Everything gets forked up in Squid Game's penultimate episode

[Editor’s note: The recap of episode seven publishes January 1.]

The deepest cruelties of Squid Game‘s Games are the nasty tricks they play with culpability. You might be able to remember, in the back of your head, that the person actually killing hundreds of people for doing a sub-par job at playing children’s games is the person who cooked this insane system up—or the staff who propagate it, or the soldier who obligingly pulls the trigger in its support. But in the moment, when you’re staring at another schmuck in a green jumpsuit who just made a decision that kills you? Both of you are going to come away feeling like that guy is your actual murderer.

And thus is it with Mingle, this competition’s third game—which, just like last time around (with Tug-of-war), is the first of the season’s contests with a guaranteed body count. One of creator/writer/director Hwang Dong-hyuk’s strengths, when assembling a season of this show, is in creating games and rule systems that underline the deeper satirical points he’s hoping to make, and Mingle is a particularly vicious one: Across the opening 20 minutes of “O X”‘s running time, we watch newly forged alliances get mutated, tested, torn apart, slammed back together, and worse. We watch the players make split-second decisions about who’s in and who’s out, with immediate, murderous consequences. And for the first time this year—give or take Thanos’ sociopathic outburst back in “001”—we see players deliberately kill each other in the rush to stay alive. That gets its harshest underline when Jung-bae watches In-ho snap another player’s neck in order to get the number of people in their room down to the mandatory 2. But it was guaranteed from the moment the Organizers transformed the final round into a bloodthirsty version of Musical Chairs, by asking 126 people to fit into 50 rooms in teams of 2. (I’d love to know how much In-ho knows about the Games he’s now undergoing; safe to assume he helped design them, but it’d be interesting if he guessed that final twist just because he’s so in tune with the overall philosophical intents.)

Is it any wonder that the rest of the episode continues the larger group’s descent from political in-fighting to full-blown tribal war? Although the show is still taking it easy on named characters—with only poor, sweet Young-mi dying here as a sacrificial lamb—the latest game has not only solidified the life-or-death stakes of continuing on with the Games, but the moral ones. The X voters now know, definitively, that anyone voting O is willing to kill a human being to get just a little more money, and that kind of moral certainty has a way of escalating things aggressively. The O’s, meanwhile, may not have made the next connection between player deaths and cash just yet—although the fork jammed into our favorite shithead rapper’s throat at the episode’s climax is probably going to help that point of political innovation along nicely—but they still understand the power of banding together as the in-group. Sprinkle in just a dash of religious looney-ism—courtesy of increasingly unhinged soothsayer Seon-nyeo getting her hooks into a handful of fear-addled followers—and you’ve got a formula for such brewing and violent chaos that In-ho barely has to do anything to keep the tensions boiling.

Instead, he keeps his focus on Gi-hun, continually keeping our hero just a bit off balance. When Gi-hun pushes early for a decisive—and potentially violent—conversion effort, before the O’s have had a chance to take stock of the situation, it’s In-ho who shuts him down. (Appearing as the calm voice of caution in the process.) And then, after the latest vote ties, and the lines have had a chance to calcify, he’s the one pushing for the confrontation that eventually leads to a potentially fatal brawl. It’s all done so subtly, and with such a calm veneer of believability, that, if we didn’t know who he was, it’d be easy to imagine the audience getting seduced by it, too. (“I’m a likeable guy,” he brags after surviving the second round of Mingle. “So I’m good at games like this.”)

It’s worth stepping back at this point and noting that the question at the heart of Squid Game‘s second season isn’t just “Who’s going to live, and who’s going to die—again?” That would be a waste of the show’s premise, and while I can quibble with the slow start of this season (and suspect Netflix might have its own goals and desires here), I trust Hwang to have more on his mind than simple repetition of the thing that worked before. The question—as Gi-hun laid out in roundabout fashion last episode, in his heart-to-heart with Jung-bae—is really more like “Does it have to turn out this way every time?” That is, are the Games imposing a lethal structure counter to the dictates of human nature, and can thus be overcome, or simply working in harmony with them, and must thus follow their natural course? In-ho clearly has a take on this, and he’s bending heaven and earth to convert Gi-hun to that misanthropic point of view. With one episode left in the season, it feels like we’re on the verge of tipping over into the same dog-eat-dog mayhem that ended with our hero screaming, anguished, on his knees in the Squid Game court two years ago, begging his friend not to leave him as the last man standing. But does it have to be that way?

“O X,” once it dispenses with a top-tier Game in its opening third, isn’t as heartwarming or as tense an episode as “One More Game,” and its focus on the political lines threatens to leave it feeling like a retread of “001” and “Six Legs.” But as the top of the hill that the rollercoaster is about to come crashing down, it’s an effective hour of television. Those first 20 minutes are riveting, stomach-churning stuff, as the show’s designers continue to milk genuine unease by splashing new types of childish vistas with gallons of slippery blood, like a Double Dare course in hell. And it believably moves all of our characters closer and closer to the crisis point, whether it’s the sad, strange parable of human weathervane Min-su, or Myung-gi’s failed efforts to reconcile with Jun-hee. The lines are drawn, and the forks are out: I genuinely have no clue how many of these poor bastards are getting out of next episode’s finale alive.

Stray observations

• • Boat report: The Boat Boys find a hatch—good!—and a bomb—less so! But they’re still determined to keep boating it up. I swear I’ll start putting these in the body of the recaps the second they start feeling relevant to the episodes.
• • No-eul is similarly sidelined; she’s stopped interfering with the organ ring, at least for now.
• • Thanos and his hench-boy are a small-doses pleasure, but I did get a smile out of them happily twirling on the rotating platform while the rest of the players tensely wait for the next number to be called.
• • My current theory is that Min-su is mostly here for audience surrogacy purposes—he’s a decent enough stand-in for the ways social pressure can be used to radicalize a generally normal person—but he does get a surprisingly nasty moment when he double-crosses his friend Se-mi to stick with Thanos and Nam-gyu.
• • Geum-ja has absolutely zero patience for In-ho’s Hannibal-lite schtick when he starts tossing around implications about her son.
• • Thanos making out with the O button also got me. Choi Seung-hyun (a.k.a. T.O.P.) seems to be pretty huge in South Korea; the character can be annoying at times, but the dude radiates charisma.
• • Current prize per player: 356 million won, a.k.a. $234,874.
• • And here’s where we have to acknowledge that, with just one episode to go, and only three Games covered, Squid Game is definitely not resolving these Games in a traditional fashion—at least, not without pushing over into the already announced third season. Hwang has said he basically wrote one story for the two seasons and then split it in half, so it remains to be seen how satisfying a split we’ll have before the show’s next big wait sets in.