‘Squid Game’ Season 3 Episode 5 Recap: It’s Going Down

“All right,” says Player 100. “If there are no objections, let’s go ahead and vote on Player 222’s elimination.” Player 100 presents this as an entirely reasonable statement, and that’s how it’s greeted by his co-conspirators in the final game. In the tradition of the nightly decision whether or not to continue playing, they’ve agreed that a majority vote will settle the matter of whose lives to sacrifice so that the others might live. Player 100 is trying to get things on track, keep things nice and orderly according to agreed-upon precedent and procedure. No more messy arguments that are beneath our dignity as colleagues — It’s time to democratically decide whom to murder.

Taken together, Squid Game’s second and third seasons are one long allegory for sham democracies. I mean, you hear how fucked up their logic sounds when it’s presented by Player 100, right? Vote how they will, the majority can never rightfully take away the rights, or the lives, of the minority. Our inalienable human rights are just that — unseverable from our status as human beings. They are not subject to vote or plebiscite, to Supreme Court ruling or executive order. They are ours forever. You can no more vote them away than you can vote away the bones curled hard in our fists or the hearts that beat in our chests.

But that’s the version of “democracy” that the Squid Game’s sadistic creators — the in-world ones, I mean, not the very nice filmmakers — have presented their players. It’s not dissimilar from the version we’ve been largely forced to accept here in the real world. Illegitimately condemning other people to torment and death because there are more of some than there are of others, the players participate in a series of zero-sum ballots where voters can only conceive of themselves as members of opposing teams since the stakes are so high. And no amount of voting can break the cycle of violence and degradation, not as long as the loathsome, mega-rich VIPs (David Sayers, Jane Wong, Bryan Bucco, Jordan Lambertoni, and Kevin Yorn, each of them almost unbearably obnoxious) want it to continue. 

And by this point in the games, it’s all been boiled down to its essence: Can you ethically vote to kill a baby, and are the results of that vote binding?

I don’t mean to give short shrift to the episode’s other business, in which Jun-ho rescues Player 246 from his pink-suited pursuers at sea, while No-eul takes down her commanding officer (Park Hee-soon), a fellow North Korean defector, in her quest to wipe 246’s real identity out of the Games’ records. But this game really freaked me out, man. 

For starters, it’s the strangest game room we’ve seen yet, because it’s not an ironically candy-colored children’s fantasia. The entire cavernous space is a dark, dour gray, except for its three towers, arrayed in the familiar “circle triangle square” Squid Game pattern. But their bright paint has dulled and chipped, and their surfaces are weathered and cracked with age and use. It’s deeply unnerving to see structures this concrete and run-down after all these episodes of people murdering each other in Legoland. 

Also, I’ll level with you: I’m afraid of heights, and these falling-from-high-places Squid Game episodes scare the bejesus out of me. The entire time the eight surviving men (and a baby) were standing around up on those towers I wanted to scream at them: “Get away from the edge! Everyone in the center! Sit down, lower your center of gravity! Better yet, lie face down and don’t move because the terror is too much to take! Oh wait, is that last bit just me? That’s just me, isn’t it?”

Anyway, the action revolves around the tense debates among the six conspiring players. They need to figure out how to eliminate Min-su (who hallucinates a cameo by sadistic, dead rapper Thanos, played by T.O.P.), Gi-hun, and Baby 222 without getting dragged over the edge themselves. The matter is complicated by the need to separate Gi-hun from the baby so they can be eliminated separately. If you guessed these assholes would both go overboard, attempting to kill too many people at once for their truce to hold up for all three rounds, and turn on each other, you guessed right!

Player 203 (Choi Gwi-hwa) is the most aggro member of the co-conspirators — it’s he who gets fed up and tries to knock off Gi-hun and the baby simultaneously, leading to a full-fledged rumble among the survivors. He also participates in the vicious beating of Player 039 (Woo Jung-kook), gruesomely maiming his leg. The idea, proposed by Player 100, is to use the man as a “lunchbox”: They’ll just carry him to the final platform and dump him over the side, ending the game per its complicated, kill-or-be-killed rule set. The dehumanization is so profoundly awful for the man that he voluntarily kills himself rather than be subjected to that indignity.

But by then, only Gi-hun and Myung-gi remain, with Myung-gi himself finally putting an end to Player 100’s reign of error. Turns out Myung-gi was working to protect Gi-hun and the baby all along, which he says as he admits he’s the baby’s father. But Player 039’s suicide means that one of the two of them must die if the baby is to live. 

I don’t think they were going to murder 039, mind you! I think they would have honestly drawn straws or something. Gi-hun especially is that kind of guy, as the Front Man learns when Gi-hun backs out of stabbing his enemies to death in their sleep the night before the game. A flashback reveals that the Front Man, known then as Hwang In-ho, didn’t have that strength of character. The memory brings tears even to the Front Man’s steely eyes. No wonder he’s been so determined to keep Gi-hun alive and break his will: Gi-hun’s conduct shames him. For a certain type of person, it is not enough to do evil — others must be stopped from doing good. After all, if they can do it, anybody can.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.