How Squid Game Season 3 Honors The Series’ Breakout Character

This article contains spoilers for Squid Game season 3.

By the show’s very nature, Squid Game is no stranger to ripping beloved characters from our grasp just as we’ve come to appreciate them. Even the characters we love to hate tend to come and go just as quickly, forcing us and the other players to leave them behind and move forward. But with season 3 picking up where the game left off in season 2, it’s not quite as easy to leave some of these fallen players behind, especially not a personality as big as Thanos (T.O.P.) was.

Thankfully, season 3 finds some unique ways to carry on the complicated legacy of Player 230 Choi Su-bong a.k.a. Thanos. Nam-gyu (player 124) and Min-su (player 125) both handle their “grief” with markedly different approaches. In episode 1 “Keys and Knives,” Nam-gyu (Roh Jae-won) tries to appeal to Min-su (Lee David) as Thanos did, even going so far as to do an impression of his fallen friend to try and lighten the mood.

DOES THIS COUNTS AS #thangyu? HELP 😭🤍 pic.twitter.com/aaPXPWc6Ub

— angel thanos 🪽 (@svshux) June 27, 2025

In the next episode, Nam-gyu takes his Thanos mimicry to another level by spending the entire game getting wasted on Thanos’ drugs and doing yet another impression of his friend, as though embodying his personality is enough to bring him back to life. He says “I’m Thanos. Let’s go another way. We’ve got to kill half of humanity, but we’re running out of time,” which is surprisingly layered for someone high out of their mind. It’s not only a commentary on the Hide-and-Seek game they are currently playing, but also refers to the ethos of Marvel’s Thanos, the character that his friend named himself after.

A few episodes later and it’s Min-su’s turn for a drug and grief-fueled spiral. Min-su finds himself in possession of Thanos’ drugs in episode 4 and spends the rest of his time on the show zooted and paranoid, just as Thanos was before he was killed (the Squid Game Thanos, that is – we don’t know what kind of drugs the actual Mad Titan was on, if any). 

But whereas all of these callbacks to Thanos and his big personality have been done by other characters, the legend himself finds a way to make an appearance in episode 5. High on the mysterious pills, Min-su hallucinates Thanos and T.O.P. actually returns to reprise his role for this brief cameo, telling Min-su “My brother, I missed you.”

this part of the thanos hallucination 😭 the most unserious guy pic.twitter.com/VSbDK8w1sI

— nanis SG S3 !!! (@daehoist) June 27, 2025

No matter your feelings about Thanos as a character, his presence – literal, imagined, and otherwise – is important to the final two seasons of the show. Losing him affects Nam-gyu and Min-su profoundly and influences their decisions moving forward.

In a show that usually forces us to move on from one gruesome death to the next in rapid succession, bringing Thanos back (among others) in these various forms was a welcome change of pace. It lets us see that these deaths do affect the players – even those who seem to relish all of the bloodshed and the money it brings them. We’ve seen the grief of the games in the aftermath through Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae), but now we get to see how grief manifests while the games are still happening. It reminds us that even the “villains” of the games care about each other in their own strange ways.