ABOUT HALFWAY THROUGH THE NEW NETFLIX HORROR series Squid Game, one of the contestants, a career gangster named Jang Deok-su (played by Heo Sung-tae), comes upon a gruesome new strategy. Thus far, he and several hundred other men and women, dressed in identical green polyester track suits, have been told by an anonymous army of enforcers that they are in a six-round tournament of literal elimination. Each round is a different challenge based on a children’s game, like marbles or tug-of-war; each is played to the death and for an unimaginably large jackpot. Every person who loses dies, and their deaths add to the prize money. Despite these macabre stakes, a sense of fairness has prevailed in the game’s early rounds: Do your best in competition, and if you survive,…
