This recap covers episode ten, “One Lucky Day.â€
My, my, how far we’ve come.
A great deal of Squid Game: The Challenge’s hook is baked into the spectacle of its scale. We started out with a whopping 456 participants, who were whittled down through a progression of challenges that largely capitalized on the chaos of a large group. Red Light, Green Light was the clearest expression of how expansive that chaos could be. Last episode’s Circle of Trust, while featuring a much smaller cluster, still relied on the confusion of myriad possibilities and interlocking relationships to force players into a tense bind. Now that we’re down to three players, Squid Game: The Challenge has to confront a narrative challenge. Scale and spectacle aren’t luxuries it can lean on anymore. What’s left in the deck?
Well, there’s always cruelty. “One Lucky Day†— which shares the same title as the K-drama’s first-season finale — opens in the quiet preamble before the final stretch. There isn’t much for Mai (287, because we’re doing the numbers one last time), Phill (451), and Sam (16) to do. The cavernous dorm is empty. There are presumably no more chores on the docket. There’s only so much socializing that can happen. By this point, relationships are ossified: Sam and Phill are supertight, and if I were them, I’m already wary as hell of Mai, a proven killer, and figure that whatever friendliness she projects probably can’t be trusted. For her part, Mai can do little but keep the pair at a distance. She’s not wrong. When it comes down to it, it could well be two-on-one.
As the red suits pop back out to Rent the Runway, the show gives us one final shot of character development and narrative stakes. We learn of Phill’s financial precarity and his desire to help everyone who has aided him over the years. We get a tiny bit more insight into Mai’s past in the Navy and how her teenage motherhood caused a split with her family. We’re given more on Sam’s background as someone who grew up closeted in a religious Idaho community and who went on to finally find a true sense of happiness in himself.
Dinnertime. I’ll be honest: I wasn’t expecting this show to deliver on providing a nice meal. Those fruits on the table look fake as hell! But nope, the three get nice slabs of steak. And scallops? Anyway, the trio tries to get through awkward small talk, and the moment mercifully passes. We all know why we’re here. I imagine it’s hard to think about anything else.
There is a thematic elegance to the choice of the next challenge, which is little more than a game of chance. At the center of the dining area are three buttons: One does nothing, one eliminates you, and one gives you automatic entry to the final round as well as the opportunity to pick the other person to come along with you. Mai knows the score. If either Sam or Phill gets that third outcome, they’re picking the other one and she’s toast. So while Phill and Sam hesitate, she volunteers to go first, a move that’s consistent with her past logic of trying to wrest what little control the game is willing to provide you.
Mai is right to go first. This might be the show’s purest game of chance to date, but there are still edges to glean from the margins. It sure as hell might not feel like it, but going first means you have a 66 percent chance of getting a non-elimination outcome, while going second means you have a 50 percent chance. Of course, the complication lies in that third button, the one where you automatically go through and get to bring along a buddy. Mai missing out on that button might not be an instant elimination, but she’s still on the bubble if the next person hits it.
She gets lucky. Though she hits the button where nothing happens, Sam ends up getting the wrong side of the 50-50 split. He’s distraught in the confessional. I am too. And so is Phill back at the dinner table, who feels responsible for not deciding to go second instead of Sam. But he’s through nonetheless, and suddenly, we’re down to our last two finalists.
Later, when the lights are back on and the dorm is emptied out again, Mai’s pretty chipper. She’s that much closer and she’s presumably breathing a little easier now that the game is down to a clear one-on-one. The Plastic Piggy descends onto the floor, giving the opportunity for the two to gaze at their very possible future. I wonder how it smells.
That the final game doesn’t ultimately turn out to be the titular Squid Game, as in the case of the K-drama, is something of a structural fairness. The actual children’s game requires a decent level of physicality. There’s pushing, shoving, running. Bryton (432) probably would have won that game under any scenario. Instead, Squid Game: The Challenge decides to land its plane on another children’s game altogether: the elemental rock, paper, scissors. With a twist, of course. Instead of a one-and-done, each time a player wins a hand, they have to pick out a key from a huge pile that may or may not unlock the safe that contains the $4.56 million prize pot.
Frankly, it should have been a one-and-done. That would’ve given the sequence the opportunity to build up to a boiling climax. Instead, we get an endgame that goes on and on, eventually petering out in terms of narrative tension. Mai mops the floor with Phill, seemingly having cracked Phill’s strategic patterning. (Which is totally something that can happen!) Awash with chances, she finally fishes out the key that opens the safe. A warm light spills out of the chamber, Pulp Fiction style, and she sees the same golden credit that the fictional Seong Gi-Hun was given on the other side of his ordeal. Mai is the winner of Squid Game. Congratulations to her. She went through the wringer for this: scrapping forward, losing friends, throwing others under the bus, acting on her values in vain. On the whole, though, I think it’s fair to say she played a pretty good game. She kept a lower profile (for the most part), and as things grew hot, she met the game on its terms and took ruthless, needed shots when it mattered. It’s hard to say there are any worthy winners in a game that’s built so much on random chance, group chaos, and moral compromises, so perhaps we shall abstain from such statements.
Before the finale wraps up, we’re given a brief coda filled with scenes of various players back in their lives. It’s a sweet scene in that they come across as joyful, though of course it’s a producing effort that’s trying to leave you with a positive association. The finale ends on a feeling and a sense that’s damn near the polar opposite of how the K-drama closes its first season: with its protagonist hollowed out from winning the game, hair dyed red, boarding a plane with a conviction to break the system. I had been wondering if this very entertaining, peculiar, and thoroughly unorthodox adaptation of Squid Game would go the full mile in its approach to the finale. Nah. It’s reality television, baby. You can’t break the system. There’s a second season to make.