This article contains discussion of addiction and suicide.
Massive spoilers follow for the entirety of “Squid Game,” including the finale of the show’s third and final season. We warned you; stop reading now if you haven’t watched the entire show!
From the start of “Squid Game,” the massively successful South Korean series created by we follow Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae), a man struggling with a gambling addiction who’s offered what, at face value, seems like a life-changing opportunity. In Season 1, he’s “given” the “chance” to participate in the titular games, which take place on a remote island and have a pretty disturbing twist. That twist, as we all know by now, is that 456 people compete in each game — Gi-hun ends up as Player 456, in fact — but most, if not almost all, of those people will die during the twisted and deadly versions of children’s games.
Gi-hun wins his first round of games at the end of Season 1 of “Squid Game” — and the 4.56 billion won that comes with his win — but he’s also determined to destroy the entire thing from the inside, so he re-enters the fray in Season 2 to try and do just that. (He does try and plant a chip in a false tooth to give his location to some allies, but when he wakes up in the arena, the tooth is gone, so… that doesn’t work out!) Here’s the answer you’ve all been waiting for, though: Gi-hun definitively dies at the end of Season 3 of “Squid Game.” The camera even lingers on his body so that viewers are left without any doubts about his fate, which is frankly refreshing in an age of fake character deaths. Still, it’s truly gutting to see him fall after all of this effort — so what exactly happens?
What leads to Gi-hun’s death in the Squid Game series finale?
By the time Gi-hun meets his maker in the series finale of “Squid Game,” he’s really gone through it, which is a massive understatement. During his second go-around in the games, he’s completely aware of the fact that he could die at any moment but also has some familiarity with the entire concept, so he does his best to help out other players and protect them; this builds to the point where he literally becomes the caretaker of the game’s tiniest and most tragic player.
What we mean by that is that a baby joins the games towards the end of Season 3. We found out in Season 2 that Player 222, named Kim Jun-hee — and played by (Jo Yu-ri) — was pregnant, and in Season 3, she gives birth during a particularly messed up game of “hide and seek” (which, unsurprisingly, involves a lot more murder than a standard game of hide or seek). The baby and Jun-hee survive that game, but as Jun-hee prepares for the next game, a version of jump rope that will send anyone off-beat plummeting from a narrow pathway to their death, she realizes that the combination of the baby and her ankle injury will stop her from fully competing. Gi-hun brings the baby safely across, Jun-hee dies by suicide by jumping off the platform, and the baby is named the new Player 222.
Gi-hun manages to bring the baby into the last game, where the players themselves decide who lives and who dies … and after fighting off people who would be more than happy to kill the baby for the prize money, Gi-hun sets the baby down and seems to experience a nervous breakdown. Slowly, he backs off yet another pedestal and falls to his death … and again, the camera zooms in on his body, making it quite clear that the hero has fallen.
Even without Gi-hun, the Squid Game universe will continue
Gi-hun may be gone forever, but “Squid Game” will continue without him — at least, now that the original series seems to be spawning its own franchise. Word on the street is that legendary director David Fincher is developing some sort of spin-off of “Squid Game,” but whether it’s a prequel or a different standalone series, we don’t know just yet. Still, we got a little clue at the very end of “Squid Game” about where that could be headed.
We met Gong Yoo’s Recruiter during the first and second seasons of “Squid Game,” and in the series finale, Oscar-winning Cate Blanchett is performing his duties and enlisting a bunch of broke suckers to participate in these deadly games. (Blanchett and Fincher worked together on 2008’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” so there’s literally no way that this is a coincidence.) Beyond that, Lee Byung-hun’s mysterious character Hwang In-ho, also known as the Front Man — who controls the games themselves — remains alive at the end of the series, and it’s entirely possible that we could get a series focused on this mysterious and fascinating character. In any case, “Squid Game” is so popular that it’s continuing past the original series … and without Lee Jung-jae, unfortunately.
“Squid Game” is streaming on Netflix now.
If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available. Call or text 988 or chat 988lifeline.org
