The rules are always changing, even when they don’t appear to be. In the opening season of “Squid Game,” players are invited to vote after 255 of their fellow contestants are gunned down in a game of “Red Light, Green Light.” This vote only happens after a survivor blurts out the text of consent form clause #3: If all the players can agree to stop playing, he reminds the manager liaising with them, then the game will be terminated.
The faceless administrator pauses, as if he didn’t expect any of these fools to have read the fine print, before confirming that yes, they have a right to decide whether to stay or leave. By the razor-thin majority of one vote — a single red X — the games halt. Reason prevails, but only briefly. Not long after everyone tumbles into their normal lives again, the beastly debt snarling at their throats sends many running back to the arena either to get rich or die trying.
Voting occurs only once in Season 1. In the second and third seasons, players vote after every gory game, confirming our worst suspicions about our fellow humans. As the games’ barbarity increases, the survivors’ enthusiasm for risk grows. You’d think that would change after management puts down an armed rebellion. Instead, those still standing only get cockier.
“You will now take a vote to decide whether to continue the games or not,” says the chief foreman responsible for keeping the 60 remaining contenders in line. In the Season 3 opener, this vote occurs shortly after the grunts have cleaned up the bodies and bullets.
“Squid Game” began as a critique of late-stage capitalism. As it draws to a close, Hwang’s lethal playground games are cautionary parables about tribalism driven by greed.
Player 456, Seong Gi-hun (Emmy winner Lee Jung-jae), is nearly catatonic after the uprising fails. The only way it could have succeeded is if everybody cared enough about their freedom, and each other, to stop dying in humiliating ways for the enjoyment of astronomically wealthier people. The VIPs.
That’s quickly forgotten when the foreman showcases where the prize money stands. It’s now up to 39.6 billion won, around $29.3 million. Everyone left could go home with just over $488,000, and their lives. That isn’t enough to sway the gladiatorial majority, which is mostly made up of men grinning at the fattening piggy bank suspended above them. They have zero compunctions about murdering anyone in their way, including a pregnant woman. They also openly intimidate a few X voters who want to go home into switching sides, while compelling fellow O’s who have lost their taste for carnage to stay the course.
The final count is 18 in favor of leaving, and 41 who want to stay. The demoralized Gi-hun abstains. “In accordance with your free and democratic vote, we will proceed to the next game tomorrow,” the manager concludes.
Some of the audience weren’t on board with adding regular rounds of voting, but Hwang Dong-hyuk had firm reasons for updating his story’s terms and conditions.
“So many free democratic countries around the world are choosing their leaders and therefore their futures through the act of casting a vote,” the series creator observed at a For Your Consideration event that took place last month in Los Angeles. “And the reason that elections exist is . . . to provide the right direction for a society to head.”
“However,” he continued, “as we all see, it is actually leading people to even further division, hostility against one another, and it’s almost as if it’s working in the opposite way of what it was originally intended to do.”
“Squid Game” began as a critique of late-stage capitalism. As it draws to a close, Hwang’s lethal playground games are cautionary parables about tribalism driven by greed. The director never intended to expand the story beyond a single season. Once Netflix, a company worth more than $520 billion, declared the show would continue, his vote changed.
“Squid Game 2” premiered nearly two months after Donald Trump won a second presidential term. Despite its relevant messaging and warnings, however, Hwang began writing it in 2022, around the same time South Korea elected Yoon Suk-yeol president.
We can understand why the perilous state of “fair and free” elections was on his mind. Yoon is a hardline conservative who attempted a coup a few weeks before the second season debuted in December 2024. U.S. viewers watched those events unfold, along with Yoon’s eventual removal, and wondered why our supposedly hardier democracy couldn’t operate like we were led to believe it should.
Thus, the added language about “free and democratic” elections hides a barbed contradiction. That it’s coming from an armed masked man turns a simple announcement into a taunt blasted at a roomful of cannon fodder. Later, as the contenders ascend the toy house staircase with strains of Johann Strauss II’s “The Blue Danube” playing in the background, they pass an artfully arranged mobile of corpses strung up by their wrists.
“You are witnessing the fate of those who refused the democratic process of voting,” says a woman’s disembodied voice over the loudspeakers, “and instead attempted to stop the games using violent means.” Their vaunted choice, then, is no choice at all.
Casting votes is central to the sadistic social experiment at play in “Squid Game,” especially when the numbers thin to handfuls of people, including one who functionally cannot make any decisions or have a say in whether to play or stop.
But the black-masked Front Man (Lee Byung-hun) watching everything unfold knows avarice will always overrule moral decency and common sense. When a couple of cruel, stupid VIPs voice their concern that the remaining players will vote to take their winnings and stop playing, cutting short their revelry, the Front Man rigs the rules to ensure they won’t — and to maximize the competitors’ suffering.
We need your help to stay independent
In December, we didn’t know how much damage a 34-count convicted felon would do once America handed him power again; those who oppose him simply braced for the worst. Six months later, the third and final season of “Squid Game” meets us after the United States joined Israel in bombing Iran. At home, American citizens are being swept up by masked immigration officials, who have also detained politicians on spurious claims. A California senator was manhandled and dragged from a news conference for the sin of trying to ask a question of the Department of Homeland Security head, Kristi Noem. Our taxpayer-funded safety net is being dismantled.
Some of Trump’s supporters are expressing buyer’s remorse after their government benefits were cut or their family and friends were dragged off. Those opposing him can only take a clammy kind of pleasure in reminding them that this is what they voted for.
Hwang’s critique of democratic illusion may seem subtler unless you make a point of looking for it. The first season’s guards present the games as opportunities, assuring the players that the machine gun-toting sentinels in pink jumpsuits aren’t there to hurt them. “Let me remind you that we’re here to give you a chance,” says the manager.
His second-season stump speech pushes more explicitly into the supposed free will of it all.
“We respect your right to freedom of choice,” the overseer says in the third episode, “001.” Later, he reiterates, “We always prioritize your voluntary participation.”
There have long been people and interests who figured out how to game the system from multiple angles.
After more spilled blood calls for another round of voting, he advises the still-living that “whether to continue the games for a bigger prize or to stop here is entirely up to you. Please feel free to exercise your right to choose in a democratic manner.”
And, after a vote is interrupted by a sinister chant calling for “One! More! Game!” the guard is obligated to declare, “To ensure fair and democratic voting, we will not tolerate disruptions from this point onward.”
By then, the competition is sharply divided between the blue voters, or the O’s, who aggressively want the slaughter to continue, and the red voters, the X’s, who want it to stop. And as the O’s outnumber the X’s enough to intimidate anyone from defecting, the guards become extremely encouraging about everyone’s participation in the “democratic process.” We should point out that in Season 1, the O’s corresponded with the color green, as in “go.” Maybe the blue-red division is a coincidence, although Hwang knows the American viewership very well.
“I wanted to really poke at the theme of a majority rule in elections within the liberal democratic world,” Hwang said, “and pose the questions: Can it truly bring us down the right path? And, is it capable of allowing us to choose the right leaders?”
If this is a poke, I shudder to think of what a harsher wake-up call would feel like. But then, he’s prodding a voting body amply tenderized by violent partisanship.
Start your day with essential news from Salon.
Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.
We are discovering, perhaps too late, that democracy’s resilience relies on a few important factors. Our laws, spelled out in constitutional amendments and precedent-setting judicial opinions, are some of them. Another is everyone’s willingness to abide by those rules and a common set of morals — like, say, discouraging the assassination of political rivals.
It all requires some belief in democracy’s promise that everyone has a fair say in who governs us, and how. But there have long been people and interests who figured out how to game the system from multiple angles.
“We are now living in a world where, slowly, almost all of us are being dominated by algorithms and AIs – that’s where most of us get our information from,” Hwang said. “…And so I just hope that we can take a beat to ask ourselves, can majority rule and can democracy really guide us on the right path? Is it capable of making the right choice?”
“I hope that we can come together and think about those things, be concerned together,” he added. Gi-hun held fast to that hope, too. The final six episodes reveal whether it prevails, or if optimism is just another losing game we insist on playing.
Additional reporting by Hanh Nguyen.
All episodes of “Squid Game” stream on Friday, June 27 on Netflix.
