Squid Game has officially come to an end after four years and three seasons with Netflix, but the final season found a creative way to bring Season 2’s biggest standout back from the dead before it was all over. Squid Game returned for Season 2 of the highly anticipated series last year, and quickly took over Netflix just as much as the first season did. This new season introduced Seong Gi-Hun to a new series of games, and a new cast of players who needed to survive. But the biggest standout was the wild drug using rapper named after a Marvel character, Thanos.
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Squid Game Season 2 really took over the world with Thanos as fans got to love the character despite the fact he didn’t make it out of the season unscathed. This had seemed like it meant that the character would not be making a comeback in the third season despite his popularity, but Squid Game Season 3 found a way to bring Thanos back to the action without breaking the grounded rules of its world. Whether or not it was a successful return will be up to the fans, however. Warning! Major Squid Game Season 3 spoilers to follow!
How Thanos Comes Back in Squid Game Season 3
Thanos was decidedly killed off during the second season‘s final stretch after losing a fight to Lee Myung-gi, so it seemed like he would be off the table for a potential cameo in the final episodes given that his story was completed. But Thanos was such a personality that he continued to live on through others. At first it seemed small, however, as his surviving compatriot Nam-gyu was bringing Thanos back to the screen with a hilarious impression of his former friend, but it all becomes real much later through an entirely different character.
Nam-gyu and Thanos had been bullying Park Min-su through the games thus far, so Squid Game Season 3 sees Min-su instead taking more of the reins over his life. During the chaos of the fourth game he gets a hand on Thanos’ drug necklace and starts to take them through the final games. In the final game, Sky Squid Game, Min-su hallucinates and nearly falls off the side of a platform. It’s here he briefly sees Thanos and Nam-gyu as the two try and “grab him” and drag him to his death. So Thanos was able to come back even after he died.
Is Thanos’ Return a Success?
Thanos’ comeback is going to be a point of debate among Squid Game fans. Because it might seem like a decision that was made following how much popularity Thanos had in the second season, but Season 2 and 3 of the series were produced pretty much at the same time. It’s not likely that Squid Game creator Hwang Dong-hyuk inserted Thanos into this moment just as a bit of fan service, and that’s apparent in the scene itself as Min-su is haunted by the literal ghosts of his past through the game thus far.
It’s not the kind of return that would break the reality set by the first two seasons of the series, and is also not the only dead character we see returning through these kinds of visions either. Thanos just stands out because of all the noise he made during the second season, so it ends up being just another fun nod to the fact that this character continues to cause chaos in others’ lives long after he was killed off. No other Squid Game character really has that level of impact.
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Image courtesy of Netflix
