Squid game episode 3 full episode

The Man With the Umbrella Squid Game Season 1

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Game on! In Squid Game Episode 3, our heroes and nearly all of their fellow players—187 in total, and if that’s a play on the infamous police code number for murder, bravo—return to the mysterious lair of the Front Man and his various circle, square, and triangle-faced pink goons. The players are wiser. The jackpot is bigger. The game is more difficult (even if fewer players die in the attempt). And some players are starting to try outfoxing the game masters.

The episode opens with Jun-ho, the plainclothes cop from the previous episode, tailing the van carrying Gi-hun. It soon arrives at its destination: a barge, filled with such vans, on its way to a deserted island. Jun-ho pulls a Cape Fear by squirming under one of the vans and holding on, letting it ferry him onto the barge. Eventually he gets the drop on one of the circle-faced pink guards, chokes the guy out, steals his uniform, and dumps him over the side of the barge to drown. (I’m not convinced this is in the police rulebook.)

Once he’s inside, we watch him struggle to fake his way through the pink guys’ various protocols—where to go, when to speak, what to do, and so on. On the barge, he fakes seasickness to explain his tardiness; during the second game—more on that coming soon—he simply says he got confused. The episode ends with an implied threat that he’ll face some kind of consequence for that confusion. All in all, it’s a high-risk venture.

He’s far from alone when it comes to risk-taking. As the players reunite once they come to following their dose of sleeping gas, several cliques form up, with the idea that there’s safety in numbers. Most of our heroes—Gi-hun, Sang-woo, Ali, and the old man—congregate together. The gangster, Deok-su, quickly assembles a small coterie of minions; he gets rejected by the pickpocket, and he rejects player #212 (Kim Joo-ryoung)—the mother of a newborn, who’s got a lot more tricks up her sleeve than you might think.

Indeed, the mother and the pickpocket wind up forming a team-up of their own when they’re both permitted a bathroom break. As the mother—who smuggled cigarettes and a lighter in a small container inserted into her vagina; hey, smoke ’em if you got ’em!—loudly fakes a bout of constipation, the pickpocket wriggles her way into the ventilation system, where she spies on the pink guys melting large batches of sugar.

Now here’s where things get a little bit sketchy. Sang-woo learns about the sugar from the pickpocket, but he doesn’t share this info with his alleged teammates. Another contestant, #111, finds a tiny piece of paper reading “honeycomb” in his breakfast, which gives him an advantage as well.

The players are all herded into a set made up like a giant-sized playground, with a towering jungle jim and an adult-sized slide and so on. They’re asked to line up in front of a shape of their choosing: a circle, a triangle, a star, and an umbrella. Sang-woo almost, but not quite, warns Gi-hun not to take the umbrella, but in the end he keeps his mouth shut. (I’m not really sure why—it’s not as if steering Gi-hun in the right direction would have put Sang-woo at any kind of disadvantage himself, though I suppose he didn’t know this at the time.)

Then the game is revealed. Each player is given a thin sugar wafer with the shape of their choice imprinted in it. They’re given a needle and a limited time to pick the shape out of the wafer with it. If they’re too slow, or if they break the shape, it’s game over. And you know what that means.

It’s a nailbiter, especially for Gi-hun, who selected the umbrella shape. (Remember how he left his umbrella in his ex-wife’s place last episode, which is the reason why his daughter, who popped out to return it to him, saw him deck her stepdad? Apparently he’s been losing umbrellas since he was a kid.) As players win and lose all around him, sweat begins to pour from his face onto the wafer, partially melting it. This, he realizes, is the key to winning: If he licks the wafer, it will get thinner and thinner, making it easier for him to pop the umbrella shape out.

The mother, meanwhile, uses her smuggled lighter to heat the needle, which also melts the wafer and makes her job easier. Once she wins, she passes the lighter to the gangster, in a bid to earn her way into his good graces.

One by one, all of the main characters succeed. But one of the losers steals his guard’s weapon and holds him at gunpoint. After he watches all the other losers get gunned down, he forces the guard to remove his mask, and marvels at his young age before turning the gun on himself. The maskless guard is then executed personally by the Front Man, who reminds the pink guys that if the contestants see who you are, you’re dead.

Three episodes in, a big part of Squid Game‘s dark charm is the contrast between the benign, playful, childlike nature of the games and the sadistic, fatal consequences for losing them. On a certain level this goes without saying: People shouldn’t get shot to death for losing Red Light, Green Light. I mean, duh.

But once Squid Game and its creator, writer, and director Hwang Dong-hyuk, sink their teeth into one of these games, they bite hard. Take the sugar-honeycomb game from this episode: How viscerally upsetting is it to see a gigantic children’s playground, complete with a multicolored picket fence, crayon clouds against a bright blue sky, and a layer of sand on the ground, covered in blood and dead bodies? That’s an image that’ll stick with you for a while. It’s no less effective for its obviousness. And the relative quiet of the game—everyone just sits on the floor working diligently—makes for a stark contrast with the fast-paced scrambling chaos of the Red Light, Green Light round.

The show’s ability to make you care about the players it singles out for attention is impressive as well. Gi-hun and Ali and the old man come across like big sweethearts. The pickpocket’s survival instincts make her easy to root for. The mother’s scheming is funny and perversely endearing. Even the cop, Jun-ho, is sympathetic as a guy in way over his head, trying desperately to stay afloat. 

The big exception at the moment, other than the gangster, is Sang-woo. Why is he so reluctant to share his knowledge with his alleged comrades? In particular, why didn’t he warn Gi-hun against selecting the difficult umbrella shape? For all Sang-woo knew, he was handing his old friend a death sentence. Is he secretly trying to winnow down the competition in order to increase the jackpot at the end of the games? Does he resent Gi-hun personally for reasons we’re not privy to yet? Is he simply a secretive type, paranoid and self-interested, perhaps due to the years he’s spent one step ahead of the law?

It speaks well of Squid Game‘s success rate that I’m finding these kinds of questions as compelling to contemplate as the games themselves, or the mystery of how they can muster so many hundreds of henchmen for a clandestine enterprise this sadistic. (I briefly entertained the idea that the pink guys were all either aliens or robots, until Jun-ho dumped the obviously human guy he replaced off that barge.) I’m not sure any of these characters are gonna wind up being as complex and nuanced as, like, Tony Soprano, but they don’t need to be. A good action-thriller need only create convincing sketches of people, giving you just enough to latch onto so that their misadventures mean something to you. In that particular contest, Squid Game has already won.

READ NEXT: ‘Squid Game’ Episode 4 Recap: “Stick To The Team”

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Watch Squid Game Episode 3 on Netflix

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