Squid Game Season 3’s Hwang Jun-ho Storyline Sucked

Squid Game season 3 is out, and with it comes the close to the most anime-cour move Netflix could've pulled by splitting a once razor-sharp series into fragments. Creator Hwang Dong-hyuk, who honestly only envisioned making one season, tried his best to buck the streamer’s erosion of the show’s scathing critique of class exploitation into a corporate spectacle complete with a real-life game show and video game that spectacularly miss the point.

The third and final (?) season, for all its occasional highs, suffers from the law of diminishing returns. It's not bad or incompetent wholesale; it’s just more, and it suffers from its excess. Highs remain: Seong Gi-hun’s impromptu revenge arc, his strangely poignant old man yaoi dynamic with the show’s masked villain, and moments where the series moved away from season 1’s noticeably male-centric grim satire. Also, Thanos was fun and will forever be famous.

But as a continuation, Squid Game dilutes its potency. The back half of season 3 shifts into a drawn-out trolley problem metaphor coalescing into a setup that promises even more to come, making the whole experience feel like a corporate cop-out rather than a cultural event worth relishing in.

But I could forgive all of the season’s shortcomings—be it its insufferable foreign “guests” who sound like aliens speaking English for the first time to the show’s groan-inducing final scene—had its resident cop, Hwang Jun-ho, not gone on such a frustrating and pointless excursion.

Spoilers for that.

Hwang Jun-ho is an interesting and smart character who stood out in season 1 as a resourceful presence. His feats included an undercover infiltration onto the murder playground game island, disguised as one of the PlayStation symbol-masked workers, and cornering the big bad Front Man in its finale. If that weren’t enough, Juh-ho got extra intrigue sprinkled into his capable character’s mystique with the reveal that the Front Man was none other than his estranged brother, Hwang In-ho, who shot Jun-ho off the side of a cliff face into the sea. Jun-ho’s miraculous survival made him more than just a side character, turning him into a mirror of the show’s central dilemma about trust and morality. This all rolled into positioning Jun-ho as a central player at the start of season 2, when he and Gi-hun joined forces using the latter’s winnings to contract a private militia to mount an invasion of the island. The only problem is that the plot thread never went anywhere because season 2 sidelined Jun-ho hard.

The majority of season 2 saw Jun-ho aboard a boat with the mercenaries as its captain attempted to triangulate the location of the island. Their navigation became all the more pressing when they lost contact with Gi-hun, leading him to improvise an insurrection with the participants while trying to stay alive long enough for them to arrive. Every time season 2 cuts back to Jun-ho on the boat, nothing happened. While I can levy my complaints at the show’s uneven pacing, the real issue, unfortunately, lies in the show downgrading Jun-ho’s intelligence to 0 when assessing his situation. Namely, the captain of the boat is obviously not on the up and up.

As far as Jun-ho knows, the ship captain just so happened to find him waterlogged and brought him back ashore. For whatever reason, no amount of bells were ringing in his head over why a fisherman would be close to such a place in the first place, and why he’s suddenly forgetful of where that location could be. I was even more frustrated with Jun-ho when the captain kills a mercenary and throws him overboard, and Jun-ho fails to investigate the captain’s claim that the mercenary fell overboard while drunk.

I held out hope that season 3 would make up for the narratively constipated development with Jun-ho and remind me why I enjoyed him in the first season, but the show did precisely the opposite. Despite Choi Woo-seok, whose suspicions in the show have been proven reliable, raising his concern with Jun-ho that the captain’s story does not pass the smell test, Jun-ho ignores every inquisitive instinct in his body and dismisses the assertion.

A season ago, Jun-ho was chasing a mob of people wearing pink jumpsuits through a Halloween party, trying to stop them from abducting others to play live-or-die games of hide and seek. I think he should be beyond paranoid and open to inquiring into things that don’t seem normal, especially when they happen under his nose. This whole debacle teeters on hilarious when the captain crosses out a spot on the map and all but says, "The island definitely isn't there.” My frustration reached a boiling point when it all coalesced in Woo-seok going on a whole side mission to investigate the captain’s background, track down his residence, break into his house, kill his dog, and uncover a mountain of evidence proving he was right. Key among them being the captain’s pink jumpsuit and mask buried in his yard with oodles of money and (hilariously) a bunch of photos of the captain, Front Man, and The Recruiter on fishing trips together like Squid Games hosts company retreats.

Mind you, this is all from the legwork of a lovable idiot loanshark with a heart of gold. Not, say, a detective with a database of information and an overwhelming sense of suspension of disbelief about a socialite death tournament. Woo-seok is then burdened with relaying this information to Jun-ho while detained in the police station, but it's too late, because Jun-ho took forever and two seasons to do anything before the captain shot up the rest of his crew.

Sure, Jun-ho isn’t entirely useless. His reclaiming of the ship and remembering the captain crossing out the map (lol) gets him to save an escaped contestant. But even then, he only arrives on the island with a literal 30-minute timer until the whole thing goes boom to do anything. Does he use his time well? At this point, you should know that’s not his MO. He shoots through some glass and confronts his brother, training his rifle on him as he stands on a pedestal of the last game. Finally, the confrontation we’d been waiting for! What will Jun-ho, who didn’t tell Gi-hun the Front Man was his brother and is beyond doing anything about it when it would’ve helped in season 2, do with this confrontation? He asks his brother the same thing he asked him in season one before getting shot off a cliff: “Why?”

In-Ho doesn’t grace his brother with a response and just leaves, prompting Jun-ho to mount his escape and somehow wind up back in the sea far away from the exploded island before a timeskip where he humors quitting the force to work alongside Woo-seok as a loan shark, as if he’s done anything to earn such a resume. The term "character assassination" is thrown around haphazardly in media critiques. I don’t think what happened with Jun-ho is anything of the sort. But it is a useful cop becoming something far worse: a cop.