-hun right back down the well he spent all of Squid Game 2 climbing out of. If there is a sharp demarcating line between these seasons, then, it's happening almost entirely in Gi-hun's head. Because our guy is, not to put too fine a point on it, broken. The revolutionary vanguard he spent the blood of innocents to muster has been smashed by betrayal from within, and overwhelming force from without, and it's left him utterly hollowed out by guilt and despair. The only thing that seems to give him any kind of focus at this point is the concept of someone near at hand to blame—specifically Dae-ho, who (the show helpfully reminds us) went back to collect ammunition for the fighters at the height of the battle, but instead abandoned them to their deaths in a fit of cowardice. From our outside, more objective view, it's easy to say that all Dae-ho could have done, had he been braver, was get himself killed along with his comrades, one more body dumped in a box and maybe chopped up for organs. (It also would have had the knock-on effect of eliminating Hyun-ju, since she only survived because she retreated to check up on his flaky ass, although Dae-ho can't really claim credit for that one.) But an outside, more objective viewpoint does not seem to currently be welcome in Gi-hun's mind. He can't kill the Front Man. The Games don't seem willing to let him kill himself. Dae-ho, maybe, will have to do. Our other characters, meanwhile, are largely where we left them: Murderbro Nam-gyu continues to brand himself as Thanos 2.0, bullying timid Min-su over his unwillingness to protect the now dead Se-mi during the previous night's attacks. Hyun-ju is still heroic as all get out and teamed up with tough-as-nails older lady Jang Geum-ja and her more pudding-y son Park Yong-sik. Pregnant Jun-hee (now apparently on the verge of labor) tries to figure out how far she can trust her ex Myung-gi. And the O team as a whole is diving ever-deeper into its embrace of performative cruelty, sweeping the next election to keep the games going and sarcastically thanking Gi-hun for making their electoral win possible by getting so many of his supporters killed. Of course, some of them might be about to get a sharp reminder that alleged meritocracies can get very nasty very quickly when the definition of 'merit' arbitrarily shifts. Into all this extant tension, the organizers introduce our next contest: an inventively nasty take on hide and seek. The rules are fairly simple, with players sorted into (new) red and blue teams, breaking up previous alliances (much to the dismay of O team leader Im Jeong-dae, who finds himself about to become a rabbit amongst his personal flock of wolves). The blues are the hiders, equipped with keys that will open doors inside a sprawling labyrinth. Find the exit, or simply survive the game's 30-minute run time, and they move on to the next round. The reds, meanwhile, are the seekers, armed with knives. In some ways, their task is the more straightforward one: Kill a single hiding blue, and they've secured their own survival. There comes a time, in both of the Games we've seen, when contestants' complicity in the deaths around them get ramped up. The first season diffused that responsibility across groups first, dropping teams of players into the lethal game of tug-of-war before the direct and deadly competition of the marbles game. (This seems to get a deliberate visual callback here, with arena walls that similarly evoke childhood city streets.) In these second games, meanwhile, we're still fresh off of the bloodbath that was Mingle, where players were forced to kill passively, denying life-saving space to others. Now, though, the knives are literally out: Players on red have to kill now, or they'll die. No more illusions, no more niceties. As always with the Games, the cruelest aspect here comes down to choice. After both sides complain, at different points, that the game is rigged against them, the organizers—who love 'fairness' in all things, of course— offer a compromise: Players may, with the consent of both parties, switch their team. What follows is the meaty psychological material that makes Squid Game a much better show than the base stuff a million memes constantly strive to boil it down into. We watch various players try to navigate their own mental barriers, and those of the people around them, deciding who's willing to kill for what. Myung-gi just barely manages to convince Jun-hee to let him protect her, trading her red shirt (and knife) for his blue. Yong-sik convinces Geum-ja to let him make the sacrifice of becoming the killer among them. Dae-ho and Jeong-dae utterly fail to get anyone to switch with them. And Gi-hun? Gi-hun takes his red ball (and knife) and barely blinks. He's already been confronted with the strung-up bodies of all the people he got killed with his attack on the forces of the great and powerful. What's one more murder after that? Divorced of its role as a season premiere, this is a prime slice of Squid Games good stuff: Powerful emotions, complicated gamesmanship, great performances from all involved. (Even the boat crew, still floating around in search of the island the Games are on, gets a chance to do something dramatic, as Jun-ho and Choi have a falling out over whether to trust the secretly traitorous Captain Park.) The cast of the second games is well-enough developed at this point that even basically zombifying Gi-hun doesn't really hurt the episode—he'll either go off the deep end and embrace killing, or heroically bounce back, of course, but I'm just as invested in the other stories being told. (One of Squid Games 2/3's big selling points over the first outing, I'd argue, is that it's built up a wider cast of characters into people worth caring about.) This isn't a great introduction back into the show's world—thank god it's only been six months, or I'd be totally out to sea—but on the binge it won't really have to be. What it does have is a return to the tensions that make this show so wonderfully uncomfortable, a looming game designed specifically to exacerbate them—and a proven, and unflinching, willingness to twist the knife. • Welcome to The A.V. Club's recap coverage of Squid Game 3! We'll be rolling our recaps on a daily basis until we've covered the whole season. I'm working from screeners, but keeping my standing policy of not watching the next episode until I've finished writing up the previous one, so no worries of spoilers. • Today, in our daily installment of 'not getting to all the subplots in the recap': Guard Kang No-eul launches a mini-rebellion of her own, infiltrating the organ traders and then killing them so she can force their private surgeon to save Player 246. It seems like she could have just shot them as soon as she got into their secret lair rather than go through the whole rigamarole of putting down her gun and then picking it back up. But then, I've never infiltrated a secret organ-stealing ring. • There are now 60 players left in the game, with each one's individual share now at 660 million won (roughly $486,000). Nevertheless, nobody on O seems to even briefly consider stopping. • In-ho gives Captain Park his orders: If the searchers find the island before the games are over, he's to kill him—including his brother. • It's interesting to contrast Gi-hun's utter defeat here with the story he tells back in season one about the strike at his factory being broken. That violent smackdown from the Powers That Be turned him into a feckless gambler. It's an open question what this one is going to do to him. • The attack on the command center is categorized as refusing 'the democratic process of voting'; meanwhile, the guards do nothing to stop the Os from using intimidation tactics to get more Xs to vote for their side. • I continue to not know what to make of 044, Seon-nyeo: She almost gets herself strangled by taunting Gun-hi, then continues to build a following of broken people with her messianic claptrap. • Nobody seems to clock that 'Oh Young-il' isn't among the corpses strung up. • Watching Netflix's Tudum coverage of the show last month was mostly an exercise in cringe, but it was a good reminder of how aggressively the series ages up Kang Ae-shim to play Geum-ja. She remains one of my favorite performers from this second batch of folks. • 'It's your fault.' More from A.V. Club What's on TV this week—Sinners, Nautilus, Heads Of State 3 new songs and 3 new albums to check out this weekend Making The Office without Steve Carell was as hard as watching it, apparently
