Squid Game

 By Ephraim Belnap

    This is only a review of the first episode. 

    I can see why there's hype. Some notes:

• The footage is a lot nicer than most TV shows. It's like movie-quality. I feel like that's implicitly a big part of why it's getting embraced, because it has such a sheen of prettiness. 
• That scene with the kids' paper game was a perfect microcosm of the system and the moment I knew this was gonna be good. The definition of schmuck bait, too good to be true, and in-your-face foreshadowing. 
• That old guy is gonna turn out to be the villain or something, I'm calling it right now
• That red light, green light game was pretty crazy. 
• They're doing a lot of set-up with characters right now that I imagine will pay off later. I don't have high hopes for that guy who saved Seoung's life. This doesn't seem like a "the good guy wins" story
• That scene with the loan sharks combined with the talk about debtors in Parasite makes me think South Korea doesn't have conventional laws about money-lenders. Seoung's character is straight-up beaten up, and the debtee in Parasite is in hiding because it's implied his debtors will kill him. Money-lenders in America can be super-predatory, but I don't think they can openly send people to break your legs. But hey, maybe, it's just individual stories taking license, not a real-life problem in the country. 

With all these thoughts, the biggest one I have is this - WHY WOULD YOU KILL HALF THE PLAYERS AT THE OUTSET!? 

    They have 456 players at the start, all of which seem to be recruited via the "guy with a briefcase" strategy. Then all of them were picked up in a van, dosed with knockout gas, shipped to that island, changed into different clothes, and carried into their bunks. That's a lot of capital and labor per person. You'd think they'd tell the players the rules ahead of time so they'd get the most value out of each person. Not telling them meant they lost maybe more than half the players in the very first game, meaning they might as well not have been there at all! Heck, if there are 456 players, isn't that already too many players? Even in a CoD lobby, you can't watch 500 players at once. 100 or 50 would work much better. If you need there to be more, just have them competing in different brackets and reveal them in the next episode! 

    I know it may seem creepy that I'm going over all this, but I'm mainly doing this to take away from the intentionally scary moment this was. Rationalize why it couldn't really happen. Because don't forget, stuff like this usually does happen. We usually just call them American Ninja Warrior or TikTok challenges. Killer competing sports aren't usually adopted, because the players are only good for one game, and people have known that for millenia. Even in ancient Rome, gladiators weren't usually killed, because gladiators were expensive to make, so if you only got one use out of them it was a huge loss! Imagine if we killed every American Ninja Warrior who failed. We'd lose a lot of repeat performances. It's far more economic and of benefit to everyone to keep them alive and keep them working. And the person gets to be alive! Great! 

    So yeah, killing half the players is idiotic, but it's probably an intentional move to both A) make the death reveal really shocking, and B) distance the events enough from real life that it feels obviously stylized.