[Warning: The following post contains MAJOR spoilers for Squid Game Season 3.]
Before Squid Game returned for its third and final season, the fan theories were flying online, and, as it turns out, many of those digital hypotheses proved to be true in Season 3.
Some of these guesses were far less obvious than others, so here’s a look at those plot predictions that were absolutely spot on.
One of the new games was indeed jump rope
After an initial post-credits teaser for Season 3 revealed a new giant robotic doll, Chul-su, joining Young-hee for a mystery game, some fans interpreted their positioning and the available glimpses of the setting to mean the animatronics were going to be holding a jump rope, and the players would have to jump to safety, and this one was confirmed even before the season dropped, thanks to the final season trailer.
Netflix
Guard 011 saved the player she had a past with
As we learned in Season 2, Kang No-uel (Park Gyu-young), a.k.a. Guard 011, had a bit of a personal history with Park Gyeong-seok (Lee Jin-wook), a.k.a. Player 246. She’d once met his daughter Park Na-yeong, who was ill with blood cancer, while working at a carnival and knew that he entered the games in hopes of affording a medication that wasn’t covered by their health insurance and that his death would almost certainly lead to hers as well. That convinced many fans that she secretly spared him in the events of the Season 2 finale, in which Gyeong-seok participated in the rebellion that became a bloodbath, with guards gunning down any survivors.
In Season 3, that proved to be true, as she secretly kept him alive and brought him to the operating room, where she executed everyone except the doctor and forced him to save the player, even offering her own blood for a much-needed transfusion. She then coldly executed the doctor and helped Gyeong-seok escape on a speedboat by having him pose as a fellow guard.
The boat captain was a turncoat
Given the difficulties Hwang Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon) had in reaching the island throughout the events of Season 2, some fans speculated that the boat’s Captain Park (Oh Dal-su) may not have been on the up and up. Despite Jun-ho’s protestations, he learned the hard way that the fisherman wasn’t who he said he was; instead, he was working for the Front Man and ordered the slaughter of everyone on board both search vessels, which Jun-ho narrowly survived.
Jang Geum-ja was hiding a weapon in her hairpin
Some fans theorized that the matriarch of the game had a blade hidden in her hairpin, and she revealed that to be true when pulling out the sharp blade to cut the cord for Kim Jun-hee (Jo Yu-ri) a.k.a. Player 222’s newborn baby.
Front Man tested Gi-Hun’s true character in a pivotal moment
Another theory that many fans had after Season 2 was that Front Man (Lee Byung-hun), a.k.a. Hwang In-ho a.k.a. Player 001, was planning to test Seong Gi-hun’s (Lee Jung-jae) true moral character in the final stretch, hoping he would imitate his own behavior. And in Season 3, we saw that he did put Gi-hun to the test in a personal way. Through flashbacks, we learned that In-ho was given an opportunity to kill his competitors in their sleep before the final game, and he took it. He offered the same to Gi-hun, giving him a dagger to take out those players who were left and threatening himself and the baby, and though Gi-hun initially seemed primed to act on it, he walked away and declined to stab anyone before the final game, instead letting the final game play out without that grisly advantage.
Squid Game, Streaming now, Netflix