What is the eighth episode of Squid Game?

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It’s the shortest episode of Squid Game by a wide margin, but the show’s eighth installment, “Front Man,” is long on deaths that matter. With only one episode remaining, perhaps that was to be expected. Every remaining death counts, because every remaining character is a major one. There’s no escaping the pain that comes with the killings.

We’ll start with the death that affects the title character the most. Much to my surprise, undercover cop Jun-ho actually makes it to the mainland, where he tries, semi-successfully, to get in touch with his boss and send him video and photo evidence of all he has seen in the games complex. But he’s tracked down by a squadron of pink goons led by the Front Man himself.

And in a twist, the Front Man is Jun-ho’s missing brother, In-ho.

Jun-ho only learns this after he’s already shot the man in the shoulder, at which point he takes off his mask to reveal himself. And rather than take Jun-ho alive, as was his original plan, he fires back, fatally knocking Jun-ho off a cliff into the sea below. Why pull the trigger when he and his men could have easily overwhelmed Jun-ho, who had no bullets left in his gun? Could it be that the Front Man couldn’t bear the shame he saw reflected in his brother’s eyes? Better to shut them permanently than to ever see himself in them again.

Then there are the three surviving players, Gi-hun, Sang-woo, and Sae-byeok. After they stagger back into the dormitory room, which seems sparse and cavernous now that only three residents remain, Gi-hun angrily confronts Sang-woo over his—let’s call a spade a spade here—murder of the player in front of him on the glass bridge, whose expertise with glass (he’d spent decades working in a glass factory) is what enabled them all to survive. Sang-woo’s best defense is that a) the guy could have been sharing what he knew all along, but chose to wait until he was in front of the line, and b) he could have stalled for so long that they all would have been killed. Gi-hun doesn’t buy a word.

As the three survivors prepare for an elaborate black-tie dinner staged for their benefit, we make a startling discovery: Sae-byeok has a huge shard of glass embedded in her side, and her meager ability to staunch the wound is too little, too late. As she lies in what is in effect her deathbed, she makes Gi-hun promise that if either of them survives, they’ll look after each other’s families. And when Gi-hun gets up to stab a sleeping Sang-woo to death with the steak knife each contestant has been left with, Sae-byeok intervenes. You’re not that kind of person, she tells him, before passing out from her injury.

Gi-hun runs to the locked doors of the dormitory, screaming for a doctor to come help. When the lights are switched on and a phalanx of pink guys shows up, it seems at first that his pleas may have been answered. It’s not outside the realm of possibility, after all, that the game masters would want all three contestants hale and healthy for the grand finale.

But then he sees that they’re carting one of those gift-box coffins. He turns, and finds Sae-byeok dead, stabbed in the throat by Sang-woo, who must have been woken up by Gi-hun’s cries for help. It’s dramatic irony at its cruelest.

It should be noted here that it’s always a bit of a bummer—that may be putting it mildly—when a woman character dies so that a man has something to be mad and sad about. (Ahem.) That said, Sae-byeok was hardly the first character to die in a way that deeply affected Gi-hun and/or Sang-woo—consider the deaths of Ali and the old man, Il-nam. Moreover, there’s a sick sort of moral calculus to the manner of her death, killed by a man whose life she’d just saved by telling Gi-hun not to kill him in his sleep. Sang-woo has no way of knowing it, but he just murdered his own savior.

Then there’s the nature of Sae-byeok and Gi-hun’s relationship. There’s no romance here, there’s not even a paternal instinct on Gi-hun’s part—they’re just two people who happened to become friends and allies, who’ve bonded over their similar plights. In other words, I think Sae-byeok’s death is better handled than your bog-standard “guy goes on a roaring rampage of revenge after thugs murder his wife” storyline. Your mileage may vary, of course.

Whatever the case, we’re left with two players, who are forcibly held apart by the pink guards. This time it’s for real: If one of them kills the other, there can’t be a final game. And wouldn’t that disappoint the VIPs? We can’t have that, now, can we?

It’s here, really, that the emptiness of the games’ promise of an egalitarian world, an antidote to the unfairness of the real world, is revealed as empty. Gi-hun and Sang-woo are being kept alive for the entertainment of the rich, to whom they are nothing more than toys to be used and discarded. Remind me again how this is different than the status quo that sent them to the games to begin with?

READ NEXT: ‘Squid Game’ Season 1 Finale Recap: “One Lucky Day”

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Watch Squid Game Episode 8 on Netflix

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