Squid Game’s ‘The Starry Night’ Gave Us The Most Honorable And Shocking Deaths Of The Entire Series
The beauty and the terror of each subsequent season of Netflix’s Korean language global phenomenon, Squid Game, is that we perceive the impending emotional turmoil before it arrives. We know both the characters we fall in love with and despise are in for equally gruesome deaths, and it’s that dramatic irony that creates a heightened sense of suspense (and agony) for us as viewers. I’m going to go into a few of them in detail below, so take this as your warning for spoilers.
I myself fell prey to the amnesia that sets in between seasons, and found myself asking, once again, why I profess to loving a show that is decidedly so uncomfortable to watch? I think the answer lies in the series’ democratization of death. As viewers, we live with our own specialized kind of amnesia, one that allows us to go about our lives for the most part ignoring that we too are headed towards our unavoidable deaths, albeit ones that are hopefully less horrific. The characters of Squid Game present us with both a question and a choice—if we are all going to die, how should we choose to live?
With Gi-hun being the sole survivor of the first season’s ‘games’, and appearing in season three promos wearing the iconic tuxedo reserved for the final three contestants, we know that only two others will be able to join him, making farewells to most of the other characters inevitable.
As with the first season’s “Gganbu” episode, which saw Gi-hun betray the elderly and disguised creator of the games, Oh Il-nam, in a game of marbles, this season’s second episode, “The Starry Night” is structured to eliminate half of the remaining contestants through a deadly game of hide and seek.
Players are divided up into two teams, red and blue, with the red team sporting cartoonish daggers, and the blue team granted keys that will allow them to unlock doors in the maze-like arena. Each member of the red team must kill a member of the blue team in order to advance to the next round, while the blue team must survive, or reach the exit until the timer runs out.
This is decidedly one of, if not the most gruesome game devised by Squid Game showrunners to date, because it demands a more direct and intimate level of violence from individual players than ever before. While earlier competitions resulted in the murder of the other players, group games like tug of war involved more of a self-defense mechanism, or the actual act of killing was perpetrated by the guards after players had lost each competition. In this scenario, the blood is truly on the players hands.
The stakes are raised even higher as we watch friends and allies divvyed up across team lines. Pregnant Jun-hee is pitted against ex-boyfriend and father of her child, Myung-gi, as are mother-son duo, EEv. Meanwhile a semi-catatonic Gi-hun directs his ire at Dae-ho for his cowardice during their thwarted uprising.
Bidding farewell to Squid Game‘s most honorable player
Series creator, writer, and director Hwang Dong-hyuk took on a huge responsibility in creating trans character Cho Hyun-ju. She is a Special Forces veteran who was discharged after coming out as a trans-woman, and comes to the games looking to win money to pay for gender-affirming surgery after her identity causes her to lose employment opportunities and family acceptance. She finds belonging with Geum-ja and Jun-hee during a joint trip to the women’s bathroom, a detail that is purposefully reiterated in this episode.
During the uprising at the end of last season, Hyun-ju’s military experience comes to the forefront as she displays great bravery and resilience in the face of an uneven match-up with the guards, which serves as a direct foil to Dae-ho’s cowardice. Leaning into these two politcally controversial
It’s our knowledge, of the hyper-charged politics surrounding restroom laws and the rights of trans-people, as well as the horrific violence they endure, and the murder rates among trans-women, that escalate our anxiety over Hyun-ju’s fate even higher than the series premise demands. Our fear that the series will sensationalize those facts, and recreate them on screen as fiction, is ever present, but fortunately unnecessary. Squid Game maintains Hyun-ju’s dignity up until the very end, in the series most honorable death to date.
During the uprising at the end of last season, Hyun-ju’s military experience comes to the forefront as she displays great bravery and resilience in the face of an uneven match-up with the guards, which serves as a direct foil to Dae-ho’s cowardice. Directly challenging critiques against trans-people serving in the military, Hwang Dong-hyuk creates a trans-heroine with this self-less character who is consistently and reliably seen putting herself in danger to protect others.
That trait is exemplified in this episode by her loyalty to Geum-ja and Jun-hee, as they team up during the hide and seek game, where her two companions would be seen as exceptionally vulnerable. The moral superiority of this choice is reinforced by the game’s infrastructure of three lock and key combinations, with each of the women possessing one of the uniquely shaped keys. The game is designed for cooperation and teamwork, which only these three explicitly exhibit.
Instead of Hyun-ju’s identity as a trans-women being sensationalized, it is Jun-hee’s pregnancy that gets put under the spotlight as she goes into labor in the middle of the game. Perhaps a commentary on South Korea’s 4-B movement, where women are refusing to date, marry, have sex with, or have children with men, Squid Game presents us with one of the worst possible conditions to bring a child into the world in, making us question what kind of future her daughter could possibly have in this scenario, and which conditions outside of this fictional world and in our own parallel this same sense of hopelessness.
Hyun-ju not only defends the now three other women depending on her with her own body, she refuses to walk through the door to the exit alone and save herself, and returns back to escort her friends to safety as well. Her tragic demise arrives when Myung-gi, who has abandoned his promise to protect Jun-hee in order to kill as many players and increase his potential share of the money, stabs Hyun-ju in the back. Her valor and selflessness is once again a foil, this time for Myung-gi’s selfishness and bloodlust.
The most shocking death of all
Ever since the moment Geum-ja and Yong-sik realized they had both arrived at the games together, in order to pay off Yong-sik’s debt, we knew this would be the most messed up Squid Games alliance of all time. The writer’s preyed upon that knowledge with a series of close calls, including that moment in the blood-soaked game of Mingle where Yong-sik is dragged away from Geum-ja by two men, and we as the audience never know if he is resisting them to the best of his abilities, or not.
The two have a powerful heart to heart before this game, debating whether they should trade teams, allowing Yong-sik to wield the dagger, or attempt to trade with a third person so they can share a fate. They discuss Yong-sik’s past with bullying, as well as the domestic violence they both endured at the hands of Yong-sik’s father. In the end, Geum-ja gives her son the dagger, reminding him she has a weapon hidden in her hair pin she can use in an emergency.
We painfully watch Yong-sik struggle in this game, slowly unraveling mentally as he realizes his lack of aggression will lead to his demise. When he finally meets up with his mother and Jun-hee, we are already anticipating Geum-ja’s reaction to sacrifice herself to save her son. It’s so brutal and terrible, and we believe Yong-sik to be selfish enough at this point to follow through with it. In many ways, it’s exactly the ending we expected for this pair.
Except, that’s not the ending they get. Yong-sik makes a last ditch effort to push his mother away and kill Jun-hee instead, and Geum-ja makes the horrific decision to save her by stabbing her song in the back with her hidden dagger. It evokes a deep moral disturbance in viewers, and we witness Geum-ja protect the new mother and baby, over her own role as a mother to her son. Her loyalty lies in solidarity with Jun-hee, as she prevents an act of femicide, and buys the two women more time. How much more is up for debate at the end of the episode, as we wonder who will protect them now that both Hyun-ju and Yong-sik are gone.
