Dalgona Candy

S1 E3: The Man with the Umbrella

Squid Games, Netflix, 2021.

It begins, as all great field trips do, with a man trying not to throw up while committing a felony.

Squid Game reminds us that infiltration is mostly seasickness, breath control, and pretending you belong somewhere that would absolutely kill you if it noticed you didn’t. Jun-ho slips into the machinery like a loose screw the system hasn’t detected yet, an encouraging thought, if you enjoy believing institutions are fragile, and a less encouraging one if you are currently inside one.

Back in the dorms, the players wake up with the groggy optimism of people who have collectively agreed to re-enter a nightmare because the alternative was worse, which is perhaps the most honest depiction of capitalism ever filmed. They form alliances the way children do at recess, quickly, sincerely, and with the suspicion that someone will betray someone else by lunchtime. Gi-hun assembles his little platoon: a gambler, a financier, a migrant worker, and a man who might be older than memory itself.

Meanwhile, the show quietly rearranges its chessboard. Player 067 crawls through vents like a rumor you can’t quite verify, discovering that the great secret behind the curtain is, of all things, melted sugar. Not a grand conspiracy. Not a nuclear code. Just candy. It’s almost comforting, if you ignore that the candy is being weaponized into a sorting mechanism for human lives. Elsewhere, Player 212 performs the essential civic duty of yelling until the system bends slightly, proving that even in a totalitarian death maze, the loudest person in the room still gets a bathroom break.

Then comes the playground, scaled up to the size of a god’s indifference. The shapes (circle, triangle, star, umbrella) appear large and innocent, which is how you know they are not. Sang-woo, who has already solved the equation in his head, chooses survival and calls it strategy, which is a polite way of saying he lets his friend walk directly into difficulty with the calm demeanor of someone diversifying a portfolio. It is a small betrayal, almost elegant, the kind that doesn’t announce itself until later, when you realize you were the risk he was hedging against.

The game itself is absurd: carefully carve a shape out of a brittle disk of browned, melted sugar or die. The rules are simple, which makes them cruel. The room fills with the sounds of scraping, cracking, praying, and occasionally gunfire. Some players discover ingenuity, licking the sugar, melting the edges, turning desperation into method, while others discover that trembling hands are not a viable strategy. Gi-hun, given the umbrella (a shape so intricate it feels personal), survives not through foresight but through the kind of brilliance that looks a lot like panic stretched over time.

And through it all, the episode hums with a quiet thesis: people return to the game not because they are foolish, but because they have done the math. Outside, the world is a slower version of the same cruelty, with fewer uniforms and better lighting. Inside, at least, the rules are visible. You pick a shape. You hold your breath. You try not to break.

Make it! Dalgona Candy by My Korean Kitchen