The second season of the Korean survival-exploitation drama “Squid Game” dropped last week after Christmas Day and it took no time at all for most of its fans to finish the latest installment, but not everyone stayed long enough to see the short mid-credit scenes, or stinger, tease what’s to come.
But if you did and like me, you left wondering what the heck it was, don’t worry. I gotchu.
But before that, let me offer you a short recap. And I do mean short because I still intend to write other explainer essays on “Squid Game,” but from an anarchist reading of the show. In 2021, when it first came out, I was impressed by how it’s different from “Battle Royale,” the Japanese novel by Koushun Takami that popularized this genre. As a fan of the novel and a constant nagger about the business model of the streaming platform that distributes “Squid Game,” I was not ashamed to tell my friends that I liked the Korean show better because of the economics and philosophy that it explores. I call the genres of “Battle Royale,” “Squid Game” and “The Hunger Games,” survival-exploitation drama to separate it from survival dramas in which people find themselves battling external threats like zombies and monsters, alien invasions, and disasters. Survival-exploitation dramas, meanwhile, puts characters in violent and unjust situations perpetrated by other people. Survival exploitation (the noun without the dash) is often used to describe the situation in which people are forced to engage in paid sexual acts in exchange for something to eat or get them through the day. This isn’t very different from what the characters in these stories.
If you haven’t seen both seasons, obviously, there are heavy spoilers ahead so please look away now.
Now for that short recap:
Three years after he won the Squid Game, Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) is back in the island where the games are played but not before finding allies outside the game. These allies understand just how brutal people who work for the games are: Hwang Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon) has been undercover as a worker and Choi Woo-seok (Jeon Seok-ho) has been abducted and was forced to play a deadly game by The Salesman before. Nothing changed in the rules of the games. Everyone is still allowed to vote whether or not they will continue with the games, but season 2 plays on this a little bit more. Players are now given patches to show how they voted (this is a nice symbolism of how people are still divided even after elections, but I will talk about that in a separate post*). Gi-hun believes that in order to make the games stop forever, they need to talk to the man behind the black mask. In order to do this, he convinces some of the players who previously voted with him to start an uprising. Unfortunately for him, Player 001 is the masked man and naturally, he botched the players’ insurrection. Let’s leave the summary with that for now. You’re here because you already watch the second season, so I don’t have to give you the entire details.
(*Aside from being a symbol of division, I also suspect that these patches will be used in another way in the story because technically, the writers did not have to make them wear a physical symbol. Think of the first arc of “Hunter x Hunter,” but in “Squid Game.”)
Let’s talk about the mid-credit scenes, which everyone is wrongly calling a post-credit scene.
Even after the revolt, the game continues. In the short clip, Players 096, 100, and 353 are seen looking up to a giant doll that looks like the one from the Red Light, Green Light game.
Player 100 is Im Jeong-dae (Song Young-chang), the annoying businessman first seen in the third episode titled “001.” With a 10 billion won debt, he owes the most money among the other players.
Player 096 was the guy from Class 946 of the Marines. We first saw him in Episode 4, “Six Legs,” when Kang Dae-ho (Kang Ha-neul) recruited him to be part of their five-person team. He was immediately replaced by the pregnant Kim Jun-hee (Jo Yu-ri).
The next time Player 096 was seen, he was with Player 100 and Player 353 in Episode 6, “O X.”
It is obvious in the mid-credit scenes that one of the games in Season 3 includes a train. When we see the three players enter, we see a railroad crossing sign on the lower right side of the screen. It is then followed by a cut to the face of the giant doll, and then another cut to another doll—the two dolls appear to be facing each other from the way those two cut scenes were edited.
The next and final scene were railroad signal lights that shifted from red to green.
It is tempting to speculate that the next game will involve the thought experiment The Trolley Problem since prior to their uprising, one of the questions asked by The Frontman (Lee Byung-hun) to him was if he was willing to sacrifice a few of those who voted with them for the sake of others. However, The Trolley Problem is not a Korean game.
The Korean Leap Frog game is a traditional game where players form a position similar to a train. This game traces its origins from 16th Century European game, buck buck. Here are some teens playing the game:
However, I do not see how the two giant dolls will be involved in a game like that.
Whatever game it is, it means that the games will not be stopped even after what Gi-hun and the others did. It also means that we are going to see games that are not quite similar to those in Season 1.
“Squid Game” Season 3 is reportedly going to air in 2025.
