Why Does In-ho Join the Games?

WARNING: The following contains spoilers for season two of Squid Game.

Squid Game season two picks up more or less where season one left off. Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) has won the games, and rather than take the money and start a new life with his new red-dyed haircut, he makes the risky decision to use his newfound resources to try to bring down the games once and for all.

But of course, the shadowy forces behind the games aren’t going to make it easy for him. Season two picks up three years later, when Gi-hun has been obsessively hunting for a way into the games’ orbit with little to show for it. Finally, he finds the man who recruited him (Gong Yoo), putting him on a course to potentially capture the mysterious Front Man and put an end to the games. Needless to say, this doesn’t go the way he hoped, and Gi-hun is forced to implement his backup plan: rejoin the games and try to take them down from the inside. But the people at the top aren’t going to just sit back and let this happen either, and they throw a pretty big wrench in the works with the arrival of contestant 001, or as the audience knows him, the Front Man himself.

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Why the Front Man is a Contestant

The Front Man, real name Hwang In-ho, joins the games under the pseudonym Oh Young-il, contestant 001. While the audience is aware of his true identity, the characters aren’t, and In-ho quickly goes about gaining Gi-hun’s trust, forming a sort of team with him and a few other contestants. Young-il seems like the perfect guy to have in Gi-hun’s corner: he’s capable, handy in a fight, and backs his play to try and convince the others to vote to end the games.

Gi-hun’s pleas mostly fall on deaf ears, as a majority of the players vote to continue, lured by the promise of a larger payout. But through it all, it seems like Gi-hun might still succeed in his mission if he and Young-il stick together. Young-il even has a properly sympathetic backstory, telling Gi-hun he joined the games in order to get money to pay for his dying wife’s medical treatment. While Gi-hun seems to grow slightly suspicious of his new friend over the course of the season, he never discovers his true identity.

It seems pretty clear that In-ho has joined the games in order to subtly thwart Gi-hun’s crusade, especially in the season finale where he has his alter ego apparently “killed off” during the contestants’ failed rebellion. But really, if this were the end goal all along, it doesn’t seem like there would be much reason to go to the trouble of posing as a contestant and gaining Gi-hun’s trust at all. It begs the question of what In-ho’s true motives might be.

What In-ho Could Be Up To

In-ho has been one of Squid Game’s most mysterious characters since his introduction in season one. For most of the first season, his face was kept hidden by his now-iconic geometric mask, until it was revealed that he was the missing brother that undercover detective Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon) had infiltrated the games in order to find. Not only was the detective’s brother involved in the games, he was near the very top of the pyramid, and he proved his dedication by shooting his own brother and letting him fall into the sea.

In-ho has shown some flashes of conscience throughout the series, but he still seems to buy into an underlying philosophy of the games as more than just entertainment for bored elites, but rather as a sort of moral reckoning for an inherently broken world.

It’s still unclear why In-ho would go to the lengths he does in season two, but it’s likely there’s more at play than just trying to protect the games. In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, actor Lee Byung-hun speculated that perhaps In-ho is trying to educate Gi-hun, to prove him wrong in his efforts to appeal to humanity’s better nature. He wondered if In-ho saw some of himself in Gi-hun and maybe even rooted for him in a way. It’s possible that In-ho truly does have some sympathy for Gi-hun and wants to help him come around to his way of thinking out of some warped sense of duty.

Squid Game has set up Gi-hun and In-ho as basically two sides of the same coin, with In-ho as the first contestant (001) and Gi-hun as the last (456). They represent two opposing views of humanity: that people are basically decent even when driven to desperation, and that people are inherently greedy and selfish. Season two ends on a massive cliffhanger, but season three will no doubt explore this even further, putting these two philosophies to the test to see which one wins in the end.

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Release Date

September 17, 2021

Cast

Wi Ha-joon
, Anupam Tripathi
, Oh Yeong-su
, Heo Sung-tae
, Park Hae-soo
, Jung Ho-yeon
, Lee Jung-jae
, Kim Joo-ryoung

Seasons

2

Showrunner

Hwang Dong-hyuk

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