Poor Player 222. Many of the doomed, desperate souls featured on “Squid Game” wound up in Hwang Dong-hyuk’s underground, deadly arena because of a few expensive, ill-advised decisions that plummeted their bank accounts deep into the red.
But Kim Jun-hee, our Player 222 (played by K-pop star Jo Yu-ri), is there because she has no place else to go and no one to turn to. Orphaned at a young age, she hooks up with a bad boyfriend, crypto influencer Lee Myung-gi (Yim Swian), who persuades her to invest in what turns out to be a scam.
In debt by tens of millions and pregnant by Myung-gi, who ghosts her, Jun-hee takes her chances with these death games. When she’s introduced in season 2, her pregnancy is far along enough that Player 149, Jang Geum-ja (Kang Ae-shim), notices she could go into labor any time.
That makes it a foregone conclusion that Jun-hee will give birth at a most inopportune moment, which she does. By then, she’s also broken her ankle, lowering her survival chances to zero when the next game is revealed to be jump rope. She recognizes this, hands off the newborn to the show’s stoic hero Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae), and jumps to her death.
Watching this drama unfold from within their luxurious lounge are a group of masked VIPs who have placed bets on certain players. One drunken billionaire accidentally selected 222 and throws a fit when she dies. But then another suggests that the newborn should assume her mother’s number and join the fun.
“Squid Games” recently concluded to mixed reactions, although the third season’s six episodes garnered 60.1 million views worldwide between its June 27 premiere date and June 29, according to The Hollywood Reporter. That represents the largest three-day tally Netflix has ever recorded in its internal rankings.
Whether it met expectations or fell short, enough people were invested in finding out whether Lee’s empathetic Gi-hun would manage to survive this hell again.
Entering the baby into the game, however, probably wasn’t a move most people saw coming. It’s preposterous. So is the idea of risking one’s life by playing children’s playground games for a shot at 45.6 billion won, equivalent to more than $33 million. Why shouldn’t a baby have a shot at earning what its mother couldn’t? After all, if it were born outside the arena, it would inherit Jun-hee’s debt.
Justifying why this pile of helplessness would be placed in competition with a group of bloodthirsty adult men might mean we’re focusing on the wrong thing. Again.
The same goes for the other predominant question about the baby: was it real, or CGI? Turns out it was a real . . . prop. In some scenes, Jo held a silicone dummy and in others, a robotic puppet. (Our last glimpse of the baby features a real child actor since the scene takes place in a safe environment.)
But since Hwang intends “Squid Game” to be a grand parable about late-stage capitalism, then each of its players must evoke some element of society, right?
The third season features a scam queen shaman who builds a small cult of followers that she sacrifices to men hunting them with knives; a minor, failed pop star whose narcissism and drug habit make him dangerous; and a slimy executive who excels at talking his way out of disadvantageous situations.
One might think of Jun-hee and her little girl as stand-ins for the women and children swept into limbo as a result of careless politics. But after watching “Squid Game In Conversation,” an auxiliary episode featuring Hwang in dialogue with Lee Jung-jae and Lee Byung-hun, who plays Front Man, it seems even that is reading too much into the value of Player 222.
From what we can surmise, the baby is a device to showcase the nobility of the show’s male characters or lack thereof. That’s it. Nothing more.
Of course, devices have their use. In “Squid Game In Conversation,” Hwang tells his actors that “the most important decision in Season 3 was to give birth, to have the baby be born and to give Gi-hun his mission to protect it and finally save the baby by sacrificing himself,” he said. “Everything led me there. When I finally landed on that idea, I realized, ‘Ah, it was all for this.’”
Maybe that’s one reason the ending was dissatisfying.
Please understand, this doesn’t imply a belief that most people watching “Squid Game” care about the fates of anyone in this show besides Gi-hun, let alone notice that no other female characters made it to the final game besides Player 222 2.0. Fewer may see the irony in the remaining women being killed off by a round of jump rope, a playground game predominantly played by girls.
Start your day with essential news from Salon.
Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.
“Squid Game,” for all its bluntness, tries to hold up a mirror to the real world, where a cursory look around lets us know how little society values the lives of women and children. There have been many stories about the backlash against feminist discourse in Korea, stemming from protests about the wide wage gap between men and women, along with the general normalization of misogyny. Yoon Suk Yeol’s anti-feminist platform is cited as one of the planks that won him the presidency in 2022.
After Donald Trump was re-elected president, some American women began considering the principles of South Korea’s 4B movement more seriously. The name is shorthand for bihon, which translates to “no marriage”; bichulsan, which means “no childbirth”; biyeonae, meaning “no dating”; and bisekseu, which means “no sex.”
That sounds extreme until you read a few headlines. Right now, Georgia law is keeping a brain-dead woman on life support so her months-old fetus can gestate to term. Her family had no choice in that decision; state law grants fetuses personhood and bans abortion after the point at which an ultrasound can detect cardiac activity in an embryo.
On Thursday, our Republican-held Congress passed an unpopular bill that strips funding from Medicaid and food assistance for low-income families. The New York Times quotes a sobbing Democratic Rep. Brittany Pettersen of Colorado, as saying, “The amount of kids who are going to go without health care and food — people like my mom are going to be left to die because they don’t have access to health care. It’s just pretty unfathomable.”
Hyung’s sidelining of women in his violent fiction ranks much lower on our collective list of problems with the world, but you can’t accuse him of being out of touch with politics.
Even so, once you realize the role of women in this show is to sacrifice themselves in service of men’s stories, you might also notice how much suffering is piled on some of them in the name of entertainment.
As USA Today critic Kelly Lawler mentioned to a mutual friend, there was no need to break Jun-hee’s ankle before sending her into a game she had no chance of surviving. She’d just pushed another human out of her body on the hard floor of some deadly maze. Hopping around after that is not in the cards for anybody.
But giving birth is not enough. To ensure the audience cares about the robot baby, its mother must suffer greatly.
Geum-ja is another mother willing to die for her worthless son, entering the games in the hope of paying off his debts without knowing he’d also signed on. She bravely stabs him to protect Jun-hee and her baby, but hangs herself shortly afterward.
Women in “Squid Game” are there to break in the most fetching ways. Jun-hee’s anguish has a similar purpose to that of first-season favorite Kang Sae-byeok (Jung Ho-yeon), who is nearly broken when she talks Gi-hun out of a morally reprehensible act. Soon after that, Gi-hun and Sae-byeok’s shared adversary murders her in her bed, which certainly makes Gi-hun look like the better man.
Her ghost reappears in the final episodes to utter the same words she told him then: “Mister. Don’t do it. That isn’t you. You’re a good person at heart.”
Baby 222 lands on a more fortunate ending because, at least for now, killing infants for sport on TV is a terrible look. Granted, Myung-gi, the third surviving player at the end and the baby’s father, looks willing to do that instead of becoming a single dad. Thanks to Gi-hun’s knack for hanging on to the bitter end, we never have to find out what Myung-gi would have done.
Gi-hun then trades his life for that of an infant with no parents, no name and no traceable identity. Front Man could have done anything with Player 222 Jr., but — nobly, again — leaves her in the care of his more principled brother Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon), a former cop.
Then he delivers the remainder of Gi-hun’s winnings to his daughter, who now lives in the United States, and declares she wants nothing to do with him before she learns her father is dead.
One of the last women seen in “Squid Game” is an American recruiter played by Cate Blanchett, who grins at Front Man watching from his limo as she slaps some indebted fool. By then, we’ve mostly stopped thinking about that baby, which is just as well. She never really mattered in the first place.
The following article contains spoilers for “Squid Game”
The post What the “Squid Game” baby says about us appeared first on Salon.com.
