Squid Game thoughts – NO SPOILERS

Something that spoiled the experience somewhat is the casual attitude of some of the characters, especially the main character, Gi-hun. In between the games, he interacts with other players almost like they are actually playing real children’s games for no stakes, instead of playing for their lives.

Before many of the games, his demeanor seems to veer far toward, hey, let’s all go out and have fun.

More than once he pleads to the guards that one of the other players is in some kind of medical distress, as if they would care.

I am not talking about his extreme kindness to many of the other players. To me, these are his best moments. They reveal who he really is, especially his interactions with the old man.

But many of the in-between-games scenes seem so dissonant. Like, do these people not understand the stakes? Have they not been here the whole time? The husband and wife team were especially puzzling.

I want to make this a flaw and ask how the creators of the show could miss this. But that presumes they don’t know what they’re doing or that I know their story and their craft better than they do.

So why would they do it? The answer must lay in the characters.

For Gi-hun, without giving away any spoilers, it’s that he’s a gambler. Though he is constantly losing, he also wins big sometimes and he thinks every bet is going to go that way.

For Gi-hun and many of the other characters, we find out somewhere along the way that they don’t think they have anything to lose.

Also, it’s a bizarre situation, almost science fiction or fantasy, so who’s to say what is a reasonable action in a crazy world?

So ultimately, I think it works.

Part of the reason it works is the second episode.

I watched the first episode at night. I was not ready for how hard it hit. I thought, I might not be able to take a second episode, especially so late at night. I knew if I bailed out, I probably would never come back. But I wanted to find out what happens. So I pressed on.

It was a good move because Episode Two might be the most important. It’s the one where you get to know the most about several of the main characters and what’s at stake for them, and thereby, what is at stake for you, the viewer.

I heard a guy on the radio say almost the opposite. He said the second episode is boring and just stick with it past that one and the show gets great. He was a sports radio guy so it’s not much of a surprise that he would prefer the other episodes featuring intense, life-and-death competition to the episode that reveals the players’ wants, needs, pressures, fears – their characters.

So there you go, it’s character, who you are, that determines how you react.