Squid Game‘s first season arrived seemingly out of nowhere in 2021 to become Netflix’s most-watched series ever. While season two has also been a ratings smash—according to the streamer, it notched the most-watched premiere week of any series, topping previous record-holder Wednesday—it hasn’t quite had the cultural impact of season one. People are talking about it, leveling both praise (Thanos!) and complaints (Thanos?). But they’re not obsessing like they did before.
It could be that there’s just a lot more streaming content to gab about in 2025 than there was at the height of the pandemic. Maybe it’s just part of the challenge of living up to a blockbuster debut. Or perhaps fans are holding back on too much Squid Game discourse until the third and final season arrives later this year. With that in mind, here’s what we’re hoping to learn when Squid Game returns to wrap up its violent adventures.
What will happen with the Squid Game baby?
Though we’re genuinely worried things might not turn out well for Player 222, real name Kim Jun-hee (Jo Yu-ri)—who enters the competition out of financial desperation despite being very, very pregnant—we’re also not sure if Squid Game is prepared to kill off a pregnant character. Will she give birth in the middle of a game? Will her crypto scammer ex-boyfriend, Player 333 (Im Si-wan), actually step up to help her? Will the guards steal her baby like they do the organs of the not-quite-deceased injured players? We’re nervous for the outcome, but we need to know.
Where are all those stolen organs going?
Speaking of, while we know certain among the pink-clad guards are entangled in a lucrative black-market organ ring, we still don’t know who’s receiving the goods—probably gangsters, but how did they get involved amid all the Squid Game secrecy? We also don’t know if the Front Man, who seemingly keeps tabs on everything, is aware of the island’s human chop shop. The organ-theft subplot was introduced in season one and had even greater prominence in season two, with an in-house surgeon coming in to pluck eyeballs and other bits from the barely dead corpses of the fallen. So a conclusion feels necessary, right?
What’s No-eul’s endgame?
In season two, Kang No-eul (Park Gyu-young) is introduced with a backstory that makes you think she’s a likely candidate to be joining the games as a player—except instead of having to play “ddakji,” the paper-flipping game, she’s simply handed what looks like an invitation. Soon we realize she’s been recruited as a guard, something she excels at given her military service in North Korea—a country she fled after reluctantly leaving her young daughter behind.
Guard 011 is there to kill, full stop, until she’s threatened by the hierarchy for mangling bodies intended for the organ-theft ring. There’s a lot of barely contained anger lurking behind her eyes, and while it’s understood that her ultimate goal is to reconnect with her long-lost child, it’s clear that No-eul—who is ruthless but not heartless—is going to have a big role to play in Squid Game‘s post-player revolution climax. What that role is, exactly, we can’t yet say.
How’s Gi-hun’s daughter doing?
Season one of Squid Game ended with Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) deciding not to get on that plane to America—where his daughter, who’s spent her entire young life being disappointed by her father, has recently moved with her mom and stepdad. Instead, Gi-hun decides to use his hard-earned blood millions to take down the Squid Game, something he’s still trying to do when season two leaps ahead two years.
We don’t get any updates on Gi-hun’s daughter in season two; first he’s consumed by detective work, then he’s enmeshed back into the daily survival struggles when he re-enters the game. It seems impossible that season three won’t reunite father and daughter somehow, or at the very least bring back that character for some sort of closure.
When will Player 001’s secret come out?
Throughout season two, the audience knew that Player 001 was actually the nefarious Front Man (Lee Byung-hun) in disguise. A former Squid Game winner himself, we know his real name is In-ho, but he tells Gi-hun and the others that his name is “Young-il.” Quite obviously, the dismantling of this gigantic secret is going to be a crucial moment in season three. And with it will come, we hope, answers to yet more pressing questions: how will Gi-hun, who thinks “Young-il” is his buddy, handle this devastating news? And what final form will In-ho and Gi-hun’s weird, twisted relationship take when season three ticks away its final episodes?
How will things end with In-ho and Jun-ho?
In season one, police detective Hwang Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon) infiltrates the games by impersonating a guard, intent on tracking down his long-lost brother, In-ho. Eventually he discovers that not only is his brother a past winner, he’s now the Front Man perched atop quite the diabolical pyramid. Though he keeps some of those very important details to himself—imagine if he’d just shown a photo of In-ho to Gi-hun, and told him that his brother and the Front Man were one and the same!—he’s no less determined to bust open the game in season two, especially after Gi-hun gets sucked back into its tentacles.
When the brothers met in season one, In-ho asked Jun-ho to join him, then shot him and sent him plunging off a cliff. Season three needs a more productive reunion, or at least a less open-ended one—if only to get Jun-ho off that damn boat and back into the action. It might be too much to ask to get a flashback to the Front Man’s time as an actual player—how exactly did he end up winning? Wouldn’t you love to get a glimpse of that?—but we’re hoping that at the very least, Jun-ho and In-ho’s long-suffering mother will get some relief by the end of Squid Game.
Will the games go on?
There was a tease in the season two post-credits of more “Red Light, Green Light”-style mayhem to come, but how will the games recover from Gi-hun’s failed player rebellion? Will season three, which filmed back-to-back with season two, pick up immediately following episode seven and take things from there? With so many players still hanging on trying to get their mitts on that giant piggy bank, and so many plot threads left dangling, that seems the most likely scenario. Season two did just that, before leaping ahead two years—though it feels like another time shift wouldn’t make sense this time around. We still need to crown a winner! Or winners! Or see everyone decide to vote to call the whole thing off!
Who’s really in charge?
Season one revealed that the elderly Oh Il-nam (O Yeong-su), the original Player 001, hadn’t really taken a bullet after the marble game as Gi-hun thought he had. Instead, he was the mega-rich architect of the entire competition—with a twisted moral compass that somehow blended nostalgia for childhood games, the desire to help people in debt, and zero misgivings about facilitating mass murder. Il-nam did actually die, of a brain tumor, as season one wound down.
But as we see in season two, the games are still going like clockwork with the Front Man taking point. We know there’s an international element to the Squid Game (remember those American-accented “VIPs” in season one?), but we have no idea what its organizational structure looks like or what its big picture might be. We recently learned that David Fincher is working on an English-language Squid Game spinoff; might that bigger world be teased as Hwang Dong-hyuk’s creation comes to a close after its third season?
Squid Game seasons one and two are now streaming on Netflix; season three is coming later in 2025. What are you hoping to see from its final chapter?
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