‘SNL’: Squid Game Starring Rami Malek and Pete Davidson – Who Wins?
You know you’ve made it if you become a sketch on Saturday Night Live. Squid Game topped the Netflix charts and trended on social media. Now, Pete Davidson and SNL host Rami Malek got their turn. A digital short on the Oct. 16 episode pitted Davidson and Malek as competitors in the game, but who won?
[Spoiler alert: This article contains spoilers for Squid Game and the Saturday Night Live sketch.]
‘Saturday Night Live’ got ‘Squid Game’ right
The producers of Saturday Night Live recreated Squid Game to the T on only a week’s notice. Davidson and Malek were dressed in the green numbered jumpsuits that the hundreds of contestants in the Korean drama wore. Davidosn gets 456 and Malek is 218. They trudged down the pink staircases just like the contestants on the show, eating hard boiled eggs for their meal.
Saturday Night Live recreated the Red Light/Green Light game, intercut with the robot girl. It actually looked just as bloody when SNL cast members got caught moving after she called red light. Blood sprayed on Davidson’s face, but he continued, and never stopped rhyming. They also recreated the honeycomb game, where contestants had to carve a shape out of a cookie without breaking it.
They also had the business card with shapes, the golden ball filled with money, the communal bunk bedroom, the front man with his “Dr. Doom” mask, and the pink guards threatening the contestants with guns. Poor Chris Redd played the dead contestant whose organs get harvested.
Rami Malek vs. Pete Davidson
Malek and Davidson both made it through Red Light/Green Light and honeycomb. The winner was finally decided in the glass bridge game. In the real Squid Game, the contestants must cross a bridge containing two glass panes each step of the way. One glass is tempered to hold the weight of two people. The other is regular glass that will break and you will fall to your death.
In Squid Game, the contestants at the front of the line take their 50/50 shot with each glass plane. They may make it one or two panes, but soon enough their luck runs out. But, each time a contestant falls through the glass, it leaves the tempered plane so the other contestants get one step further.
In SNL’s Squid Game, Davidson flat out pushes Malek onto a glass pane. It breaks and Malek falls, but because this is a comedy, he’s still singing as his bones are all broken and out of joint.
‘SNL’ left out these ‘Squid Game’ details
Saturday Night Live continues its accurate recreation of Squid Game after Davidson wins. He proceeds to dye his hair red like Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) did at the end of the show. Davidson also leaves his winnings sitting in the bank, like Gi-hun did. Again, because SNL is comedy, Davidson loses it all on a bad sports bet. There’s also a funny joke where he’s confused by the Korean currency.
However, the Saturday Night Live Squid Game did not include every single detail from the show. For example, they don’t play marbles in the sketch. Nor do they play the game that starts it all, when the salesman (Gong Yoo) challenges Gi-hun to flip folded paper tiles on the ground.
Since Davidson won at the glass game, there’s no final “squid game” showdown. On the show, Gi-hun faced his old friend Sang-woo (Park Hae-soo) in a playground game they used to play as children. That’s where Squid Game got its name.
