Squid Game Season 3’s CGI Baby Is Just Distracting

Despite all the weird marketing around it, the unrelenting spin-offs and reality shows that completely miss the point, and misguided crossovers with juggernauts like Fortnite, I love Squid Game. Netflix never has and never will understand the underlying themes of one of its most successful shows, only the crude potential for profit. Then again, this is the same studio that reportedly tells showrunners to write as though the audience is half-paying attention on their phones, so maybe it’s just projecting.

Fortunately, I can look past how the streaming giant has diluted Squid Game’s themes into slop, because creator Hwang Dong-hyuk’s struggles, intent, and passion shine through far stronger. My problem with the show is much more petty: the CGI baby.

Mild spoilers for Squid Game Season 3.

A Poignant Message Constantly Undercut

CGI baby in Squid Game with its mouth open lying on a flower bed.

Squid Game’s final season masterfully subverts expectations by focusing on the games after Seong Gi-hun’s failed revolt leaves him destitute and broken, spending much of the remaining six episodes silent and handcuffed to a post in the corner. The futility of pushing against the unmovable wheels of capitalism and inspiring the masses to join you against the machine feels almost like a purposeful jab at Netflix itself after Dong-hyuk was given a flat fee and no bonus for the first season.

Dong-hyuk was so panicked working on the show that he lost “eight or nine” teeth. “Even though the first season was such a huge global success, honestly, I didn’t make much,” he explained, which is what brought him back for a second and third season. Though he also said that the stress was “much greater” this time around.

Given that Gi-hun takes a backseat for much of the final season, the spotlight is given instead to the rest of the cast, specifically Player 222, ie Kim Jun-hee, who gives birth during the hide and seek game. It’s a poignant, albeit hamfisted, message about how we’re born into circumstances far beyond our control, and the cruelty and disregard that even the youngest and most vulnerable in society face. Without so much as blinking, grown men adorned in their luxuriant suits deliberate among themselves about sacrificing a newborn for the ‘greater good’—their own survival—and comically lurch towards it like cartoon characters ready to pounce.

The mother dies, the baby takes her place, and immediately inherits the horrors she was subjected to. It’s a heartbreaking microcosm of a very real generational struggle. But every scene with the baby is undercut by how distracting the CGI is.

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It’s halfway between the digital rendition of Grand Moff Tarkin in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and that one Assassin’s Creed 2 cutscene where you mash buttons to make baby Ezio wriggle. It’s especially distracting watching its mother, the original Player 222, and the elderly matriarch Player 149 cradle what looks like a video game character in some of the most emotional moments of the show, making for a bizarre viewing experience as you snap from being brought close to tears by their award-worthy performances to almost laughing in shock.

I’m not sure why Netflix went with this direction for Squid Game, rather than just casting an older baby and asking us to suspend our disbelief a little—it’d be far easier than reconciling with a miniature Gollum. Failing that, they could’ve used a doll, like some scenes in the show already do. You know there’s not a real baby under that jacket, but it doesn’t matter; the actors sell it. Clever camera angles could’ve been used to mask its absence, rather than framing entire shots around a digital newborn’s face, splashing out with needless digital effects.

Squid Game’s final season is a brilliant end to this four-year story, weaving a narrative that’s never been more relevant while still finding something meaningful to say after three seasons, in spite of a distributor and IP holder actively working against it. But my god, why did they have to ruin it all with a CGI baby?