Don’t play any games, deadly or otherwise, if you’re not up to date on the third and final season of “Squid Game.” You’ve been warned, but huge spoilers are coming!
In Season 2 of “Squid Game,” audiences were horrified to discover that Player 222, a young girl named Kim Jun-hee (Jo Yu-ri), was pregnant. Unsurprisingly, the show considerably ups the ante in its third and final season; not only does Jun-hee give birth under the most dangerous circumstances possible, but the baby’s life is at risk right away.
During the second episode of Season 3 of Hwang Dong-hyuk’s internationally beloved series “Squid Game,” the game in question is a particularly demented take on hide and seek in which the players are split into two teams with corresponding vests: a blue team and a red team. All the blue players have to do is keep hiding successfully from the red team until they can use the keys they’re given to find an exit out of the maze-like structure … and the red team has to kill members of the blue team, because if they don’t kill at least one person, they’re eliminated from the game. Aided by former soldier Cho Hyun-ju (Park Sung-hoon) and the elderly but fierce Jang Geum-ja (Kang Ae-shim) — Players 120 and 149, in that order — Jun-hee makes her way through the game, despite the fact that she sustains a nasty ankle injury in the process. Then, she goes into labor … which presents a new and terrifying problem.
Hyun-ju manages to guard a room while Geum-ja helps Jun-hee safely and successfully deliver her baby, against all odds; Hyun-ju is ultimately killed by the baby’s own father, Lee Myung-gi (Im Si-wan), Player 333 (who, incidentally, didn’t know Hyun-jee just protected both Jun-hee and their newborn child). So what happens to Jun-hee’s baby after that, and why is it so messed up?
Jun-hee’s baby survives one of the terrifying games played in Squid Game … but what about Jun-hee herself?
As she bonds with her newborn baby and deals with her woefully injured ankle, Jun-hee still has to prepare for yet another horrible game alongside the rest of the players. This time, it’s a “simple” game of jump rope, so here’s the disgusting twist: players have to cross a narrow pathway in order to “pass” the game and clear a giant metal rope swung by two enormous dolls the entire time. Should a player fall off the pathway or miss the metal rope, they’ll plummet to their death underneath the field.
Jun-hee merely sits, despondently, without bothering to even try and cross the pathway. The show’s main character, Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae), is a parent himself — in fact, he gives Jun-hee a sweet speech before jump rope begins about how incredible it is to watch your child grow up, and how he’s ashamed that he took the experience for granted — so he immediately offers to transport the baby across the bridge to safety and then come back for her. With the baby wrapped in Jun-hee’s player jacket — which bears the number 222, and you will want to remember that fact — Gi-hun successfully crosses the bridge, but he’s blocked from getting back across because other players are gleefully shoving each other to their deaths on the pathway to winnow down the potential winners.
Even though Myung-gi, who’s still at the starting line, begs the woman he loves and the mother of his child to let him help her, but she refuses. Ultimately, Jun-hee simply jumps to her death, all too aware that she’ll never safely make it across the bridge. Gi-hun still has the baby … who, again, has the Player 222 jacket. That’s when everything changes in the most devastating way you can imagine.
Gi-hun, now the caretaker of Jun-hee’s baby, is faced with a seemingly impossible choice
Remember those absolutely awful VIP guests from Season 1 of “Squid Game,” who sit in a luxurious box above the playing field and bet on the desperate players while wearing gilded animal masks and chugging liquor? Well, they’re back in Season 3, and after Jun-hee’s death, they come up with a genuinely heinous idea. To preserve one player’s precious bet, they decide that the baby is now Player 222, and by the time the players reconvene after jump rope is over, the guards have gotten the message and inform the players that a newborn baby is now an active participant in this game.
It is genuinely and terrifyingly horrific to imagine a baby being killed in the bloodshed we see throughout “Squid Game,” but at least she’s protected by Gi-hun, a man who somehow survived his first go-around in the game (only to end up back in the arena anyway). The final game, which involves the hopscotch-esque titular “squid game” where players move between circles, squares, and triangles, forces the players to choose from amongst their own number and keep knocking people off of massive and literal pedestals as they cross the arena; even though a bunch of bloodthirsty players certainly want to kill the baby straight away, both Myung-gi and Gi-hun serve as the tiny infant’s protectors. It’s an absolutely harrowing twist, and it’s also the kind of twist that only a show like “Squid Game” would even dream about.
“Squid Game” is streaming on Netflix now.
