Hwang Jun-ho was just way too sloppy as an undercover cop - his infiltration of a super-secret organization was unbelievably convenient.

Squid Game is a South Korean survival-game series that premiered  September 17, 2021, and went on to rack up quite the interesting stats - watched by 142 million households (taking the throne from beloved period drama, Bridgerton), reportedly responsible for 3.3mn new subscriptions to Netflix and boosting the streaming network's value by a whopping $19bn.


With these statistics and the amount of Squid Game reenactments and parodies, this battle horror series is adored by many but is also not without its plot holes - especially when it comes to the cop subplot starring Gwang Jun-ho (Wi Ha-Joon).

Here are some questionable acts surrounding his one-man organization bust



He tailed the 'abducted' contestants way too easily.

After questioning Gi-Hun on whether his brother was a player of the Squid Game the former tried to report to the cops, an unsatisfied Jun-ho smartly lurks around Gi-Hun's house, witnesses him entering a vehicle, and immediately follows.

And by immediately follows, I mean smoothly, without a single hitch. The driver he was tailing did not look in his rearview mirror once - not even when they appeared to be the only two cars on a dark lonely road.

It's not at all suspicious that one car followed yours all the way from a quiet neighborhood right to the secret location you tried to keep secret by drugging all the contestants?

We'll just assume the driver was underpaid.


The location of the squid island might not be such a huge secret

I mean if a cop can park around your private property, sneak underneath a car, and then onto a boat going to a very secret location without any surveillance cameras catching it, then its probably just a resort. Asides the armed gamepad heads, are there actually any security measures at this dock? A blind old German Shepherd perhaps?




Gaddem Detective Hwang, you really just gon' kill an innocent man?

Right off the bat of an undercover investigation you know nothing about?

After Jun-ho very easily sneaks into a car carrying the contestants, one of the gamepad heads finds out he's not a registered contestant, and to save himself, Jun-ho kills him. Just like that. A presumably innocent man. Someone else's brother.

We the viewers know that man had blood on his hands but Jun-ho didn't know that. All he saw was Gi-Hun willingly get into a vehicle driven by the man he killed. That's not a crime, is it?


You're acting a lil sus with these questions, Detective.

The way things are run on the island (mask on all the times) is kind of convenient for this undercover cop. Not so convenient is the no-speak rule because that means he can't ask around like he needs to or ask for pointers which he clearly needs - not knowing what his tasks are and whatnot.

The chattiest the moderators are is when they're in the organ harvesting room and instead of using this opportunity to build some kind of rapport, Jun-ho asks brutally direct questions that would be suspicious to anybody, more so if it was information he - or at least the person he was pretending to be - should already have known.

He's not a very good undercover cop, is he?

While we're on the topic of the convenience of masks, we understand not wanting the moderators to reveal themselves to one another but the actual Management (like the Front Man) should know what everyone else looks like because how else can you ensure you've not been infiltrated? Not knowing what your own rule-enforcers look like is why a surveillance camera repeatedly saw Jun-ho take off his mask and still wasn't able to tell he wasn't the Number 29.


You seem very uninterested in keeping your identity a secret, good sir.



Twice in this series, Jun-ho takes off his mask at the exact moments where he shouldn't be taking off his mask.

a. after killing his diving partner and heading up the ladder. Unmasked, you killed someone backing possible cameras and then turned back still unmasked to flee to a place that's above your clearance.

b. After tieing up the VIP, Jun-ho climbs down the ladder without his mask and then comes eye-to-masked-eye with the Front Man.

Was he unbothered that this organization confident and powerful enough to kill contestants and employees under the radar wouldn't go as far as tracking his loved ones and turning their innards into outards?


This detective sucks at covering his tracks.



After killing his diving partner, the smart thing to have done would be to throw one diving gear somewhere - into the water, into a trashcan or something, anywhere. Instead, he just runs back up and from the absence of any missing dive-ware, the Front Man is able to tell that an intruder is still in the building.

Again when Jun-ho somewhat successfully escapes the game warehouse, shouldn't he have misplaced his canister or I don't know hidden it more carefully so his trackers wouldn't be able to tell which way he went?

It was almost like he wanted to be found and shot (shot, because we know he's not dead).


The missing brother story is all over the bloody place.



The cop subplot starts because Jun-ho is looking for his brother who was not answering his mother's calls. We later find out (to the shock of no one) that the Front Man is his brother. But here's where it gets tricky. His brother won the Squid Game in 2015.

This means, at some point in 2015, his brother went missing for a few days. If your brother is missing again, shouldn't your first place to look be whatever excuse he came up with in 2015? Also what exactly did In-ho do with his billions of South Korean won that he can only afford a room you can barely do a downward dog in and doesn't even have an automated system to pay for his coverup house?

And if your brother is a cop, why not go the Sang-Woo route and lie that you're away on business somewhere, on a religious retreat to find yourself, something. He had a phone in the Front Man suite, he could have called his mother but he seemed pretty sure no one would come looking for him. Not even the brother he gave up a kidney for. Perhaps, the kidney never even belonged to In-ho but an unlucky Squid Game player.


Verdict

Questionable storylines excluded, Hwang Dong-hyuk's Squid Game is gripping and what you'd expect from a survivor game series - the death of everything and everyone except the particularly strong battery of an undercover cop.

7.5/10.