Squid Game Season 3 Ending Explained: The Game Isn't Over Yet, Thanks To A Surprise Last-Minute Cameo

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

After three seasons, 22 episodes, and so, so many deaths, Squid Game has finally played its last game – and declared a winner, as Season 3 comes to a close on Netflix.

…Or has it? Show creator Hwang Dong-hyuk has already teased a potential spinoff taking place between Seasons 1 and 2. Earlier this week (June 25), Front Man actor Lee Byung-hun teased even further that the finale may not tie things up with a bow, leaving the world of Squid Game more open than you might expect. And in fact, that’s exactly what happened in the finale as we move the action from South Korea to Los Angeles, featuring a shocking, surprise A-list cameo. Squid Game has gone Hollywood, baby, and Cate Blanchett herself is recruiting the players!

There’s a lot more to delve into there, and we will. But first, let’s give a recap of what went down in the finale, for context. Leading into the final episode, the game was down to two – well, technically three – players: Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-Jae), aka Player 456; Lee Myung-gi (Im Si-wan), aka the crypto-scamming YouTuber Player 333; and Myung-gi and Kim Jun-hee’s (Jo Yu-ri) baby, who has been rechristened Player 222.

Meanwhile, rogue guard Kang No-eul (Park Gyo-young) had left a dead body in the Front Man’s office while trying to find info on Park Gyeong-seok (Lee Jin-wook), aka Player 246, whom she had helped escape. Gyeong-seok was almost killed on the water, only to be saved by police officer Hwang Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon), who was almost killed himself but is now within reach of the Game’s secret island, the thing he’s been searching for since Season 2. And also, unfortunately for everyone, including the viewing audience at home, the billionaire VIPs are back.

That’s a lot to juggle going into the final hour, but it wouldn’t be Squid Game without chaos. So here’s how it all turned out in the finale, “Humans Are…”

Squid Game Season 3 Ending Explained

Without getting too lost in the rules of Sky Squid Game, the final game in the series, Gi-hun realizes that Myung-gi is likely going to kill the baby in order to claim the final prize money. So despite his oath to save everyone by reentering the game at the beginning of Season 2, Gi-hun instead ends up in a knife fight with the YouTuber. Myung-gi ends up falling to his death, so it’s down to Gi-hun and the baby – and only one of them can survive, or they both die.

There’s a moment where it seems Gi-hun might throw the baby off the pillar they’re on… But instead, he kisses the baby’s head, puts her down, and then looks directly at the camera – talking to the Front Man, but also us, the audience.

“We are not horses,” Gi-hun says. “We are humans. And humans are…”

Without finishing the sentence, Gi-hun falls backwards off the pillar, to his death.

While he dies, there are several other things going on. No-eul has set the records room on fire, but not before discovering that her child, the one she was trying to find, which led her to working for Squid Game, is dead. She almost kills herself, but stops when she sees Gi-hun’s sacrifice. Meanwhile, Jun-ho gets to the island and sees his brother, the Front Man, take the baby, and stops short of killing him. “In-ho!” he shouts. “Why? Why’d you do it?” But there’s no answer, and the Front Man has started a countdown sequence to blow up the island, as the Coast Guard approaches.

So, our surviving characters escape, and six months later, someone takes the stacks of money Gi-hun was hiding in his hotel room. Who is it? It’s not explicitly stated, but is likely the Front Man, or a rep of the Squid Game. Back at the carnival where she worked, No-eul visits with Gyeong-seok, whose daughter is recovering from cancer. And No-eul also gets a call that her daughter may be alive in China. She’s likely not, but No-eul has decided to hope and search, rather than move on with her life.

Oh, and after picking up his old cohorts at prison (who are going to take over Gi-hun’s hotel), Jun-ho gets home to find Baby 222, along with a note that she is the winner, and a gold card. When Jun-ho checks it at an ATM, he sees that it has 45,600,000,000 won.

What Are Humans: Breaking Down Squid Game’s Horse Metaphor

You get it, right? It’s not just the money: 456 won. Despite dying, the ideological challenge the Front Man put to Player 456 was proven false, as the latter sacrificed himself to save 222. The Squid Game continues, because as was established in Season 2, you can’t stop the game. It’s a metaphor for capitalism, and only by breaking the whole system of the entire world could Gi-hun ever hope to eliminate the Squid Game.

Instead, he won a personal, moral victory by letting himself fall to his death to preserve new life. You can see this in the Front Man’s interactions later on (more on those in a second); but there’s also the ominous, dangling question of what that money will do to Jun-ho, now that he has access to it, as well as how it will impact 222’s life going forward.

So what is the end of the sentence Gi-hun left us on? What are humans anyway, bro? The first thing to understand is that horses have been a pervasive metaphor throughout the series, from the literal horses on the carousel in Mingle to the horse mask worn in the club scene in Season 2. And if you’ll remember, when we first met Gi-hun he spent most of his money on horse races. In the finale of Season 1, the Front Man told Gi-hun that “You bet on horses. It’s the same here, but we bet on humans. You’re our horses.” Later on in that same episode, Gi-hun fired back, “Listen carefully. I'm not a horse. I'm a person.”

That sets up the “horse” part of Gi-hun’s final line, but what about the rest? The important part here is that Gi-hun is looking at us, the viewer. It’s likely that Hwang Dong-hyuk has a possibility, or possibilities in mind for what humans are. But it is up to us to fill in the blank there. No shade to horses, but the idea is that humans are unlimited. Are we compassionate? Greedy? Loving? Vain? All of that? The answer is yes, humans can be anything, and are so much more than horses running around a track. We have the capacity for anything, and that is how Gi-hun “wins,” by proving that he can break the cycle with his own sacrifice.

…But he hasn’t really broken the cycle, has he?

Squid Game Heads To Los Angeles, But Is This David Fincher’s Series?

In the final scenes, we cut to LA, and see the Front Man has come to where Seong Ga-yeong (Jo A-in) lives. That’s Gi-hun’s daughter, who left with her mother in Season 1, in case you forgot. She doesn’t want anything to do with her father, but the Front Man gives her a box with his “belongings,” which weirdly include the bloody 456 uniform, as well as a gold card. Of note, the Front Man clearly still sees things as capitalist exchanges, despite what Gi-hun taught him about horses versus people. Whether the money will change Ga-yeong, and also what she’ll do with the very clear evidence of a death game existing, is TBD.

But the bigger, dangling cliffhanger is that as the Front Man is driven through the city, he passes by an alleyway and hears the distinctive sounds of ddakji being played, followed by slaps. Sure enough, someone is in the alley playing the game that leads to Squid Game… And it’s not just “somebody,” it’s Cate Blanchett. She’s the recruiter and is playing with a bearded man, who is losing just like Gi-hun did all those many years ago.

Funnily enough, in Squid Game: The Conversation, a half-hour that follows the final episode, it turns out that not only did Lee Jung-Jae have no idea who the cameo was, but Byung-hun didn’t even get to meet her.

“Cate Blanchett, she’s one of my favorite actors, but I didn’t even get to say hello,” he says. “She and I shot that final scene separately, since it’s just the camera cutting back and forth between us. I couldn’t say hi because once we shot it, we had to go.”

They also add that Blanchett got ddakji in advance to practice, but according to Hwang Dong-hyuk, “She wasn’t able to try it out much before the shoot. She had to hit the other ddjaki and flip it, but she couldn’t get it. So I went over and gave her a quick lesson.”

Don’t worry, he adds, “the take we used, that was real… The tilt up from the ddjaki, where we first show her face. That confidence you see, that’s all real, because she’d finally managed to flip it over.”

So is there more ddjaki in Blanchett’s future? Back at the end of 2024, it was reported that David Fincher is working on an English-language version of Squid Game. The initial fear was that it was a remake of the Korean series, which would be highly unnecessary. And at one point, it seems that Fincher might have been working on a movie version. But as of October of last year, the project reportedly coalesced into a series. Fincher, as a contextual note, has a long-standing deal with Netflix, and has already created The Killer, Mank, Mindhunter, and Love, Death and Robots for the streamer.

While we don’t know as of this writing if David Fincher’s project is what’s being teased here or if it’s just a cool celebrity cameo of note, Fincher and Blanchett have worked together before on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. So it’s entirely possible this is a fun tease for the potential spinoff series. Or it could be Fincher getting the hook-up for Hwang Dong-hyuk for a cameo. Either way, Squid Game seems to be far from done.

And frankly, that’s the way it should be, right? It’s more true to the series that the pervasive octopus arms of capitalism stretch all over the world. No one man’s sacrifice can change that, even if we do see hope, love, fear, and an array of non-horse-like emotions coursing through our characters in the final half-hour of the series. After all, humans are…