Every Season Of Squid Game, Ranked

This post contains spoilers for "Squid Game" seasons 1-3

That's it, then. Game over. One of Netflix's most groundbreaking flagship shows has come to an end, with "Squid Game" season 3 being the final chapter (maybe). It's been a wild ride filled with compelling characters, jaw-dropping twists, and brutal games, but now that "Squid Game" is complete, it's time to look at the scoreboard and rank all three seasons.

It feels safe to say that not since "Stranger Things" has a Netflix show gripped the world as powerfully as Hwang Dong-hyuk's chilling battle royale series, where the good turned bad, and the bad turned even worse. Thankfully, along the way, it made a well-deserved star out of the show's MVP, Lee Jung-jae as Seong Gi-hun, and a few other supporting talents that unfortunately didn't see the final round.

Some of highlights of "Squid Game" haven't even involved our favorite last man standing. There was a mother-son duo that broke hearts, criminals that had no issue in making and breaking alliances, and Marvel-obsessed drug addicts that not even death could stop from one last appearance. Now, after careful assessment and picking apart some of the best plays in the series, we've settled on which was the best season of "Squid Game." Unfortunately, like many trilogies, it's the final chapter that didn't play quite as well as the rest.

The last lap is always the hardest, and the final season of "Squid Game" is a perfect example of this. Picking up directly after the events of season 2, season 3 has a lot to do but not enough time to do it. Dropping from the show's usual seven episodes to just six, there are too many plot threads to tie up, and not all of them are equally engaging, resulting in a somewhat sloppy and disappointing ending.

It's not all bad. In fact, "Squid Game" season 3 actually features one of the best episodes of the show. The problem is it's only the second, and it spends its time killing off the best characters. Cho Hyun-ju (Park Sung-hoon) becomes a force to be reckoned with, and her defense of Kim Jun-hee (Jo Yu-ri) during the Hide and Seek round is an exciting watch, but it ends on a brutal note when Hyun-ju stabbed to death by Lee Myung-gi (Im Si-wan). Other character exits come thick and fast from then on, and the surviving players are, frankly, pretty boring.

There's also the creative chaos that spirals out of control when a baby is thrown into the mix. As for Seong Gi-hun, he spends far too long in the final season wrestling with his own moral compass, lost among a crowd of Saturday morning cartoon-level villains and flat characters that are no match for the original lineup.

The biggest challenge of the show's second season was capturing lightning in a bottle again, just like before. Unfortunately, pacing issues and supporting characters feeling lost at sea prevent season 2 of "Squid Game" from being quite as good its predecessor.

Reintroducing Seong Gi-hun into the games was expected, but creator Hwang Dong-hyuk does an impressive job of adding some meaningful surprises that remind us of what we loved about the show from the start. While one veteran of this deadly tournament warns his competitors about what's coming, another is hiding in plain sight. This gives us more moments with the Front Man (Lee Byung-hun), who's dropped himself into the game so he can get closer to the player who got away. Include kooky characters like Thanos (T.O.P.) and others who have a shared history even before the first game begins, and "Squid Game" season 2 mostly proves to be pretty enjoyable. It's the rest that can sometimes make it a real slog to get through.

While Seong Gi-hun is warning everyone he can about the dangers at play, the Front Man's brother, Hwang Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon), is mostly stuck on a boat trying to find the island that he infiltrated and escaped from. Any time we're stuck with the renegade cop, the show draws to a standstill. If anything, it highlights just how dumb some of these characters are. If what came before wasn't so good, the season 2 would have suffered so much more because of it.

Perhaps it's because the world was stuck indoors with nothing to do that "Squid Game" season 1 drew as much attention as it did and earned the critical acclaim to match. The dystopian death tournament contained so much that we'd seen before in the likes of "The Hunger Games," "Battle Royale," and "The Maze Runner." Nevertheless, "Squid Game" shot to the top of the charts, becoming the most popular show in Netflix's history.

While the series managed to assemble an okay cast in its second and third seasons, there was something about the initial group that proved to be a bigger help in preventing season 1 from being easily overlooked. Though Player 456 emerged as the sole winner, many other players contributed to the game, making it tense and turbulent in equal measure.

Filling those game rooms were the likes of the good-natured Ali Abdul (Anupam Tripathi), the duplicitous Cho Sang-woo (Park Hae-soo), and the fragile but (seemingly) lovable Oh Il-nam,(O Yeong-su), who all played their part to keep us hooked. One of the biggest stars of the show, however, was the now iconic production design: That giant doll with the chameleon eyes zipping through the crowd, the Escherian hallway leading to different games, and those unmistakable tracksuits that became an easy Halloween costume option. With pieces like that on the board, there's no question that the debut season brought its A-game and hasn't been topped since.