Just a totally pointless subplot that achieves nothing and only serves to confuse us in the end. The cop does nothing to help the contestants, there’s never any police backup and he doesn’t even kill the lecherous old VIP that wanted to have his way with him. He ends up killing his own brother and the plot just sort of. Apparently he won in 2015 and instead of taking all those billions and seeing the world, he’s taken over as the Front Man. But when Hwang Jun-ho finds the records room he spots his brother’s name in the winner’s list. It seems as though his brother has been missing for maybe a couple weeks. We hear him on the phone, possibly with a parent, saying that he’s looking for his brother in his usual spots. He goes to his tiny apartment and finds one of the mysterious cards with the PlayStation buttons on it. I don’t know if I missed something in the timeline, but when we meet Hwang Jun-ho he’s looking for his brother.
In this episode we learn that the mysterious Front Man-the guy in the scary black mask running operations-is actually the brother of Hwang Jun-ho, the police detective who sneaks into the games when all the contestants go back for a second try. The VIP issue is definitely the worst in Episode 7 (VIPs) but Episode 8 (Front Man) introduced another major problem. Instead, we have to listen to these deeply grating characters jabber on and on and on, totally undermining their cool golden animal masks and any sense of dread or mystery they might have otherwise possessed. The show would have been better served to cut all their lines and just have them as mysterious masked observers. The VIPs take up a ridiculous amount of screen-time from the moment they’re introduced until the end of the games and I hated every single second of it. Suddenly we’re listening to English instead of Korean and every single line is just bad. Their dialogue is awful and made more jarring by bad voice-over work. The VIPs-uber-wealthy Westerners for the most part-are painful in every way. Then the VIPs show up in Episode 7 and things take a major turn for the worse.
The games were harrowing, the drama and humor were on-point and you really started to see Seong Gi-Hun’s transformation. I had very few complaints for the first six episodes of Squid Game. It’s a show you can’t really look away from-its violence so engrossing and terrible, its characters so clearly desperate in both the real world where they struggle with money problems and in the games where they fight for their lives.īut the show is not without its flaws. Squid Game is not one of those shows that you necessarily enjoy, though it can be quite funny at times. There are six games and each is increasingly horrible, though I think the pancake game-in which contestants had to carve out one of four different shapes from a hard pancake without breaking any of the edges-was the most tense. Elimination from the games costs you your life. But the price 455 contestants end up paying is higher than anyone imagined.
With 45 billion won up for grabs, it’s a chance at a new beginning.
He, like most everyone else in the games, joins without realizing the stakes. He is deeply in debt to ruthless loan sharks and the little bit of winnings he just won at the race track were stolen by a pickpocket-Sae-Byeok-who he later meets at the games. He’s a chronic gambler who steals from his elderly mother.