Squid Game - Unanswered questions.

Unless you have been living under a large rock in the Line Islands for the past 9 months, you are probably aware that there is a hit tv show called Squid Game. 

To give a quick plot summary for the 4 people in the world who haven’t seen it yet- the show tells the tale of a 40-something guy whose life is a mess. He’s divorced, his wife took their daughter with her and, oh, he’s addicted to gambling,

which has put him millions of Korean Won in debt with loan sharks and other shady figures who are by now chasing him for their money. One night he is approached by a mysterious man on a subway platform who offers him money if he plays a kids game with him. After losing a number of times (and getting slapped in the face for each time as he has no money) he finally wins a game and the mystery man gives him 100.000 Won (that’s about 70 Euro, give or take).

He is then given a business card with a phone number on it and the instruction to call the number if he wants to make more money playing kids games. Much more. 

Gi-Hon (our main man) then goes home and later that night decides to call the number to enroll. He is given instructions to wait by the side of the road, where he is picked up by an unmarked van and taken away.

He wakes up in a dorm in an, up to then, undisclosed location, with 455 others who were also lured to the games for a chance to win enough money to solve their financial problems. Things turn out to be quite different from what they expected.

So, anyway, you can read episode reviews here, so I’m not going to waste time on that. 

No, what I want to discuss here are the questions I’m left with at the end.

And a warning for those who haven’t seen the show yet:

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS 

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS 

Okay, so let’s start from the bottom and work our way up.

The players. 

We know that they are recruited by a mysterious man in a fancy suit(more on him in a bit) who challenges them to a game of ddakji. They then get a business card with a phone number to call to take part. 

That is not the main problem.

As we see on the show, there are 456 players at the start of the games. 

After they vote to abandon the games in episode 2, all but 14 of them return for the second round after they realize that life in the real world is just as miserable as it is in the murder games compound. 

Then there is the winner, who lives, and then, at the very end, we find that the old man (Player 001) was actually the organizer and only took part for the excitement, knowing that he would survive no matter what. 

Check it out for yourself: during Red light, Green light he is the only player who doesn’t light up on the motion detectors in the doll’s head. 

During tug of war, he is the only one not locked to the rope, and during marbles he is “shot” in a secluded corner of the model village, where no one can see him. 

This brings me to the main point here: that leaves us with a body count of 440 people.

440 people who al vanish from the face of the earth at the same time around the same place and are never seen again. (Remember, the eliminated players are cremated leaving nothing but ashes which the organizers probably dump in the ocean).

Okay, a number of these people are losers, gangsters and addicts with no friends, or who no one will miss, but most of these people have jobs and friends and families and will definitely be noticed if they disappear. Take San Woo, for example, player 218. He is a high ranking executive at a big investment bank. If he doesn’t show up for work for days on end, the bank would surely contact his family.

If even only 60% of the players are reported missing that’s nearly 250 people who vanish without a trace. 

Surely, someone at police HQ must notice that large numbers of people go missing at the same time. And remember, we find out that the games have been held since the 1980s, presumably around the same time every year. So every year, around the same time, hundreds of people go missing and are never heard from again. 

Someone must see a pattern there.

Now you could argue that no one knows where the games are being held and that there isn’t any evidence- no body, no crime. This is all true, which leads me directly to the recruiter(recruiters?).

The recruiter is the only member of the organisation who operates out in the open. He approached Gi-Hon in a subway station, which certainly has CCTV. He is also seen approaching people on street corners and in parks, so there must be tons of footage of him. 

When someone is reported missing, the first thing the police are going to ask is “Where did you last see him/her.” And then “Where were they going”

Plus the police must see the mysterious business card on the CCTV footage too. And every time that card appears, people vanish without a trace. 

Even if there is a team of recruiters (which I think is plausible, because I can’t see one guy getting around to convincing 456 people to play in a relatively short period of time) then the same relatively few faces must keep popping up in missing person cases. 

And ofcourse all these disappearing people step into identical unmarked gray vans,

which must also be a red flag for law enforcement. 

So in conclusion- how can it be that, for over 3 decades, hundreds of people go missing every year and are never seen again, yet the police doesn’t pay any attention to such an obvious pattern?

Then, there is the question of the pink guards.

These guards perhaps raise the most questions.

We already know that there are 3 types: 

Circle masks, who do the dirty work, like cleaning up bodies and handing out food.

Triangle masks, who are the armed enforcers, who carry guns and shoot the eliminated players.

And then there are Square masks , who are supervisors. They tell the other guards what to do and are not to be spoken to unless they address you first. 

The Square guards also have access to the Frontman’s control center, where they have work stations, which they use to monitor the lower level guards in their rooms/cells and to keep track of the security situation at the facility. 

So the question is: Who the hell are they? 

Are they slaves, like the players, or are they employees? If they are employees, then, is this a one off gig or do they come back every year? 

It would seem it is the latter, as 3 of the guards have set up a lucrative organ harvesting operation with a Chinese crime syndicate, which is not something you can easily do in a few days on an isolated island with little or no cell phone signal. 

Then there is this: setting up the games might take, maybe, two weeks, given there are so many guards and half the games have relatively simple set ups. Red Light, Green Light is basically a big open field, where only the murder doll and her tree have to be installed. Honeycomb is a big sandpit with some playground equipment and Squid Game itself only has a big field with some markings on the ground.

Now let’s say that, after the games end, they need another 2 weeks to clean up the aftermath- clean blood off the walls, dispose of bodies, and the ashes from the crematorium, maybe dismantling the game sets (it’s unclear if the games are the same every year or if they change over the years). And then the week that the games actually take place. 

That’s five weeks. What do they do for the other 47 weeks of the year?

Do they do other work for the organisation? If so, do they do it on the island or the mainland? Are they kept as prisoners on the island in between rounds of the games? Again, unlikely, given that some guards have set up the organ smuggling operation. 

We know the guards aren’t microchipped on their bodies, like the players, but on their uniforms, so there’s a risk of them running away once they get back to the mainland. Another risk of sending them back to the mainland is that they might disclose the location of the island  to the police and compromise the operation. Remember, the circle guards drive the vans around Seoul and to the ferry so they know where the island is.

The most interesting theory I’ve come across so far, and arguably the most plausible, is that they’re North Korean defectors who have been smuggled out of the North by the organisation and are now made to do the dirty work for the organisation for a few years under the promise of freedom and South Korean citizenship, and the threat of death or deportation back to the North if they talk to anyone about the games, or do a bad job (like the 2 guards who take off their masks and are promptly shot by The Frontman).

This is also an indication that there has to be some secondary control structure. The Frontman only has a handgun. The triangle guards have a big cache of automatic rifles and other guns. If they put their minds together they could easily kill all the other guards, the Frontman and whatever contestants are remaining, take all the cash from the piggy bank and head back to the mainland with at least a million US Dollars each. So there must be something, somewhere keeping them in check. 

This, conveniently, brings me to the next troubling presence in the show: The Frontman. 

Why is he there? We learn early on that he is the cop’s brother and won the games 5 years earlier. Gi-Hon wins roughly 40 million Dollar in this year’s edition, so even accounting for inflation, he must have won at least 35 Million Dollar a few years earlier. He doesn’t have to work ever again so why is he back?

Did he gamble all his money away or invest it unwisely, leaving him in need for a job?

Did he go back to manage the facility straight away, or is this his first time? 

Early on in the series, the cop is seen going back to his brother’s apartment where the landlady asks him if he can maybe pay his brother’s rent. 

Why would you keep paying rent for someone who has gone missing 5 years earlier? Or did he disappear only recently? 

Where was The Frontman in the intervening years? 

Or is the apartment scene a flashback?

Or did he, perhaps, like the VIPs and the old man, get bored of being filthy rich and decided to get involved in this mass murder game organisation? 

The old man dies in the final episode, so someone else will have to take over the organizing of the games. 

Will our current Frontman take over at the helm and will another former games winner be promoted to the Frontman role? 

That would almost make it look like a regular company structure, wherein you can get promoted to a more senior position when someone above you in the organisation moves on (or, as here, dies).

There is a lot we don’t know.

And then there’s the final thing I want to talk about and that is the prize money.

In the final episode, Gi-Hun/Player 456 is thrown out of a limousine and onto the streets of Seoul. When he gets up, he has a debit card stuck in his mouth and when he checks the card balance at a nearby ATM, he finds that his account has a balance of over 45 Billion Won, or roughly 40 million US Dollars.

Last year, my dad paid a contractor an amount of just over 5000 Euros for work he had done on his house, garden and driveway and, within 10 minutes of making the transfer, had a bank employee on the phone asking him what the hell he thought he was doing. 

That is a respected long time customer paying a legit local business. 

How on earth you could move the equivalent of 40 Million US Dollars from a shady organisation to someone’s private account without every alarm bell in the country going off is beyond me. 

The bank must have been in on the organisation. Perhaps the old man was the owner of the bank, or its CEO? 

You can’t move that kind of money around without attracting the attention of every industry watchdog unless someone on the inside is intentionally keeping the transactions off the books. 

So.. there are plenty of questions to answer in season 2, which has now officially been confirmed. I’m looking forward to it.

Now, as an encore, here is something I noted while watching the show for a second time- all main characters, in episode 2, in the interval where they are back in the real world, have the way they die foreshadowed.

Player 067 - throat slashed

She confronts the people trafficker she paid to bring her mother over from the North, and puts a knife to his throat.

Just before the final game, she has her throat slit by player 218.

Ali - Betrayal

Ali goes to his place of work to collect his back salary but his boss betrays him by saying that he has no money to pay him even though there’s an envelope full of cash on his desk. Ali grabs the money and runs for the door but boss man grabs him and a struggle for the money begins. Ali manages to wrestle the money from him and pushes his boss who stumbles into some sort of metal press and has his hand turned into steak tartare. 

Back in the games, during Marbles, San Woo gives Ali stewardship of their combined marbles and asks him to stay put while he goes looking for a team that, like them, doesn’t have a clear winner so that they may play a playoff for all the marbles so that they can both survive. What Ali doesn’t know is that San Woo has replaced the marbles with pebbles whil Ali wasn’t watching, and has walked off to a guard to show him he was victorious. Ali is then shot in the head, betrayed for a second time.

Sun-Woo - Suicide.

Sun Woo goes back to his luxury apartment when the games are initially abandoned after round one. He is then seen laying in a filled bathtub, fully clothed, with a beer in his hand. He is trying to get drunk, pass out slide further into the water and drown- a clear suicide attempt.

Back in the games, at the very end, he realizes that going back to the real world is pointless

as every financial law enforcement agency is looking for him and he takes his steak knife and stabs himself in the neck. Suicide.

Gangster- Betrayal and a bridge

Gangster dude calls up one of his minions and tells him about the games and that there are

billions in cash laying around the island. He suggests they get a crew together, bring a shitload of guns to the island, overpower the staff there and walk off with the money.

What he doesn’t know is that his accomplice has been planning to backstab him and has contacted a crime syndicate from the Philippines who run a casino where gangster dude had run up a large debt and then ran off without paying them, figuring they wouldn’t go through the trouble of going all the way to Korea to collect. 

He was wrong.

His minion has informed the Filipinos where they would meet and as soon as they stop the car, the Filipinos move in. Gangster dude first murders his former associate by stabbing him a few dozen times, and then runs off.  Seeing that he is surrounded, he jumps off a high bridge and swims to safety underwater. 

Back in the games, when they reach the glass stepping stones game, he is just ahead of the

woman he first made friends with, then had sex with and then he told to fuck off for the tug of war game, because he didn’t want women on his team as men are stronger and that would make it more likely for him to win.
In the glass stepping stones games, however, he ends up being one step ahead of her, but when he gets to the front of the pack, he refuses to move forward and forces other players to go first.  However, when the woman reaches his glass stone, she tells him she will go first, but then grabs him around the waist, tells him he messed with the wrong person and then she throws both of them off the bridge and to their deaths. 

The only players still alive at the end of the series, Player 001 and Player 456, while the others all deal with problems, can be seen sitting outside a bar, having beers and a bite to eat and enjoying themselves.

So that was my analyses of Squid Game. As I said, there are many questions left unanswered so we have plenty to look forward to in season 2. 

Enjoy your day!