How Are ‘Squid Game’ Season 3’s VIPs Still This Awful?

I am currently halfway through season 3 of Squid Game, which was released yesterday and is (maybe) the final run of the series. I think it’s quite good so far, and episode 2 in particular is easily one of the best of the entire show.

However, by episode 3, you run into an old, hard-to-believe problem: the arrival of the VIPs in their gold animal masks that have the absolute worst dialogue and delivery of the entire series. It’s to the point where it’s so jarring it takes you out of the entire episode, which is filled with compelling performances from its Korean cast. Spoilers follow.

The question is…how did this happen again? After the VIPs were lambasted in the wake of season 1, how did they get this group of villains so wrong yet again? This time, there’s an American, a Brit or two and possibly a woman from Japan. The difference this time is that they got to “participate” in the second game by being part of the clean-up crew that goes around shooting players who failed the game.

The dialogue is horrific. It’s not just the writing, which is, in fact, terrible; it’s the delivery and the fact that this is English dialogue that somehow sounds like it’s dubbed over itself to make it sound like someone recording separately from a sound booth. Which, for whatever reason, is probably what happened.

These are the exact same complaints about the season 1 VIPs, and while there is some speculation this is done on purpose to be campy like past genre films, that does not seem to be the case. There was actually an interview done with one of the actors who explained why this was so weird and bad. This is from the Guardian and ran shortly after season 1 was released:

“It’s different for every show, but non-Korean performers often act with dialogue that is translated by a non-native – sometimes even by Google Translate – so it can sound unnatural,” he says. “Often we don’t have the scripts for the rest of the show,” he adds. “We are only given our scenes, so we have no idea of the tone.”

“We were all wearing very heavy plaster masks, and sitting on couches that were at least 20-30ft away from the closest VIP. We all had to yell our lines vaguely into the air, which added to the weird tonality of the delivery.”

That sounds like exactly what’s still happening, right down to the distance between the VIPs, and it’s impossible to imagine there was no way to fix this from season 1. The explanations are that they did it on purpose and left it this bad despite the blowback, or they simply screwed up again and did not learn their lesson.

Again, the rest of the show is great so far, but once again, the VIPs are the low point and so bad they make the rest of the episodes worse.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.