‘Squid Game’ Episode 4 Recap: All’s Fair in Love and War

With over half a season left, Squid Game still feels like it’s entered the lightning round. Its fourth episode (“Stick to the Team”) is not only its most viscerally violent—in terms of savagery, if not body count—but also its most plot-heavy. New characters emerge, new alliances form and dissolve, new cracks in the facade of the game-masters’ united front begin to show, and, ultimately, a new moral burden is forced upon even the biggest babyfaces (that’s wrestling jargon for “good guys”) in the game. It’s tense, terrific filmmaking from start to finish.

We’ll start with the emergence of player #111 (Yoo Sung-joo) as a major factor. For starters, he’s a doctor, which makes him invaluable to the gangster Deok-su’s faction when fighting among the players breaks out. (More on that later.)

But more importantly, he’s in cahoots not just with other players, but with their pink-suited, masked-up handlers. We see him working in secret with a handful of pink guys to harvest the organs of dead contestants—they mark the gift-box caskets of the not-quite-dead ones with a red cross of blood, presumably because their organs would be the freshest. In exchange for his services, the guards tip him off as to the next game everyone will be forced to play, via a tiny pink scroll of paper inserted into his food rations. (No, I don’t know how they insert a piece of paper into a hardboiled egg. No, I don’t really care.)

As for the players themselves, things get a whole lot more “Hobbesian war of all against all” in this outing. After the gangster Deok-su and his minions sneak back in line for a second helping of their meager dinner of an egg and some seltzer, other players are left with no food or drink whatsoever. When a young woman narcs on them, one of the players who’s gotten stiffed raises a ruckus—and promptly gets beaten to death by Deok-su.

Which means the jackpot available to the winners increases. Which basically guarantees that the players will start killing each other.

In fact, this is considered by the game-masters to be a secret “game” in its own right. After lights-out that evening, players begin attacking one another, and their guardians hit a strobe light to increase the feeling of utter chaos. As people are butchered in their beds, primarily but by no means exclusively by the gangster’s group—which now includes player #212, who ingratiated herself to Deok-su by handing him her lighter during the “honeycomb” challenge and who has sex with him after the massacre as a way to blow off steam—our heroes, led by Gi-hun, gather together to fend off their attackers. There’s safety in numbers, at least to an extent.

But this orgy of violence—which may be the series’ most harrowing sequence to date—is just an overture for the official game to follow. As the doctor and the gangster know for certain, and as Sang-woo theorizes for our group of more-or-less good guys, it will require brute strength. That’s something that our heroes—who include an old man who can’t remember his own name, the scrawny female pickpocket (whose name we learn is Sae-byeok), and finally crazy old player #212 (whose name we learn is Mi-nyeo), who’s been rejected by Deok-su’s group, much to her chagrin—are sorely lacking relative to the competition.

The game, it turns out, is tug-of-war, played on elevated platforms erected on towers high above the ground, where the losers will plummet to their deaths.

Only the quick thinking of the old man—who, in one of those quirks of dementia, can remember the way to win tug-of-war even though his own name eludes him—saves our group from certain death. (Their team of ten players includes several random men and one new woman, #240, played by Lee Yoo-mi, who’s even younger than Sae-byeok.) Thanks to his strategy, it seems as if they’ll be able to avoid the fate that befell the team pitted against Deok-su and his goons…but the episode cuts off before the winner is decided.

So we’ll see how things turn out after the game is resolved…well, no, actually, we know how things will turn out: The team with all of the main characters on it is not going to die. What I mean is that the tug-of-war game could be a pivotal moment for the series, for a single, stark reason: It’s the first game—the first official game, anyway—that requires its participants to kill one another in order to win.

Even during the lights-out free-for-all, our heroes were able to dodge the responsibility of murder, since all they did was look out for one another and defend themselves, and none of them had to do so to the death. After this tug-of-war game, though? Even sweethearts like Gi-hun, Ali, and the old man will have blood on their hands. How will that change them? How it will affect their outlook towards the games, and towards one another? It’s a very rich dramatic vein, waiting to be mined.

That’s why the unnecessary cliffhanger ending doesn’t bother me that much. Yes, it’s obvious that our heroes will emerge victorious, so in that sense the cliffhanger is building up non-existent suspense. But what victory will feel like to these (mostly) mild-mannered people—that’s an open question. I’m both excited and afraid to learn the answer.

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Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Watch Squid Game Episode 4 on Netflix