The series finally ends. I liked it a lot, but I wanted it to end. There really wasn’t going to be a story beyond Season 3, and the claustrophobia is too much to endure. The games and the scheming are integral to the plot and there is a limit to how much more of it you can watch. I was juggling various possible endings in my mind and the actual was one among the top two I had imagined.

In Season 1 itself you get the feeling that the games have an audience (who are not shown until Season 3). I felt that this concealment was unnecessary. Those who have watched Hostel and its sequels know the premise already—Rich folks paying to see bloodshed. Introducing the audience in the first series itself could have allowed some more creative angles to the plot instead of watching the constant tug of war between the participants, which gets tiring after a point. The audience could have been shown introducing twists for their increased entertainment and that could have added some unpredictability to the plot.

The series does a decent job of keeping it uncertain as to who will make it to the last game (except for the one obvious player). There are players you root for, even with full knowledge that they will eventually be killed. It’s a strange feeling—like postponing bad news. A couple of players commit suicide, overwhelmed by the odds. One wonders if this would happen in real life. If you were prepared to die, what would you choose? Going down fighting and taking a bullet, or falling hundreds of feet to a skull shattering death? To be fair, the fight would be fruitless. Death is certain against a battalion of armed guards on an island you cannot leave. But does being in control of how you die make you feel better. We will never know.

One feels there should have been some payback for the rich audience who are funding the entire misery. They are introduced without any drama and whisked away to safety during the raid in an equally insipid manner. The series treats them as inconsequential caricatures. You don’t feel for a moment that they are the real bad guys. Instead, you feel the bad guys are among the participants. Perhaps this is not a shortcoming but a masterstroke, that from our perspective, we are so engrossed in the survival drama that we don’t feel any antagonism against those who have brought on the suffering in the first place.