The rules are menacingly simple: win all ten of your partner’s marbles without violence. Interestingly, the marbles game is the most undefined round of the game thus far. For me, this is the episode in which the prize money fades away as the players unknowingly place their lives in the hands of the ones they’ve come to trust most. Squid Game walks a fine line regarding the players’ motivation, whether they’re playing to win the money or get out alive. And even though another younger, stronger player woos him, Gi-hun sticks with the old man. Sae-byeok and Ji-yeong pair together, mainly to avoid groveling to the older male players. Sang-woo quickly forms a team with Ali as the strongest and most intelligent players, respectively. Mi-nyeo tries to seduce and threaten herself into a team but ends up the odd man out, and the guards drag her away. Despite having no clue what the next game is, the selection process immediately turns ice-cold, with the women and older players ignored as partners in favor of the stronger and (seemingly) smarter male players. The instructions are to form teams of two in ten minutes. Not that they’re given enough time to process this information because it’s game time. When you know what the end has in store, the lead-up hurts just as much as the gunshot.īut before all that, on the way to the next game, the players are shocked by the doctor and the organ-harvesting guards strung up in the neon-stair room and the revelation that cheating was taking place.

But Squid Game reveals its brutal twist a quarter of the way into the episode and makes us sit and watch these matchups in close to real time. These kinds of huge, story-altering moments are usually dropped toward the end of an episode or movie after years of buildup (think the Red Wedding or Thanos’s snap). The reveal that the two-person marble teams will compete against each other is pure devastation represented on the faces of Gi-hun, Ali, and husband and wife, who must now compete against one another. “Gganbu” is a heartbreaking gut-punch of an episode.

Lose your marbles girl