Squid Game: One Lucky Day

 "I am NOT a horse!"

And so it ends, unexpectedly in several ways. Gi-hun wins, as we knew he would... and then has to go back to real life, and its tragedies. Money will not bring his dead mother back. But, given that he takes a year to try his daughter, and abandons her at the end to compete suicidally again, it's suddenly clear that Gi-hun, this apparently decent man, is just a crap dad and always was. Sod him.

The episode is full of surprises, not least that the final game- the eponymous squid game itself, of course- takes up relatively little of the episode, and is pretty much just a dirty scrap between Ji-hun and Sang-wu, with Sang-wu ultimately killing himself in defeat to ensure that, if Gi-hun has to win, he should at least win the prize.

Before long, though, Gi-hun is back in the real world, and his mother is dead: all that money is mreaningless. And then we get the big revelation- the old man we all loved so much is neither as nice nor as dead as we'd previously supposed. But I'm rather afraid I lose all sympathy for Gi-hun before this point. I know he's depressed, but he's not even tried to see his daughter for a year. Plus his hairdo is stupid.

This is an interesting choice, to make him suddenly unlikeable,and an interesting one. I'm not sure I like it, but it's an admirable and brave move to do something so abrasive and challenge not only our expectation od the happy ending but our liking for Gi-hun, who perhaps never was the good man we thought..