Squid Game Season 3 Finally Reveals How The Front Man Won The Games

This article contains spoilers for "Squid Game" season 3, episode 5, "Circle Triangle Square."

Throughout Netflix's "Squid Game," the Front Man (Lee Byung-hun) has been a looming, unbeatable figure. If he gives a command, it is obeyed. If he fires a gun at his brother, Hwang Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon), the bullet hits in the exact spot that allows the target to survive the wound (and the ensuing fall off a cliff) but still neutralizes him as a threat. When the big "Squid Game" season 2 Front Man twist revealed he's posing as a player, he turned out to be a social and likable guy who quickly built rapport with Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) despite donning the historically suspicious player number "001" and initially voting against leaving. He's the winner of the 2015 Squid Game, and the chosen prodigy who inherited the operation after game creator Oh Il-Nam (O Yeong-su) died. 

Assuming the story he tells Gi-hun while posing as Oh Young-Il is fully correct, the Front Man even has a moving backstory: Originally a stellar police officer, he borrowed money from a shady character when his pregnant wife needed a liver transplant, and was promptly fired because this was seen as bribery. He participates in the game to secure the requisite funds to save his wife and child, but both were lost by the time he emerged as the winner. It's a surprisingly sympathetic origin story, as villains go ... but as the flashbacks in "Squid Game" season 3, episode 5 reveal, there's a crack in his perfect tragic villain shell. As it turns out, the Front Man didn't win the games by himself, but received the same help from Il-nam that he now attempts to offer Gi-hun. 

In "Squid Game" season 3, episode 4 ("222"), the Front Man unexpectedly summons Gi-hun to his quarters. After revealing his identity to the stunned player, he proceeds to make him an offer that's frankly hard to refuse. Explaining that he wants to help Gi-hun save himself and Kim Jun-hee's (Jo Yu-ri) newborn — who's now "competing" as Player 222, courtesy of the VIPs — the Front Man gives Gi-hun a knife and instructs him to kill the remaining adult players before the final game, revealing that this would render it unplayable. This would allow both Gi-hun and the baby to not only survive but emerge as co-winners. Gi-hun takes the knife but ultimately rejects stone cold murder, opting instead to participate in the last game and protect Player 222.

Thanks to the Front Man's word choices and general attitude, the scene makes it seem that he's grown fond of Gi-hun and genuinely feels disgusted by the baby's inclusion in the game, not to mention the other players' gleefully stated intentions to kill the newborn. However, the episode 5 flashbacks reveal that this might be just another one of the Front Man's games of moral superiority after all. We see that when the future Front Man was still just Hwang In-ho and competed in the game as Player 132, a masked Il-nam gave him the exact same opportunity, only without any pity-motivated factors such as the baby. Not much later, we see the harried In-ho kill the other players like a coward in the night, his face a frozen mask of terror ... and just like that, almost everything we've known about both the Front Man and the version of Squid Game he enforces goes out the window.

Until the flashbacks, the Front Man has enforced a twisted but clear moral code of the game's fairness. This, the show has told us, drives his conflict with Gi-hun: The Front Man shares Il-nam's nihilistic philosophy about humanity's uncaring opportunism that allows him to view Squid Game as a genuine lifeline for the downtrodden. Meanwhile, Gi-hun's belief in good people makes him view the game as senseless slaughter, and his ultimate goal is to bring the operation down. 

This struggle between these Squid Game prize money winners with opposing philosophies was the backbone of "Squid Game" season 2. In season 3, the Front Man seemed to gain the upper hand when Gi-hun became jaded and vengeful in the aftermath of the failed uprising and Jung-bae's (Lee Seo-hwan) death. Now, however, it turns out that the Front Man has been standing on clay feet all along. Unlike Gi-hun, he never won the game fairly, and we now know that neither he nor Il-nam have been above rigging the results when the situation calls for it. If nothing else, this makes the Front Man's anger toward the cheating organ traffickers in the season 1 episode "A Fair World" hypocritical, to say the least. Combine this with he and Il-nam both infiltrating the game as players, and the Front Man's superficially earnest attempt to help Gi-hun and the baby seems a lot like a last-ditch attempt to drag his opponent down to his own level.

"Squid Game" has spent plenty of time eroding the moral ground under both Gi-hun and the Front Man. This is fitting, because there are no true winners in Squid Game — only those who die, and those who get a bunch of money.