Every Squid Game Character Who Could Return For David Fincher's Spin-Off Series

Spoilers ahead for all three seasons of "Squid Game."

"Squid Game" has come to a close — well, the first series, anyway — and anyone who's watched the show before the third and final season probably assumed that the ending would be a real bloodbath. True to form, it was. After pretty much all of our favorite season 2 players fell throughout season 3, including Cho Hyun-ju (Park Sung-hoon), Lee Myung-gi (Im Si-wan), Kim Jun-hee (Jo Yu-ri), Jang Geum-ja (Kang Ae-shim), and Park Yong-sik (Yang Dong-geun) — Players 120, 333, 222, 149, and 007, respectively — we're left to see what happens to Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae), the series protagonist who's left protecting Jun-hee's newborn baby in the final game.

Gi-hun pretty unequivocally dies after fighting with Myung-gi, the baby's father, resulting in Myung-gi's death. Broken by the games, he simply wanders and falls off of a pedestal and, considering that we see his dead body, the guy is definitely gone. He sacrifices himself so that the baby is declared the winner, but that's not the point right now. The point is that we know of at least one "Squid Game" spin-off — helmed by David Fincher — and based on the show's massive international popularity, it would be foolish to believe more won't pop up in the future. So which characters could return for Fincher's series — or, perhaps, another future expansion of the "Squid Game" universe? (Hopefully not the VIPs, who are terrible and should never, ever return to our TV screens.)

The most obvious person we can expect to see in David Fincher's "Squid Game" series is Cate Blanchett, the Academy Award-winning actress who worked with the director on the 2008 drama "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button." We only see Blanchett, who recently led Steven Soderbergh's sexy heist movie "Black Bag" alongside Michael Fassbender, briefly at the very end of the "Squid Game," series finale. The plays the new recruiter (replacing Gong Yoo's recruiter from seasons 1 and 2, who dies by suicide during the show's second season).

Blanchett could very well be the star of Fincher's "Squid Game" series. We don't know anything yet, really! I'll just say that, based on what we do know, it would be legitimately insane to hire Blanchett, one of the world's most acclaimed and lauded actors, for just a brief cameo on the original "Squid Game" if you're not going to build a spin-off series around her. It feels pretty certain that she'll come back.

There's still so much we don't really know about Kang No-eul (Park Gyu-young), a North Korean defector and former soldier who ends up recruited into the game not as a player, but as a guard in season 2. We know that she left the totalitarian regime of South Korea's neighbor to the north, that she's looking for her missing daughter, and that she's unexpectedly sensitive for being so tough. She finds the organ donation aspect of the games absolutely abhorrent, and she goes to enormous lengths to save Player 246, Park Gyeong-seok (Lee Jin-wook), because she knows firsthand that his daughter is sick and potentially dying due to blood cancer. (She knows this because, before working as a guard in the games, she worked at an amusement park where she met Gyeong-seok and his daughter in person.)

No-eul survives the series finale and gets news that her daughter may be in China, so frankly, it would just be cool to see her story continue ... and, not for nothing, Park is one of the best performers on the show. Let's hope we see her again.

Man, Hwang Jun-ho, the detective played throughout the entire series by Wi Ha-joon, has really been through it on "Squid Game." In the first season, he sets out to try and find his long-lost half-brother by sneaking into the games as a guard, only to discover that the guy running the games — the Front Man, who usually wears a black mask – is his half-brother Hwang In-ho (Lee Byung-hun), who promptly shoots him. It's not a fatal injury, so at the start of season 2, Jun-ho wakes up in the hospital and is driven by a new and intense desire to find In-ho and destroy the compound where he hosts the games.

Jun-ho makes it to the island and briefly meets In-ho, who's carrying Jun-hee's baby. The detective and his allies barely escape as the compound explodes to cover up all of the crimes committed there. Later, he returns back to his apartment to see that his half-brother has given him the baby and their winning prize money on a bank card. On the one hand, it does seem like Jun-ho's story is done and dusted. On the other hand, it could be interesting to see him again, and it could also bring Jun-hee's child back into the mix without, you know, forcing a small child to compete in any sort of games — squid or otherwise.

It feels right, in a sick and weird way, that Hwang In-ho, who's still working as the Front Man, will probably show up in David Fincher's "Squid Game" spin-off. First of all, as with Park Gyu-young, Lee Byung-hun is one of the best actors on the show by a long shot, and unmasking him at various points throughout the series ultimately provided some of its most striking and emotionally charged moments. During a recent appearance on "The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon," Lee winked at the idea that he might end up playing the Front Man in a spin-off about the character, but it still stands to reason that he'll appear in the only confirmed spin-off (as of this writing) — particularly because there's a moment in the "Squid Game" series finale where he acknowledges Blanchett's recruiter.

As for his fate in the series finale, In-ho escapes unscathed. As I mentioned, he brings Jun-hee's baby off the island and gives the infant a presumably safe life with his upstanding half-brother. There's still quite a lot we don't know about In-ho yet, though, so it would be enlightening to bring him back for a spin-off and potentially even get a little more of his backstory. Here's hoping he gets something new and novel to do, though, after his character was gifted a recycled storyline in season 2.

Lee Jin-wook's downtrodden dad Park Gyeong-seok is one of the saddest figures in all of "Squid Game," which is really saying something. Introduced in season 2, we see Gyeong-seok through No-eul's eyes as she watches him bring his incredibly sick daughter to an amusement park. She's wearing a sweet knitted hat that looks like a strawberry which, when removed, reveals that she has lost her eyebrows and hair to chemotherapy. When he learns that an experimental medication could help her, Gyeong-seok enlists himself in the games as Player 246 and, for the most part, survives pretty handily. When Gi-hun and a handful of other players stage a mutiny in the season 2 finale, Gyeong-seok is shot — but he's shot non-lethally by No-eul, who ends up saving his life and helping him escape in season 3.

Gyeong-seok should, by all rights, go and live his life with his daughter — who appears to be on the mend when we briefly see the pair in the series finale — but it's not out of the question that he gets involved in the games again to earn a little bit more money. You can't rule anything out with "Squid Game," so we might end up seeing Gyeong-seok don his green jumpsuit again.

Hey — why not? You know how, for years, everyone's talked about a possible "Kill Bill" sequel where a murdered woman's daughter returns to kill Uma Thurman's Bride after several decades? We don't actually know when David Fincher's sequel will be set, so it's not impossible that Seong Ga-yeong — Gi-hun's daughter, played by Jo A-in — returns to avenge her fallen father.

After Gi-hun dies, his game uniform and his winnings (if you recall, he did eke out a victory In the first season of the show and only re-entered the games to try to destroy them from the inside) are hand-delivered to Ga-yeong by the Front Man himself in the series finale. There's really no telling where her story could go from here. Maybe it's nowhere, but maybe the series finale is setting up a revenge arc for Ga-yeong when she's older. Honestly? That would be pretty cool.

"Squid Game" is streaming in its entirety on Netflix now.