‘Squid Game: The Challenge’ Was an Addictive Abomination
(Warning: This post contains spoilers for the Squid Game: The Challenge finale.)
In the penultimate episode of Squid Game: The Challenge, Netflix’s reality-show interpretation of the brutal South Korean drama that traumatized viewers worldwide in 2021, the players sat in a circle around a little black box tied off with pink ribbon for a new game. For days afterward, the image scratched at the inside of my brain as I tried to figure out why that present looked so familiar. When I began rewatching the original series, however, it hit me like a train: It’s a version of the gift boxes players in that show received with their invitations to play—a larger version of which would become their coffins when they died during the game.
Squid Game: The Challenge, whose final episode aired Wednesday, was full of these macabre flourishes, like the exploding squibs of black ink that players wear on their chests to simulate blood spatter when they lose a game and “die.” They’re all humorous jabs at the gruesome stakes in the source material, in which 456 players (all of whom are drowning under insurmountable debt) compete in a deadly series of games for a life-changing cash prize. As a reality show, The Challenge was as triumphant as its predecessor—intense, compulsively watchable, and impressively produced. Think a little too hard about what you were watching, though, and you might start feeling like one of Squid Game’s masked villains.