The third and final season of Squid Game just dropped on Netflix, and it has a lot of what you'd expect from the show, namely bloody mayhem as a new crop of cash-strapped individuals play deadly children's games until one finally takes home the grand prize...or doesn't, you'll have to watch to find out for sure.
While I'm not willing to spoil everything about the ending, there's one thing I have to talk about. The final scene of the show is set in Los Angeles. We see a person in a suit playing a game of ddakji — that's the game where you throw down a heavy piece of folded paper onto the ground in an attempt to flip another piece of paper upside-down — with some random dude. This is how ordinary people get recruited into the Squid Games; the person in the suit is a recruiter, and the dude is a mark who probably has money riding on this. Every time the guy loses, the recruiter slaps him in the face. We saw series hero Seong Gi-hun go through this exact process in the first season:
This short scene has all kinds of implications for the Squid Game universe. Apparently they hold Squid Games all over the world, not just in South Korea. This could even be a lead-in to an English-language Squid Game series we've been hearing about for a while; Fight Club director David Fincher is reportedly working on it.
The other notable thing is that the recruiter is played by Cate Blanchett. Yes, that Cate Blanchett, the one with multiple Academy Awards to her name. The one who played Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings movies, and Queen Elizabeth, and Katharine Hepburn, and Lydia Tár, and Lilith in the Borderlands movie, although we can be generous and just forget that one exists. Here she is in Squid Game, recruiting people to play the Squid Games.
Blanchett's character only has one line, "As you wish," but you remember it, because Cate Blanchett just said it. This is a pretty big name to pull out right at the end of the show. Clearly the producers want us to pay attention to this cameo. But what does it mean?
Well, it could just a fun little winking cameo at the end of the show; isn't it neat that we got Cate Blanchett to do this? Another option is that the English-language Squid Game spinoff is further along than we thought and Cate Blanchett is a part of it. If that's true, it will certainly help get eyes on the show whenever Netflix formally announces it, which they haven't as of yet.
For now, all three seasons of Squid Game are streaming on Netflix, as are several other Cate Blanchett projects, I'm sure.
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