Squid Game Season 3 Finally Puts Its Organ Trade Storyline To Good Use
Attention, all players: This article contains spoilers for "Squid Game" season 3, episode 1 — "Keys and Knives."
As entertainingly horrible as Netflix's "Squid Game" can be, the show does suffer from one meandering storyline. Well, all right — two meandering storylines, if you include Detective Hwang Jun-ho's (Wi Ha-joon) endless, tension-breaking boat trips. The one I'm talking about here, however, is the organ trade arc, which inexplicably returned for "Squid Game" season 2 only to tread water throughout its seven episodes.
"Squid Game" season 2 is both exciting and underwhelming, and the return of the show's most disgusting storyline certainly belongs in the latter category. Throughout the season, the black market organ trader subplot comes across as a weird leftover from season 1, where it tied into Jun-ho's island-infiltrating storyline and fell by the wayside when the Front Man (Lee Byung-hun) found out about it. The sophomore season's revelation that the Front Man's black-clad right hand officer (Park Hee-soon) runs the whole thing and has recruited a new batch of guards in his crime ring feels repetitive and unimportant, and seems to serve no purpose beyond giving masked guard Kang No-eul (Park Gyu-young) a chance to seem comparatively heroic.
Fortunately, this changes in season 3, where we find out that "Squid Game" has been playing the long game all along. Here, No-eul uses the organ traders' established method for transporting wounded patients to rescue Player 246 (Lee Jin-wook), the father of the sick kid No-eul connected with while working as a mascot in season 2.
Squid Game took an entire season to set up the organ trade storyline's big payoff
In season 1, several Squid Game guards pad their income by only wounding some of the players they're supposed to kill and taking them to a secret basement, where the medically-trained Player 111 (Yoo Sung-joo) removes their viable innards for black market organ trade. The storyline is a gruesome looking glass that allows the viewers to catch a glimpse behind the smoke and mirrors of the game. It factors naturally into Jun-ho's adventures on the island, and is immediately (and violently) removed from the playing field after it serves its narrative purpose. This makes it surprising and somewhat frustrating to find out that a new bunch of traffickers have taken over in season 2, especially since they bring so little to the table.
All that organ harvesting, however, suddenly becomes massively important when season 3 kicks off. It turns out that the large amount of attention "Squid Game" gave to this side plot in season 2 was meant to familiarize the viewer with the exact way the current trafficking operation works and what No-eul's relationship to them is. When "Squid Game" season 3 kicks off, everything is in place, so she's able to easily "join" the black market ring after wounding 246 and convince one of the corrupt guards to take her to the surgery hideout in order to rescue the poor guy before the harvesting begins.
Just like that, what seemed like a pointless holdover storyline suddenly becomes a key plot point that offers an escape route from the island, and elevates both No-eul and 246 as characters. It's an impressive home stretch resurrection for a storyline that utterly failed to hold its own against the terrifying games of "Squid Game" season 2.