Hell
The 201 remaining survivors of the first game, shaken by the revelation that "elimination" from these games actually means death, are terrified and frenzied. Everyone wants to quit the games and leave, begging the guards to release them and promising that they'll pay their debts. The guards clarify that the games aren't to punish them for their debts and remind them that they signed a contract stating that refusing to participate will get them killed. Sang-woo points out the third clause of the contract, which states that if a majority of players refuse to play, the games will be canceled and they can be returned home.
The staffers agree to set things up so that the players can hold a vote. Before they do so, they lower a giant see-through piggy bank from a hole in the dorm ceiling and fill it up with stacks of cash totaling ₩25 billion. They reveal that each contestant is worth ₩100 million and that the total prize pot will be ₩45.6 billion. The guards further explain that the players can make a choice between leaving or staying, and set up a voting machine with two buttons — a circle to continue and an X to leave. If they leave, they don't get any of the prize money.
Gi-hun is the first to vote, and votes not to continue, as do many others. The vote remains neck-and-neck all throughout, but eventually, Sang-woo and the other contestants willing to continue the games push the positive votes into the lead. A fight nearly breaks out as the contestants who want to leave get angry with those who want to continue, necessitating intervention from the guards. The counter-argument to leaving is that their lives outside of the game aren't going to improve; at least here, they have a chance to get the money. It's Player 001, the old man with the brain tumor, who gets to cast the deciding vote and break the 100-100 tie. He selects to quit the game.
With that, everyone is dropped off back on the mainland, with the promise that if the majority of players want to continue the games after a few days, the games will be restarted. Gi-hun is dumped with Player 067, the pickpocket who stole his money. Sang-woo, who is with Player 199, charges his phone to discover a torrent of messages from the authorities. He nevertheless gives 199 cash for food and a bus ride back home.
Gi-hun runs right to the cops to report what he's gone through, but none of them believe his story. The business card he gives as proof of the games is redirected to the wrong number, then a disconnected line. Only one of the cops, Detective Hwang Jun-ho, believes his story, as he recalls it was similar to what happened to his missing brother. Discouraged, Gi-hun exits the police station and while looking for his mother around town, bumps into Sang-woo, who confesses he owes a staggering ₩6 billion due to a bunch of bad investments and had put his mother's fish store up for collateral in one of those deals. As they catch up, Gi-hun receives a worrying call from the hospital. The doctors inform him that his mother has been diagnosed with advanced diabetes, but she insists on leaving without treatment even at the risk of her feet requiring amputation. Gi-hun asks his mother why she refuses to stay in the hospital, to which she coldly reminds Gi-hun that he had canceled their health insurance and drained what little savings they had to get more money to fuel his gambling addiction, hence why they can't afford her taking the time off to get the treatment and recover. Racked with guilt, Gi-hun swears that he'll make things right and get the money.
Jun-ho goes to his brother's apartment, to which the landlady informs him that his brother's rent has already passed. While looking around, he finds the same card that Gi-hun had.
The pickpocket, a North Korean defector named Kang Sae-byeok, visits her little brother Cheol, who is staying in a children's home as she can't afford a bigger place for them both to stay in. Cheol hates how the other children bully him and claim that his sister abandoned him at the orphanage. Sae-byeok consoles her brother, reassuring him that she will get him out of the orphanage and rescue their mother from North Korea.
Player 199, a Pakistani immigrant named Ali, goes to his boss, who refuses to pay him the six months of wages he owes him with the excuse that he doesn't have money, but fails to hide an envelope full of cash in his pocket. Enraged by his boss' greed, a fight ensues which ends with the boss' hand getting mangled in a piece of heavy machinery and Ali stealing the money and running away, now jobless.
Sae-byeok visits the broker she hired, only to find out the deed has absconded with her money. She threatens the guy who connected her with the missing broker, but that doesn't get her money back.
Sang-woo talks to his mother over the phone, lying to her that he's on a business trip before attempting to kill himself in a bathtub by inhaling charcoal fumes. As she talks up his success to a client, two police officers approach her and inform her that Sang-woo has a warrant out for his arrest, being charged with forgery, embezzlement, and other crimes related to fraud, much to her disbelief. Sang-woo's suicide attempt is interrupted when someone calls at his door, leaving him only a card from the games.
Ali returns home that night, his wife alarmed at how he's covered in blood and wondering how he suddenly got a stack of money. Ali only tells her to buy tickets for the first plane back to their home in Pakistan for her and their child and leave him behind to support the family, assuring her that he loves her and will join them once he's finished his job in Korea.
Determined to save his mother, Gi-hun first tries to ask a friend to give him a job, to no avail. He then encounters Player 001 at a store and catches up with him. The old man wonders if he and Gi-hun were destined to meet each other. The old man notes that the outside world is its own kind of Hell and tells Gi-hun that he's decided to re-enter the games, not wanting to wait for his tumor to end him with a slow and painful death.
Player 101, a gangster named Deok-su, reconnects with one of his criminal underlings, showing him the game card he got, and orders him to gather as many people as he can, figuring they can follow the game vans, break into the island, and steal the money themselves. Naturally, Deok-su's underling doesn't believe him and casually informs Deok-su that he sold him out and drove him right to a bridge surrounded by armed goons from a Filipino casino where Deok-su racked up a small fortune in debt without paying it up. He kills the traitor and jumps off the bridge to escape, swimming to safety.
In a desperate last resort, Gi-hun begs his ex-wife Eun-ji for help, only to find that she and her current husband are also struggling to make ends meet. They begin arguing about the events that led to their divorce and Gi-hun's inability to step up and be the responsible father Ga-yeong needs. Ga-yeong's stepfather offers to lend the cash to Gi-hun on the condition that he cease all contact with Ga-yeong. Infuriated by the proposal, Gi-hun angrily rejects the money and leaves. On his way home, he encounters Jun-ho. Believing he would be arrested, he initially dismisses the pleas of the squid games as him just being drunk, but when Jun-ho informs that he needs his help to save his brother, Gi-hun rejects it, feeling useless.
Ultimately, everyone decides to return to the games, waiting on the street at midnight to be picked up by the cars and Jun-ho sneaking around by following the route of the cars.
"Hell" provides examples of:
- Asshole Victim:
- Ali's greedy boss who refuses to pay him gets pushed and his hand stuck in a machine crushing his fingers while Ali runs away with his money.
- While Deok-su is a monster, his partner-in-crime turns into a complete smug Jerkass when he reveals he ratted him out, while still sitting in the same car as him. This attitude makes it hard to mourn him when Deok-su stabs him to death as a response.
- Cassandra Truth: After the majority of players vote to stop the games and they're released back into the real world, Gi-hun goes to the police and tries to tell them about the games. The police naturally think he's making it up, due to how weird it sounds, and even Gi-hun himself understands this despite trying anyway.
- Decided by One Vote: The vote comes down to this. Player 001 gets to cast the deciding vote, breaking a 100-100 tie.
- Defiant to the End: One brave player, who never returns once he is given the out, asks the guards what they plan to do with about several hundred hostages and a bunch of dead bodies. He points out that their phones will reveal where they are.
- Don't Ask, Just Run: Ali tells his wife No Time to Explain about the money; she needs to get on a plane with their child and fly back home to Pakistan. He can't join them, because he has some work to finish.
- Everyone Has Standards:
- Sang-woo wants the games to continue. He also knows, however, that the guards are threatening to shoot everyone who wants out. When it seems another massacre will occur, he stands and reminds the guards that per their own contract, the third clause states that the players can vote to stay or leave. At the least he wants to give people a fair chance to vote.
- Gi-hun can't vote for the games to continue, after what they suffered. Ali also votes no, for the same reason.
- Even Evil Has Standards: The Square guard tells the scared begging people to stop groveling. That won't get them home. Besides which, begging isn't dignified and no, this isn't a means to scare them into paying their debts.
- Exact Words: The Square guard coldly says that the players were told the rules. Several people protest that they weren't told that "elimination" was being gunned down in a fake playground.
- Fingore: Ali fights with his boss after not receiving his pay and ends up pushing him into machinery, where his hand's fingers are brutally crushed.
- Gray Rain of Depression: The scene where Gi-hun begs his ex-wife for money for his mother, only to wind up in a humiliating confrontation with her new husband, ends with him trudging home in the pouring rain. It's then that he finds the Squid Game calling card again and elects to return to the game.
- Ground by Gears: Ali's boss' hand gets crushed up by a pair of rolling flatteners. Presumably, someone must've turned it off, or else the guy would have been killed.
- Ironic Hell: After the survivors vote to end the game, they are released from their contract, and the possibility of a nightmarish Cruel and Unusual Death, but they don't get any money for their trouble. Back on the mainland, the main group is happy to have come out of that situation alive, but:
- In addition to his previously revealed problems (being in debt to violent criminals and at risk of losing his daughter forever), Gi-hun also finds out that his mother has severe diabetes, and can't afford to be treated for it because he'd gambled all their money away.
- Sang-woo owes debts totaling over ₩6 billion note due to a series of bad investments, and he's also wanted by the police for embezzelment, fraud, and other White Collar Crimes.
- Sae-byeok's younger brother is trapped in an orphanage since she doesn't have any money for more ample lodgings, and the broker she hired seems indifferent over the fact that the Human Traffickers that were supposed to get her mom out of North Korea ran off with her money.
- Ali finds out his boss was lying about profits being too small in order to not pay him, and when fighting over a large wad of money that totaled several months of stolen wages, Ali pushed the boss onto a machine that mangled his arm, picked up the money and ran off, telling his wife to go back to Pakistan with their baby while he took care of some business.
- Deok-su tells an underling to gather some men so they can hijack one of the minivans leading to the island so they can rob the prize money, only for the underling to tell him that the Big Boss put a bounty on his head for losing a fortune of his money in a Philippine casino, and that he also led some Filipino mobsters to their position to collect the money he still owes them.
- Player 001 tells Gi-hun that he wants to go back to the island, as he doesn't want to be bored out of his mind waiting for some incurable ailment to slowly kill him. He even directly says the outside world is its own kind of hell.
- I Owe You My Life: When we cut to the survivors, Gi-hun is huddled with Ali and Sang-woo. He thanks Ali for saving his life. Ali modestly says Think Nothing of It, that he's just glad the man is alive.
- Let Me Get This Straight...: One of the police officers to Gi-hun after hearing his story.
- Loophole Abuse: The first rule in each player's contract prevents them all from leaving the games early. However, Sang-woo helps to invoke the third rule that states the players can exit the games should most, if not all, agree to forfeit. This leads the staff to implement a voting system to determine whether the group continues or ends via majority.
- Mama Didn't Raise No Criminal: Sang-woo's mother reacts this way upon finding out from some policemen that her son has an arrest order for committing fraud.
- Mean Boss: Ali's boss who refuses to pay his employees.
- Morton's Fork: The players can vote to Stay or Leave. If they stay, they risk being killed in the games if they fail them, but if they leave, their lives will continue to be miserable and risk having a slow death by loan sharks and poverty. The great majority of people who voted to leave the game return after realizing this.
- Murder by Cremation: In the intro of this chapter, one eliminated player who survived the game attempts to open the coffin, only for a guard to notice it moving and quickly sealing the player inside the coffin to be cremated like the rest of the fallen players.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Due to his habit of stealing money from her, Gi-hun's mother can't pay to take care of her diabetes, refusing an operation that could save her life. This drives Gi-hun into returning to the deadly games.
- Pet the Dog: Per the voting system, the guards tell the survivors that those shot in the first round would have 100 million won sent to their family members, if the players' majority vote to go home. As far as we see, they don't renege on this while saying the people who want to return will get a second chance.
- Police Are Useless:
- After returning from the first game, Gi-hun immediately goes to a police station to tell them about what he's been through, but absolutely nobody believes his story because of how ridiculous it all sounds. When Gi-hun provides them with the calling card with a phone number he used to contact the game organizers, it turns out the organizers also account for this as well and connected it to a random person's number instead, discrediting Gi-hun's story even further.
- Averted with detective Jun-ho. When he found a similar card in his missing brother's room, he remembers Gi-hun's story, and is quick to realize that something is going on. He's also relentless in tracking down the truth.
- Pragmatic Villainy: Credit to Deok-su, he comes up with a good plan to take advantage of the games. He reasons that the trucks would have a driving and pickup pattern, so some men could hijack it, find a way to the money, and rob the giant piggybank. The problem is he burned the goodwill with his boss.
- Read the Fine Print: A case where this works in the hero's favor. The guards threaten that anyone that wants to opt out of the game will be "eliminated" per clause two. Sang-woo then stands and shouts that he read the whole document; there's a third clause that the players can vote to end the games. After a Beat, the guard says that is true. They set up a voting system, where everyone gets one chance.
- Sadistic Choice: The decision of whether to continue or call off the games comes down to what scares the players more: risking life and limb, of themselves and the other players, for a chance at a massive cash prize; or leaving the games, only to return to lives that were so miserable, it drove them to compete in the games in the first place. In Gi-hun's case, leaving the games means returning to a dead-end job, continuing to be threatened by loan sharks, losing contact with his daughter, and living with his seriously ill mother who cannot afford the treatment that could save her life. The same goes for the decision of whether to return to the games afterward, which most of the survivors from the first game decide to do; better to die for a chance at a better life than to live in uncertainty, right?
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here: After surviving the first game, most of the players want out.
- Stalker Shot: After Gi-hun is taken in the van and drives off, Detective Jun-ho is revealed to be following them in his car from behind when he turns on his headlights.
- Strange Minds Think Alike: Both Detective Jun-ho and Deok-su realized the Logical Weakness of the truck convoys—they have a pattern. Follow the pattern, and you find the way to the island.
- Throw the Dog a Bone: While the players were thrown into the first game without realizing the consequences, afterward the survivors are given an opportunity to vote on whether to continue. When a majority votes to go home, the gamerunners honor the result and release them.
- Too Dumb to Live: Deok-su's underling starts gloating about selling him out to the Filipinos while he is still in the car with him. Unsurprisingly, this promptly gets him stabbed to death.
- You Have to Believe Me!: Gi-hun's first action after getting back home is to go to the police and report what he's experienced, but due to the sheer absurdity of the situation, the cops write him off as a liar and a weirdo. He's begging and screaming for them to take him seriously and he's pretty crushed at the end when he realizes they'll be of no help.
