Six Thoughts About Netflix's "The Squid Game"

1. Unless you've been living under a rock, you know the basics of this show.  The premise is an engaging high-concept variation of a familiar plot: for their own amusement, the rich and/or elite get the unwashed masses to fight to the death.  The Hunger Games was played straight, but those movies didn't come close to this kind of exhausted, grim hopelessness.  The marbles episode packs a devastating punch.  It's not a particularly fun experience.
2. We're not familiar with the style and format of Korean television.  Are all K-dramas this overwrought?  The villains are complete one-note caricatures, one all obnoxious bug eyes, the other sneering and scowling through every scene.
3. "Netflix bloat" is a real thing and, frankly, we're tired of it.  This show runs nine episodes (most of them almost an hour long) when the story could have easily been streamlined and told in four.  Just about every twist and turn gets talked to death by the characters, dragging the plot out to absurd lengths.
4. We suggest watching it in the original Korean with English subtitles.  Don't rely on the histrionic English actor voice dub that makes like it play like a bad episode of "Star Blazers."
5. As fascinating as it is to consider an underground death game sponsored by billionaires, the logistics here are utterly implausible.  Over 400 hundred people die in this first season, all of them seemingly with families and friends and living in big cities like Seoul.  They will be missed.  But, okay, this can maybe work.  Oh, but the contestants can vote to end the game, so it's possible that you have hundreds of people out there alive who know about the game and could talk.  Hmm.  Okay, we'll go with it.  But it's a bridge too far when later we learn this contest has been happening for years.  That's thousands of people who just vanish, their bodies disposed of in secret, and no one starts asking questions except for a single police officer?
6. In the end, we're trying to puzzle out the point to it all.  There's some dark themes about the "it's either you or me" evil people will do to survive, of course, and the resilience of the human spirit in the face of death.  There are also some last-minute meditations on wealth and classism that might have resonated better had they been introduced sooner.  And then there's the epilogue, which suggests that despite winning, victory for the surviving character was a hollow one.  The character won, but they're broken.   The end most definitely did not justify the means.  Again, that's an interesting notion but one that could have maybe been clearer.  It's all mushy, which seems inexcusable given the producers had nine hours to make it less mushy.  Then again, as a Cheese Fry colleague suggested to us, this show may have been more about the morality of the game rather than the arcs and journeys of the contestants.

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