Haven’t seen Squid Game on Netflix? It’s not too late to binge-watch the K-drama hit
- Hundreds of destitute entrants compete in a series of deadly games for a life-changing sum of money in Squid Game, the hottest K-drama to come from Netflix
- In Amazon Prime’s The Grand Tour Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May – confined to Britain by pandemic regulations – drive around Scotland
A Kafkaesque nightmare besets Seoul’s most desperate citizens in the surprise global hit that is mystery thriller series Squid Game (Netflix, season one streaming now).
To bring those who are late to the game up to speed, the competition, cynically named after a children’s playground pastime, comprises lethal tasks attempted by hundreds of entrants, all destitute and coveting the pot of cash literally dangling before them.
Billions of won (tens of millions of US dollars) are temptingly suspended, beyond reach, in a Perspex piggy bank above the barracks-style accommodation housing an initial 456 players – a number radically reduced with each task.
The contestants’ psychological stress escalates as a clock counts down each activity, which is understandable when murder may be moments away courtesy of machine-gun-toting guards in anonymous black masks and jumpsuits. Ramping up the disconcerting surrealism are the oversized pieces of “play” equipment in garish colours: a gigantic doll, a towering slide and a monstrous roundabout, plus M.C. Escher-style stairs to illustrate the bind in which the players are trapped.
Circumstances have caused the players to enter the game voluntarily, although keeping its nefarious aspects secret means they must be taken unconscious to a distant island from which they can’t escape.
Squid Game sparks huge interest in white Vans shoes and retro tracksuits
If all that sounds bad enough, bear in mind that Squid Game, set in the present day, satirises those parts of the modern world saddled by a capitalist system that rewards greed and consumption. As one competitor puts it, “the torture is worse” outside the game.
Behind the suffering is a sadistic, Bond-type villain who watches the lethal games on closed-circuit television, although what rewards he derives from exercising power over those who have become his unsuspecting playthings isn’t immediately clear.
It doesn’t take long for the competitors to begin forming alliances to shorten the odds on survival, threatening the herd mentality that previously meant control was easy for the guards. This could spell elimination by bullet for all remaining players; but who hasn’t wished the same fate to befall one or two reality-television contestants?
A Grand Tour of Scotland awaits
Television’s biggest overgrown schoolboys set off on another round of motoring mayhem in season four, episode three of The Grand Tour (Amazon Prime).
Subtitled Lochdown (insert laugh here), in this episode the perennial “adolescents”, confined to Britain by pandemic regulations and unable to terrorise Asia or Africa, confront Scotland.
But those hoping to see Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May run out of the country, as they were in the Argentinian instalment of Top Gear, will be disappointed. Instead, they engineer their own entertaining catastrophes as they drive towards the Outer Hebrides in three of the most preposterous cars ever built, each the epitome of 1970s American excess.
The unsuitability of the low-riding Buick Riviera, Lincoln Continental and Cadillac Coupe de Ville for what pass for roads in the northern British countryside quickly becomes chassis-scrapingly obvious. By the time their destination appears, the caravans formerly towed have disintegrated or been sent careering off-road. But fear not, because what awaits is … Chinese hospitality, Tsingtao beer and all.
