This article contains spoilers for the series finale of Squid Game.

With the June 27 release of the third season of Squid Game, Netflix’s hit Korean dystopian thriller has finally concluded, bringing the gruesome saga to a close. The series became a global phenomenon seemingly overnight after dropping on Netflix in September 2021, when viewers were just beginning to emerge from varying states of isolation and social distancing. While popular pandemic-era series like Tiger King and The Queen’s Gambit were dark in their own ways, they were nothing compared to Squid Game’s brutally violent depiction of the many ways that capitalism disenfranchises, endangers, and dehumanizes the poor. Now, four years, three seasons, two casts of characters, and a whole (questionable) reality show later, it’s the end of an era for the series that once proved that monoculture still exists. Just one question remains: Did Squid Game stick the landing? The answer: Well, kinda.

Season 3 is a direct continuation of last year’s Season 2, which brought in a whole new slate of competitors as our lead player, Seong Gi-hun, aka Player 456 (Lee Jung-jae), enters the bloody tournament for a second time with the hopes of demolishing the games, once and for all, from within. Throughout that season, Gi-hun tries and fails to convince his fellow Squid Game players that it’s better to walk away from the cutthroat contest than to die in the attempt to win the prize money, which increases with each participant killed. In the Season 2 finale, Gi-hun attempts to stage a coup—only for his fellow rebels to be gunned down while fighting for his doomed cause. In the third season, Gi-hun has lost nearly all will to live, behaving like a dead man walking for the rest of the games, until the birth of an infant rekindles the tiniest smidge of hope for humanity.

The series finale, titled “Humans Are … ,” is split into two parts: The first half begins right where Episode 5 ended, and the second half takes place after a six-month time jump. When we left off in the previous episode, we were in the middle of the final game, Sky Squid Game, in which the players have to progress across three separate pillars by pressing a button and then pushing off at least one player per pillar in the allotted time. We start with a standoff: After the pregnant Player 222, Kim Jun-hee, (Jo Yu-ri) birthed her baby in the games and then died, Gi-hun is trying to keep his promise to her and shepherd the baby—now inducted as a player in the deadly competition—to a win in order to guarantee the baby’s safety. There’s only one pillar left to go, meaning just one more person has to die. The problem is, there are two players left, not including the baby, and the other contestant is the baby’s biological father, Player 333, Lee Myung-gi (Im Si-wan), who is mentally succumbing to the stress, adrenaline, and events of the game. Unable to trust that Player 333 will keep the baby safe, rather than choose to win the games alone by killing it—thereby winning all of the prize money instead of splitting it—Gi-hun is unwilling to lose. The men tussle, and Player 333 falls off the pillar, which should secure the win for both our lead and the baby. However, in the throes of their fighting, neither man managed to press the button starting the timer for the round, meaning that the death doesn’t count, and one of the remaining players—Gi-hun or the baby—still has to die in order for someone to win. Gi-hun presses the button to start the timer before sacrificing himself for the baby, tearfully jumping off the pillar. His last words before his fall, directed at the Front Man and the wealthy VIPs who he knows are watching, are “We are not horses,” alluding to the structure of the game, which has the rich betting on the lives of the poor. “We are humans,” he continues. “Humans are … ” But Gi-hun falls to his death before he can finish the statement, leaving the blank to be filled by the audience.

Meanwhile, Kang No-eul (Park Gyu-young), the North Korean sharpshooter working as an executioner on the game’s staff, is making moves of her own. She recently defected from the staff in order to save a player who she knows is the father of a sick daughter, feeling sympathy as a mother who lost her own daughter. But in order to ensure the man’s complete escape from the game, she has to delete the hard copies of the player records. While doing so, she checks her own file and discovers, to her devastation, that the file lists her daughter as deceased, despite her boss having dangled above her head the possibility of helping find her daughter if she did as he commanded. No-eul attempts suicide before deciding to leave the island under cover instead. She is able to do this in spite of her life-threatening injuries because, surprise, the Squid Game workers are evacuating the island before it’s set to blow up in 30 minutes, Mission: Impossible–style.

Why is the island about to be detonated, you may ask? The game’s Front Man (Lee Byung-hun), who spent most of Season 2 pretending to be a player so that he could befriend Gi-hun and then stab him in the back, got wind that our handsome yet foolish detective, Hwang Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon)—who has dedicated his life these past two seasons to helping Gi-hun stop the games by pinpointing the island where the games are—finally found their location. Jun-ho makes it to the island and, instead of immediately turning around upon seeing the bombs everywhere, finds the Front Man—who also happens to be his long-lost brother, In-ho—at the exact moment that the Front Man is carrying the game-winning baby out of the arena. Jun-ho gets his brother’s attention and aims a gun at him, but, in an echo of their Season 1 encounter, fails to shoot him, letting the Front Man walk free with the baby in hand. Jun-ho leaves the island before it explodes, destroying any trace of the tournament that has resulted in countless deaths.

Six months later, Squid Game follows up on a number of plotlines. Jun-ho is practically unemployed, having lost his desire to work for—and, let’s be real, his credibility with—law enforcement. When he arrives at his apartment one night, he finds Jun-hee and Myung-gi’s baby mysteriously placed on his table, along with a bank card that has all of the baby’s winnings loaded onto it: 45.6 billion South Korean won, the cost of 456 lives in the final Squid Game.

No-eul, the former guard, has survived. She visits the father she saved, along with his now-healthy daughter. Though the man doesn’t know that she is the one who saved his life in the competition, they have a nice interaction as strangers. On her way home, No-eul gets a phone call from the service she hired to look for her daughter, whom she believed to be dead given the files she read on the island. Surprisingly, the service says they got a lead that her daughter might be in China. Still hopeful that her daughter is alive, No-eul boards a flight to China. Simultaneously, at the airport, Squid Game closes a loop on a plotline that was introduced in the first season. Back in Season 1, Jung Ho-yeon stole the show as Kang Sae-byeok, a sympathetic North Korean defector who entered the games to win money that would help her mother enter South Korea to rejoin Sae-byeok and her younger brother. As her brother’s sole guardian in the country, Sae-byeok left Gi-hun with her dying wish for Gi-hun to take care of him. Gi-hun had been financially providing for Sae-byeok’s younger brother this whole time, and in the final episode we see the boy finally reunite with his mother, who does successfully arrive in South Korea.

As for Gi-hun, the Front Man, and the future of the games, that story continues in the United States. Fans will remember that Gi-hun’s daughter relocated to Los Angeles during the first season, and Gi-hun was on a plane to meet her after winning the games the first time before he turned around with the one-track-minded goal of ending the games for good. In the finale, after Gi-hun’s death, the Front Man visits Gi-hun’s daughter in L.A. He tells her that her father has died (calling Gi-hun “a friend” of his, which is an incredibly simplified description of their complex relationship), and gives her a box containing his bloody Player 456 jacket and a bank card with the rest of Gi-hun’s winnings from the first tournament loaded onto it.

However, the most crucial part of the finale comes soon after this moment. As the Front Man is being driven away in the back of a black luxury vehicle with fully tinted windows, he passes an alleyway, from which we can hear what sounds like someone playing ddakji, the slap game that the Recruiter (Gong Yoo) used to recruit participants in Seoul. That’s because someone is playing the game, a jaw-dropping twist for anyone who believed that the cruel competition began and ended in South Korea. When the Front Man rolls his window down, we see a different recruiter playing the game with a man in the alleyway. In a shocking cameo to end the series, this recruiter is played by none other than Cate Blanchett. The Front Man and this Recruiter give each other a knowing nod before the Front Man rolls his window up and the car pulls off.

The last two seasons of Squid Game haven’t been as sharp as the viral first season, but the finale underscores something beyond the show itself. The final moments of Netflix’s hit show posit that everything we watched up until now was a mere drop in the bucket of the global exploitation set in motion by capitalism. Everything Gi-hun did, all of the invaluable things he sacrificed—his relationship with his daughter and, ultimately, his own life—were a waste. He was never dismantling the operation from the inside; he was merely cutting a singular head off the hydra, only for two more to grow in its place. In a way, this reflects what has happened with the show in reality. Squid Game creator Hwang Dong-hyuk gave us a sanguinary warning about how morality crumbles in the face of both need and greed, and how those two things are often facilitated by the haves exploiting the have-nots. Netflix took the gruesome cautionary tale and answered with Squid Game–themed reality competition shows and Squid Game tourist “experiences.” Granted, these spinoffs of the IP might be fun—they look fun!—but the entire point of Squid Game was to depict something so brutal you wouldn’t want it emulated. Instead, in spite of the story’s message, we twisted its iconography into more money and entertainment. It can’t get much more Squid Game than that.