| Episodes | ||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Red Light, Green Light | Hell | The Man with the Umbrella | Stick to the Team | A Fair World | Gganbu | VIPS | Front Man | One Lucky Day | ||||||||||
"A Fair World" (평등한 세상 Pyeongdeunghan sesang?) is the fifth episode of the first season of the television series Squid Game.
Official summary[]
Gi-hun and his team take turns keeping guard through the night. The masked men encounter trouble with their co-conspirators.
- —Official Netflix synopsis
Plot[]
Following Cho Sang-woo's advice to take three steps forward in the Tug of War game, Seong Gi-hun and the rest of Team 4 are able to make Team 5 fall over. Team 5 is unable to regain their footing and with their second wind, Gi-hun and his team are able to easily pull back their opponents and win the game as Team 5 fall to their deaths. Gi-hun, however, can't relish the victory, feeling guilty with how he had to send ten people to their deaths to ensure his own survival. The 40 remaining contestants must survive the night, even though no one particularly trusts anyone. Gi-hun and his team create a barricade for protection, and Gi-hun warns Jang Deok-su that he shouldn't put so much trust in his underlings, many of whom are violent criminals themselves and Deok-su is an easy target that many of them would want to kill to weed out other competitors. Deok-su then commands his team to take the night off and spends the rest of the night paranoid.
Sang-woo and Ali bond as they keep watch to protect the rest of the team as they sleep, and Ali starts talking about his family. Most of his family lives back in Pakistan, and he brought his wife and son with him to work in Korea before he sent them back to the country. Being a poor immigrant without much money made him want to participate in the games.
The staff offers Byeong-gi information about the upcoming games in exchange for him helping remove organs from the eliminated players. Byeong-gi is feeling increasingly on edge however, as the stress of performing complex surgical procedures while having to survive on minimal food rations and sleep deprivation on top of the games is catching up on him.
During all of this, Player 456 and Player 001 share some of their respective histories. Gi-hun used to have a factory job making car parts, but was then laid off due to the higher-ups' financial mismanagement. He and his coworkers organized a protest to get their jobs back, only for it to degrade into a violent riot and Gi-hun witnessed one of his co-workers get shot and die in front of him. At the same time, his ex-wife began going into labor and she nearly died from complications, so Gi-hun also ended up missing Ga-yeong's birth. This event left him with PTSD and led to Gi-hun's downward spiral into becoming a slacker working poor-paying dead end jobs and developing a gambling addiction. The old man gets a headache and fever, so Gi-hun takes care of him. The guards also start to become suspicious of Guard 29 (Hwang Jun-ho in disguise), who is acting oddly as he continuously asks questions about his job that he should know. This is interrupted by Byeong-gi becoming increasingly furious.
After Byeong-gi finishes removing all the organs out of the dead contestants he was given, the guards say that they don't know when the next game is. Byeong-gi then begins to violently freak out, thinking that the guards are hiding information from him, and kills one of the guards before fleeing, with another guard pursing him. The Front Man and his men find Byeong-gi and the corrupt guards and subsequently execute them for cheating.
At the same time, Jun-ho's opposite number becomes suspicious of him and forces him to remove his mask. Jun-ho gets the drop on him though, and forces himself to remove his own mask. They talk about a "zombie", a man who has one kidney that they beat to death. Jun-ho assumes this was his brother, who also had one kidney due to donating it to Jun-ho to save his life from an illness, but the other guard clarifies the victim was female, telling him that he can prove it from the records in the Front Man's room. Jun-ho then kills him and goes looking for the Front Man's quarters.
All the remaining players are rounded up at gunpoint, including Il-nam, who had soiled himself that night. Jun-ho sneaks into the Front Man's office and finds a large room with records of the Squid Game dating back to 1988 and finds out his brother, Hwang In-ho, had won the game back in 2015.
Deaths[]
- Player 194 and his team
- Number 28
- Byeong-gi