SQUID GAME Ending Explained

Squid Gang Season 1 Recap

Ok so Squid Game follows Gi-Hun a man who’s down on his luck after losing just about everything that means something to him.

His marriage failed, he lost his job, is in deep over his head with gangsters and now faces the fact that his daughter is going to be leaving South Korea with her mother and new family. To make matters worse his mother is also at deaths door and she requires medical treatment in order to save his life.

Seems like things are going worse than this channel is however his fortune seemingly changes when he meets a man at a train station that offers him the opportunity of a life and death time.

Desperate for money Gi-Hun finds himself somewhat squidnapped and drafted into a battle royale between himself and 456 contestants worth a grand prize of 45.6 billion. Throughout we watch as the players are wittled down to one in games of red and green, honey combs, tug of war, hopscotch and one that will have you losing your marbles due to the betrayals in it.

The Meaning Of The Colours

The season is a blast to watch and early on it sets up this idea of division within colours that thematically ends up coming full circle by the end.

The colours Red and Green are introduced and these are actually classed as opposites on the colour spectrum.

Both are mentioned in the passwords, they become the name of the first game and even the contestants wear green whilst the guards don red. The show is absolutely laced with these opposing colours and they in many ways very much represent the divide between the powerful and powerless. As we know from our own society this divide is often showcased between the rich and the poor and we learn that there are a vast number of wealthy men who actually oversee the entire operation and that this is all for their entertainment.

Rather than being seen as people, the players are very much just numbers and this is demonstrated in the fact that they are literally given these as their names.

Along the way, Gi-Hun meets an elderly man named number 1 and the fact that he’s the first drafted into the game should give you a clue towards his true identity at the end. Gi-Hun is the last number in the game and throughout the season we watch as he very much works his way to 1. At one point number 1 even ends the game and gives the survivors of the first one a chance to go off and live their lives but they all return, desperate for the money.

Who Wins The Squid Game?

In the end all that remains are Gi-Hun and Sang-woo, two childhood friends who led very different lives but both found themselves in the same spot come the end of the game. The final competition is the titular Squid Game and we watch as the game they played as children decides who will live and die.

It’s an awesome final battle and they even bring some rain in in order to add some dramatics to the final showdown. Gi-Hun bests Sang-Woo but rather than killing him he brings up the clause that if both players forfeit then the game will be null and void and thus they’ll both get to go home.

This will be with nothing but Gi-Hun would rather put a stop to the death than gain the money but rather than forfeiting Sang-Woo ends his own life because of what he’s done in the game. All he does is make Gi-Hun promise that he’ll look after his mother and then he stabs himself leaving Gi-Hun as the last man standing.

Now whilst this game is going on we see a police officer who’s brother disappeared investigating to island in an attempt to learn of his fate. Throughout he sees things from the other side but a big twist comes towards the end when we learn that his sibling is actually a character known as the Front Man who is running the operation. He attempts to alert the police to the whereabouts of the island as well as what’s going on but the fact that the game is still continuing at the end lets us know that the operation wasn’t shut down.

Now one of the big questions surrounding the series is whether he survived or not.

Towards the end of the season he’s shot and though the character takes a tumble off a cliff into the ocean, we never actually see a body and therefore can assume that he’s still alive. Hwang Jun-Ho is only shot in the shoulder, much like his brother and with the Front Man not dying from the wound it is likely that his brother didn’t either.

However we do know that he didn’t shut down the Squid Games so it’ll be interesting to see how he’s brought back in future seasons.

Winning But Still Losing

After the prize money is given to Gi-Hun he returns home but open getting there he finds that his mother has died. Due to him participating in the games he wasn’t there for her in her final few days and it’s a devastating ending that feels like a real gut punch on what was already an extremely brutal series.

It’s at this point that we pick up one year later and discover that Gi-Hun is still living life in the exact same manner that he was before he won. The money that he sought after for so long was actually worth nothing to him in the end and the real people who meant something to him were lost whilst he tried to seek out these riches.

It’s very much a case of the only thing worse than not getting what you want is getting it and he’s trapped in a state of grief by himself with life having lost it’s meaning.

The Ending And Who Was Behind It All

At this point he’s given a card that is similar to the one that started everything off and on the back of it he finds an address which leads him to an apartment. Here he finds Number 1 bed bound and we learn that he was actually behind the entire game. Much like Gi-Hun, possessing all that money ended up meaning very little to him and in his boredom he created the games in order to entertain himself and his rich friends. He lived life believing that people wouldn’t help one another and uses a drunk man across the street as confirmation of this.

In his last few moments he plays one final game in which the pair bet whether anyone will stop to help him and because of their choices we see the cynicism within Number 1.

Number 1 or rather Il-Nam only believed in the worst of humanity and his entire life led him to believe that people were all self centred only interested in…well their own interests.

However as he dies we see that people actually arrive in order to help the man across the street and it’s very much an FU to him in his final moments.

Now we never learn whether Il-Nam as he’s called sees this but in all honesty, it doesn’t really matter. His entire life ended up becoming dedicated to the idea that he didn’t need to help others because other people in his position would also be just as selfish. Il-Nam could’ve shared his wealth with anyone at any time but he believed deep down that people were all as bad as each other and that if they were where he was that they wouldn’t help him either. This was somewhat shown in the game of marbles in which Gi-Hun lied and cheated in order to get ahead.

Though we will never know whether he knew of the homeless man’s fate or not it really doesn’t matter as this moment inspires Gi-Hun to do something with the money rather than letting it go to waste.

Gi-Hun gets a hair cut and has it dyed red showing that he is somewhat the one that is in the position of power now. Rather than being a malevolent d**khead like the rest of the reds though he takes a player’s brother out of an orphanage that she wanted to rescue him from and places him in Sang-Woo’s care who he makes extremely rich.

He lives up to his two promises and though it seems like a happy ending it’s all quickly cut short when we realise that the game is still going. Though Il-Nam died the game didn’t die with him and at a train station he comes across the man who recruited him played by Gong Yoo. You might recognise him from the seminal horror movie Train To Busan and I believe that come the second season that he will play a much bigger role. He is clearly still tied into the operation and Gi-Hun takes the card from the person he was attempting to rope into the game.

The season closes out with Gi-Hun about to board a plane to LA in order to see his daugther but after calling the number on the card he comes to the conclusion that the game is going to continue and that hundreds more people will die if he doesn’t step in and do something about it. He tells the Front Man that he’s coming for them and this of course carries a lot of weight for Season 2.

Season 2 Predictions

Now I believe that Gi-Hun will meet up with Hwang Jun-Ho and that together the pair will end up going to the island in order to stop the games. Gi-Hun was gassed during transport so he doesn’t know how to get there, however Hwang Jun-Ho does if he made it out and managed to swim back to the mainland.

With Gi-Huns resources and new found life he’ll be able to equip Hwang Jun-Ho with the necessary means to take down the Squid Game Gang.

This is obviously a big twist as one of the lessons he learned in his mothers death was not to abandon those that he loved but he’s very much abandoning hundreds of people to their deaths if he decides to travel to LA. He’s damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t and I see this more as an ending in which he’s sacrificing his own happiness in order to help others. Again this is something that Il-Nam would never do and thus it’s a great signal of the character coming full circle.

Now there are other potentials for season 2 and we do know that the games have been going on for decades. There’s evidence they even existed in the 80s and it would be interesting to explore not only their origins but also Il-Nams who of course founded them.

There’s also the fact that we know these are being run internationally and though it’s a long shot I’d love to see Netflix also bring in the european and western games as series to show us what was happening there before we build to an overarching narrative involving all the winners.

Review

Either way there’s a lot of potential directions they could take it and I have to say I absolutely loved this season and can’t wait to see more. It was absolutely gripping not knowing who would live and die and it made for a season that I happily binged in one day just to see what the outcome would be. This is a great character study that really gets to the meat of what it means to survive when it costs others so much and I think the show handled a lot of it’s elements in spectacular fashion. Whenever a Korean show comes out on Netflix I always try and cover it as they’re pretty much brilliant across the board and this is no different.

Squid Game pulled me right in and it gets a…