Squid Game star may have given away a season 3 plot twist

The second season of Squid Game came out right after Christmas and quickly went on to break Netflix viewership records, racking up 126.2 million views in 11 days. What can I say? People have really connected with this story about deeply indebted individuals forced to play life-or-death games in hopes of nabbing a huge cash price at the end. Netflix is surely hoping that the third and final season will make as big of a splash when it drops sometime this year.

But some of the actors and affiliates may be spoiling their plans, since they're out here leaking information Netflix would rather keep to itself. First up, Netflix Korea released a video saying that the new season will drop June 27, 2025, so about half a year away. More recently, star Park Gyu-young posted a photo on her Instagram account that may give away an upcoming plot twist.

Gyu-young plays Kang No-eul, a young woman who gets drafted into the Squid Games to be a guard, albeit one who's not entirely comfortable with her job. She doesn't want to go along with an organ harvesting racket some of the other guards have going, since it requires her to keep contestants alive and in pain so their organs can be extracted; she'd rather kill them outright, at least giving them a quick death. She does eventually go along with the scheme after the other guards threaten her life.

And at one point she outright spares a contestant who she should have shot: Park Gyeong-seok (Lee Jin-wook) moved when he shouldn't have during the opening game of Red Light, Green Light, but Kang No-eul didn't pick him off from her sniper's perch. She knows Jin-wook outside the Squid Game, and sympathizes with his need to get funds to help his sick daughter. That said, Jin-wook does get shot later in the season, when he participates in a failed uprising against the Squid Game organizers.

And that brings us to Park Gyu-young's Instagram post, which has since been deleted. It shows Park on the Squid Game set wearing the distinctive track suit that all the guards wear. And beside her is a surprise guest:

The image of the guy next to her is blurry, but fans think it may be actor Park Gyeong-seok wearing his own pink track suit, which would mean that Lee Jin-wook somehow becomes a guard in season 3.

From Squid Game contestant to guard

How might this happen? Well, again, we know that at least some of the guards are shooting contestants intending to wound rather than kill them, the better to harvest fresh organs later. So just because Lee Jin-wook got shot during the rebellion doesn't mean he's dead.

From there, perhaps Kang No-eul arranges things so Lee Jin-wook becomes a guard. I could see her killing one of the guards who threatened her and arranging it so Lee Jin-wook takes his place. Or it might even be official. We know that the Front Man (Lee Byung-hun) won the Squid Games in some previous iteration, so hiring from within isn't unheard of. Maybe some of the contestants go on to become guards.

Or that blurry picture is of someone else entirely. We'll have to wait for the third and final season of Squid Game to be sure. Hopefully we won't have to wait too long.

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h/t Soap Central