Squid Game Season 3 Finally Gives Fans What They Always Wanted (And It's Terrible)

Contains general spoilers for "Squid Game" Season 3

After years of only having brief brushes with various VIPs over the course of "Squid Game" history, Season 3 of the show finally devotes a lot more narrative real estate to a small group of VIP characters. It even allows them to carry a plot thread — which proves to be a huge mistake, because not only are these new characters extremely rote stereotypes, they're also just as uninteresting to watch as they are bored in the show. 

It would help if any of the four were complex and interesting, but they're flat stereotypes — which may have been creator-director-writer Hwang Dong-hyuk's intention, perhaps as a means to deliver a commentary about western morals. This is fine when they only have a couple of scenes in a season, but not when full episodes — like Episode 3 and Episode 5 — revolve around spending an extensive amount of time with them. Here's how the amount of time the final season of "Squid Game" provides to the VIPs almost ruins the entirety of the show.

"Squid Game" wisely keeps the VIP characters — masked, wealthy individuals from other nations who fund and watch the games for their own entertainment — off to the side during Season 1, where they only briefly show up in three episodes: Episode 7, titled "VIPs," Episode 8, called "Front Man," and the final episode of the season, "One Lucky Day." In Season 2, they're barely a factor at all. 

Audiences know that these characters are foreign investors who have been attending the games since Oh Il-nam (O Yeong-su) invited his colleagues to the first one. We are already aware that they're sociopaths who see anyone poorer than they are as expendable human waste. In Season 1, this was made clear without belaboring the point. But spending large chunks of Season 3's narrative hammering that home — while Buffalo Mask, Panther Mask, Lion Mask, Eagle Mask and Bear Mask (David Sayers, Jane Wong, Bryan Bucco, Jordan Lambertoni and Kevin Yorn) gamble with the players' lives, drink and drug excessively, sexually abuse the human furniture, and blurt out witticisms — is a waste of time. 

We get it, these people are evil. We don't need to spend 20 minutes with them excitedly slavering over the death of a baby when we could be listening to one character who's drastically underserved by the majority of Season 3.

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Because the show spends so much time following the VIPs — whether they're cosplaying as Pink Guards or betting on the lives of babies — a couple of characters end up getting the short shrift. The most important person who's being almost ignored thanks to this is Hwang In-ho (Lee Byung-hun), the occasionally nice Front Man, who doesn't get nearly the amount of attention he deserves while playing host to his group. 

True, he does get to share a wonderful brawl with Kang No Eul (Park Gyu-young) during Episode 5, but he spends the majority of Season 3 watching the games from a distance and guiding the VIPs through the experience. Since the entire show has been built around Hwang In-Ho's ambiguous relationship with optimist, hero, and all-around good guy Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) — and they barely interact during the majority of Season 3 — it's time that could have been better spent on something much more interesting than the lifestyles of the rich and depraved.