This article contains a discussion of suicide.
It’s probably a bad idea to play any of the deadly games in Squid Game with a family member … and you should also stop reading right now if you’re not current on the third and final season of “Squid Game,” because spoilers are coming!
In Season 2 of “Squid Game,” we meet a lot of new characters after Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae), the winner of the previous deadly games that offer a massive cash prize to the down-and-out, re-enters the game as Player 456 for the second time to try and bring down the entire shady organization from the inside. Two of them, as it happens, are mother and son: former gambler who owes significant debts, Park Yong-sik (Yang Dong-geun), and his mom Jang Geum-ja (Kang Ae-shim), a single mother and Korean War survivor. (The two are marked as Player 007 and Player 149, respectively.) During Season 2, there’s a mechanic where, after every single game, players can vote on whether or not they want to continue; against his mother’s wishes, Yong-sik keeps voting to keep going so that he can earn the maximum amount of money for his massive debt.
Despite a near-betrayal during the games seen in Season 2 — in a game called Mingle, where players have to sort into groups and get into rooms in the correct numbers lest they be shot and killed — where Yong-sik abandons his mother, the two are firmly a team when Season 3 starts. So what happens to Yong-sik and Geum-ja? Well, they both end up dead … and their deaths have major implications on the rest of the season (and the series itself).
After overcoming the game (in a way) during Season 2 of Squid Game, Geum-ja and Yong-sik face a brutal decision in Season 3
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly after Season 2 of “Squid Game” concluded, creator Hwang Dong-hyuk addressed a funny but macabre coincidence — specifically, that Netflix’s companion reality show “Squid Game: The Challenge” also featured players who were mother and son, though neither of them died — both Yang Dong-geun and Kang Ae-shim spoke to Yong-sik’s perceived betrayal … and the fact that the mother and son come back together afterwards.
“I didn’t really know exactly what emotion I was supposed to express,” Yang told the outlet of how he approached this major scene between Yong-sik and Geum-ja. “We shot this scene over, and over, and over again, take after take… And in my personal life, I am very distant from my own mom. My mom in reality is very ferocious and scary — we don’t have the type of relationship where we share our inner thoughts or feelings, so it was strange to have that on set and to be able to act in a way that these two people have that relationship. Doing that was difficult, being able to express that in a truthful way, because that isn’t actually my lived reality.”
“They are playing a game of life and death,” Kang added. “Rather than feeling this resentment over his betrayal, I think her focus really is that her son is alive. And because he is alive, the other things that occurred in the process of the game are less important.”
This feeling — the relief that her son is alive — is short-lived when you consider that Season 3 of “Squid Game” picks up immediately where Season 2 of the series left off. What happens is that Geum-ja is forced to choose between her son and a truly innocent life, and she makes a heart-wrenching choice.
Geum-ja is forced to kill her own child to save another … and then grapples with her grief in the most devastating way possible
In a horrible game of hide and seek where players are split into red and blue teams — the red players have to kill the blue players or face elimination, and the blue players have to hide and successfully find a way out of a maze of doors using keys they’re given at the start — Yong-sik and Geum-ja end up on different sides, with Yong-sik clad in a red vest and Geum-ja in blue. Of course, the two swear not to hurt each other, and for most of the game, they successfully avoid each other … and Geum-ja rushes to help the pregnant and injured Player 222, Kim Jun-hee (Jo Yu-ri), alongside a former South Korean soldier and her fellow ally Cho Hyun-ju (Park Sung-hoon).
Hyun-ju, Geum-ja, and Jun-hee manage to hide themselves in a room — with Hyun-ju standing guard and taking out and red players who try and attack them — when Jun-hee goes into labor, and even in the darkest possible place and moment, Geum-ja helps Jun-hee give birth to a healthy baby. Hyun-ju is accidentally killed by the father of Jun-hee’s baby, Lee Myung-gi (Im Si-wan), who’s on the red team and is Player 333 … and as Geum-ja and Jun-hee grapple with this fresh horror, Yong-sik appears in the room. Geum-ja is happy to see him at first, but Yong-sik clearly wants to kill the baby to get further in the game.
Geum-ja stabs and kills her own son, sobbing through it all … and at the start of the next episode, we see that Geum-ja dies by suicide and hangs herself in the player’s sleeping quarters. Still, Geum-ja made the ultimate sacrifice; she took her own son’s life and then her own to ensure that a completely innocent baby — an infant with no awareness of these horrific games — will remain safe, even if just for now. It’s a deeply tragic end to this mother-son relationship, and it’s also classic “Squid Game.” The series is streaming on Netflix now.
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