Korean breakout hit Squid Game racked up quite a bodycount over the course of its first season, and here's how Player 278 met his demise.
Here's the death of Player 278 in Squid Game explained, and which episode it happens. Survival movies and TV shows are a unique subgenre where a character or group have to either brave the elements, an outside force or - if they're really unlucky - both at the same time. Battle Royale from 2000 is probably one of the most famous offerings from the genre, but everything from Stallone's First Blood to Lost, Gravity and The Hunger Games belongs to this particular niche. Korean series Squid Game joined that crowd in 2021.
Squid Game became a word-of-mouth smash for Netflix, with the series revolving around a competition that sees hundreds of players taking part in a competition to compete in various children's games. Most of the Squid Game players taking part in the games are in major debt and badly need the cash, but it soon becomes horrifically clear the cost of losing is death - and often gory, painful death. Squid Game's mix of dark satire, nail-biting suspense and shocking violence made it a surprise success, and a second season will arrive in 2024.
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Squid Game's first episode set up the format of a children's game twisted into something darker with a round of "Red Light, Green Light." This is probably one of the most famous sequences from the show and saw around half of the players brutally shot down before the episode ended. Squid Game episode 6 "Gganbu" saw players taking part in a game of marbles, which included The Old Man and Player 278 (Kwak Ja-hyoung). Also heavily in debt, Player 278 had mostly lucked his way through the prior games and was doing well in marbles also. Unluckily for him, while playing against Player 101, his last marble knocked against a pebble, which then nudged 101's into a hole, letting him win.
An understandably terrified Player 278 then tried to run away but reached a dead end. After taking a moment to call everyone "a**holes," he's riddled with bullets from a machine gun. It's to Squid Game's eternal credit that it was able to so effectively mine tension from such simple games, and Player 278 looked set to win in marbles if it wasn't for some bad luck on his part.
Given his conduct in previous contests, nobody really mourned Squid Game's Player 278 after his elimination either. While creator Hwang Dong-hyuk has mentioned the possibility of bringing some "dead" characters from the first series back for Squid Game season 2, Player 278 is unlikely to get a sudden resurrection.
Next: Squid Game's Ending Betrays Its Message (If Season 2 Fails To Explain It)
It's pronounced Paw-rick, not Pad-raig. Now that's out of the way, a brief introduction. Padraig has been writing about film online since 2012, when a friend asked if he'd like to contribute the occasional review or feature to their site. A part-time hobby soon blossomed into a career when he discovered he really loved writing about movies, TV and video games; he even (arguably) had a little bit of talent for it. He has written words for Den of Geek, Collider, The Irish Times and Screen Rant over the years, and can discuss anything from the MCU - where Hawkeye is clearly the best character - to the most obscure cult b-movie gem, and his hot takes often require heat resistant gloves to handle. He's super modern too, so his favorite movies include Jaws, Die Hard, The Thing, Ghostbusters and Batman.