How the ‘Squid Game’ Series Finale Cameo (Maybe) Teases David Fincher’s Spin-off

This post contains major spoilers for Season Three of Netflix’s Squid Game.

The ending of Squid Game was always going to be bleak. Creator Hwang Dong-hyuk frequently used his show to present the darker side of humanity, capitalizing on the worst of our impulses to create dramatic tension. And with the final moments of its final season, Dong-hyuk is showing that nothing really ends, but rather, just changes shape.

In the final episode of the series, hero Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) sacrifices himself to save Player 222, aka Kim Jun-hee’s (Jo Yu-ri) newborn child, after the Front Man (Lee Byung-hun) forces the baby into the game to raise its stakes. After setting the island to explode, the Front Man escapes with the baby in the ensuing chaos. The show then jumps ahead six months and shows the Front Man visiting Gi-hun’s daughter in Los Angeles to deliver his remains, which include a bloodied tracksuit from the games and a debit card with the remainder of Gi-hun’s prize money from season one.

As the Front Man rides through the city, his car comes to a stop in traffic, and he hears a familiar sound. As he turns, he notices someone in a suit playing ddakji with a homeless person, just like Gong Yoo’s recruiter character did in seasons one and two. Only, as the camera gets closer, it’s revealed that the recruiter is played by none other than Cate Blanchett.

This is likely a teaser for to David Fincher’s upcoming English version of the series. There’s some speculation that, while his involvement was only formally announced in October, Fincher’s been at work on the spinoff series for some time, and has tapped Utopia creator Dennis Kelly to run it. While Fincher has a lot of irons in the fire, including the upcoming Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood spin-off, he’d presumably helm at least an episode or two himself, but that hasn’t been officially confirmed.

There’s a chance that Cate Blanchett’s cameo doesn’t pay off in any meaningful way, but Blanchett and Fincher worked together previously on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Fincher and Squid Games are a strictly sickos-only pairing, but like Fincher himself once said, we’re all a bunch of perverts. Of course we want the games to continue. We’ll watch every second.