‘Squid Game’ Episode 6 Recap: For All the Marbles (2024)

It has tension and terror to spare, but Squid Game has largely eschewed tugging on the heartstrings—until now. The show’s sixth episode is titled “Gganbu,” a term for childhood best friends who share everything, a relationship cemented by the solemn ritual of a pinky swear. If you guessed that few, if any, of our heroes would wind up preserving such a mutually beneficial agreement in the face of their masters’ manipulations, you guessed right.

Apart from a brief scene in which undercover cop Jun-ho overhears the Front Man fielding a telephone call about the arrival of the games’ mysterious VIPs, the action is focused squarely on the players and their next game. For starters, they’re all paraded past the hanging bodies of the guards and the doctor who’d been cheating, to further emphasize the egalitarian nature of the competition. I’ll bet everyone felt very reassured after that.

The players’ next task is to split up in teams of two. Naturally, after the tug-of-war game, everyone assumes that they’ll be working with the person they pair up with, not against them. Sang-woo and Ali select each other, a brains-and-brawn tandem who also happen to like one another. Sae-byeok, the North Korean pickpocket, is convinced to join up with player #240, the young woman who joined the main characters’ tug-of-war team. Deok-su, the gangster, chooses one of his minions, #278 (Kwak Jah-hyoung). Mi-nyeo, the conniving player #212, winds up alone, carted off by guards, her fate unknown. And despite his initial trepidation, Gi-hun partners up with the old man, whose dignity he’s helped preserve by tying his own jacket around the man’s waist to cover up the wet spot from when the poor guy wet his pants.

Unfortunately for everyone, the next game is marbles—and your partner is not your ally, but your opponent.

This is more of a bind for some teams, like the poor husband and wife combo who have a bit part in the show, than it is for others, like Deok-su and his chief henchmen, neither of whom actually give a sh*t about the other. The gangster winds up winning after successfully petitioning his guard to change the game they’d been playing (and at which he’d been losing badly) to what’s effectively a game of marble golf; his opponent’s last marble bumps his into the hole, awarding him the game and saving his life.

For our other heroes, things are trickier. Neither Sae-byeok nor her partner 240 know how to play marbles—240 dismisses the game as the province of “boomers”; classic millennial move—so they agree to wait until the last minute and kill the time sharing their sad life stories. We learn that Sae-byeok’s father was shot and killed during their attempt to escape North Korea, while her mother was returned home by security forces. Player 240 was sexually abused by her pastor father (hence her rejection of religion in the previous episode), whom she eventually came home from school to find having just murdered her mother. She stabbed him to death in turn, and was released from prison only to come straight to the games. She had nowhere else to go, she explains. In the end, she throws the game and allows herself to be killed, sparing Sae-byeok’s life. As they part ways, she reveals that her name is Ji-yeong; I can’t decide if this makes her self-sacrifice harder or easier for Sae-byeok to bear.

Like many of the other teams, including Gi-hun and the old man, Sang-woo and Ali begin by guessing whether their opponent is holding either an even or odd number of marbles in his hand, betting some of their own marbles in the process. Sang-woo freaks out when Ali takes a substantial lead, first accusing him of cheating, then begging for his life, and finally devising an alternate plan. He sends Ali out to find another team that looks like it might wind up without a clear winner, under the assumption that if their game also doesn’t reach a definitive conclusion, they’ll go up against that other team together instead of being forced to fight amongst themselves.

What Ali doesn’t realize until far too late is that Sang-woo swapped his bag of marbles out with a bag full of pebbles, taken from the fake street set in which the marble game is played. So much for their beautiful friendship, and so much for Ali, who dies feeling the sting of betrayal from a man he thought was his friend.

Gi-hun and his elderly partner also play the odd/even guessing game, though it takes some doing to get there, as the increasingly dementia-addled old man believes the fake street to be the street where he grew up. Eventually Gi-hun convinces him of the need to play…but he also takes advantage of the man’s declining mental faculties, twice rigging the game by changing an “odd” bet to “even” and vice versa in order to win rounds when the old man forgets what had originally been said.

But Gi-hun miscalculates before he can achieve victory, and discovers the old man has one last marble left. But he winds up wandering off through the fake streets again, until he finds what he believes is his home. An increasingly frantic Gi-hun begs him to finish the game, and the old man suggest playing one last round for all the marbles. When Gi-hun, who has a huge numerical advantage at this point, balks at the suggestion as unfair, the old man pointedly ask if deceiving him, as Gi-hun has done, was fair. But rather than press the issue, he simply hands Gi-hun the last marble. They’d promised to be “gganbu,” after all, and thus the marble belongs to Gi-hun as much as to him.

And like Ji-yeong, the old man finally offers up his name: Il-nam. Then he gets shot to death.

This is Squid Game‘s most intense and emotionally taxing episode to date; even writing a plot summary like the one you’ve just read takes a lot out of you. But it also feels inevitable given the ratcheting-up of the moral stakes in each game. During the tug-of-war game, the teams were forced to murder one another, but at least they weren’t forced to kill the people they’d teamed up with. There’s no such exception made here; indeed, it’s likely the game masters intended for the players to choose the people they were most fond of as partners, in order to make the result even more painful.

There’s a cheerful sadism in the way the games are constructed—seriously, can you even stand one more ironically colorful set, one more chipper announcement that the game is about to begin over the strains of “The Blue Danube”—that belies the Front Man’s insistence that their goal is to construct a fair world in opposition to the unfair one outside the complex’s walls. About the best thing I can say about Squid Game is that, for all its brutality, it does not seem to share the games’ sadism itself. The scenarios it rolls out for us are awful to contemplate, to be sure, but the awfulness is the point. Creator/writer/director Hwang Dong-hyuk values the interpersonal connections he’s creating, even as he destroys them. It’s an exploration of violence, not an exploitation of violence. He’s making sure that when he kills people you care about, you know their names.

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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 6 on Netflix