This text incorporates spoilers for “Squid Sport” season 3, episode 5, “Circle Triangle Sq..”
All through Netflix’s “Squid Sport,” the Entrance Man (Lee Byung-hun) has been a looming, unbeatable determine. If he provides a command, it’s obeyed. If he fires a gun at his brother, Hwang Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon), the bullet hits within the actual spot that enables the goal to outlive the wound (and the following fall off a cliff) however nonetheless neutralizes him as a risk. When the massive “Squid Sport” season 2 Entrance Man twist revealed he is posing as a participant, he turned out to be a social and likable man who rapidly constructed rapport with Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) regardless of donning the traditionally suspicious participant quantity “001” and initially voting towards leaving. He is the winner of the 2015 Squid Sport, and the chosen prodigy who inherited the operation after sport creator Oh Il-Nam (O Yeong-su) died.
Assuming the story he tells Gi-hun whereas posing as Oh Younger-Il is totally right, the Entrance Man even has a shifting backstory: Initially a stellar police officer, he borrowed cash from a shady character when his pregnant spouse wanted a liver transplant, and was promptly fired as a result of this was seen as bribery. He participates within the sport to safe the requisite funds to avoid wasting his spouse and youngster, however each have been misplaced by the point he emerged because the winner. It is a surprisingly sympathetic origin story, as villains go … however because the flashbacks in “Squid Sport” season 3, episode 5 reveal, there is a crack in his good tragic villain shell. Because it seems, the Entrance Man did not win the video games by himself, however acquired the identical assist from Il-nam that he now makes an attempt to supply Gi-hun.
The Entrance Man by no means performed the ultimate sport
In “Squid Sport” season 3, episode 4 (“222”), the Entrance Man unexpectedly summons Gi-hun to his quarters. After revealing his id to the shocked participant, he proceeds to make him a proposal that is frankly arduous to refuse. Explaining that he desires to assist Gi-hun save himself and Kim Jun-hee’s (Jo Yu-ri) new child — who’s now “competing” as Participant 222, courtesy of the VIPs — the Entrance Man provides Gi-hun a knife and instructs him to kill the remaining grownup gamers earlier than the ultimate sport, revealing that this may render it unplayable. This might permit each Gi-hun and the infant to not solely survive however emerge as co-winners. Gi-hun takes the knife however in the end rejects stone chilly homicide, opting as a substitute to take part within the final sport and shield Participant 222.
Because of the Entrance Man’s phrase decisions and normal perspective, the scene makes it appear that he is grown keen on Gi-hun and genuinely feels disgusted by the infant’s inclusion within the sport, to not point out the opposite gamers’ gleefully said intentions to kill the new child. Nonetheless, the episode 5 flashbacks reveal that this may be simply one other one of many Entrance Man’s video games of ethical superiority in spite of everything. We see that when the long run Entrance Man was nonetheless simply Hwang In-ho and competed within the sport as Participant 132, a masked Il-nam gave him the very same alternative, solely with none pity-motivated elements such because the child. Not a lot later, we see the harried In-ho kill the opposite gamers like a coward within the night time, his face a frozen masks of terror … and similar to that, nearly every little thing we have recognized about each the Entrance Man and the model of Squid Sport he enforces goes out the window.
The ethical contest between Gi-hun and the Entrance Man is not black and white anymore
Till the flashbacks, the Entrance Man has enforced a twisted however clear ethical code of the sport’s equity. This, the present has advised us, drives his battle with Gi-hun: The Entrance Man shares Il-nam’s nihilistic philosophy about humanity’s uncaring opportunism that enables him to view Squid Sport as a real lifeline for the downtrodden. In the meantime, Gi-hun’s perception in good individuals makes him view the sport as mindless slaughter, and his final aim is to convey the operation down.
This wrestle between these Squid Sport prize cash winners with opposing philosophies was the spine of “Squid Sport” season 2. In season 3, the Entrance Man appeared to realize the higher hand when Gi-hun grew to become jaded and vengeful within the aftermath of the failed rebellion and Jung-bae’s (Lee Search engine marketing-hwan) dying. Now, nonetheless, it seems that the Entrance Man has been standing on clay toes all alongside. In contrast to Gi-hun, he by no means received the sport pretty, and we now know that neither he nor Il-nam have been above rigging the outcomes when the scenario requires it. If nothing else, this makes the Entrance Man’s anger towards the dishonest organ traffickers within the season 1 episode “A Truthful World” hypocritical, to say the least. Mix this with he and Il-nam each infiltrating the sport as gamers, and the Entrance Man’s superficially earnest try to assist Gi-hun and the infant appears a lot like a last-ditch try to tug his opponent right down to his personal degree.
“Squid Sport” has spent loads of time eroding the ethical floor underneath each Gi-hun and the Entrance Man. That is becoming, as a result of there aren’t any true winners in Squid Sport — solely those that die, and those that get a bunch of cash.
