No search team on a boat. No Front Man navigating office politics. No between-game recuperating or strategizing. And definitely armed revolution. Other than a brief cold open showing North Korean defector turned pink-suited turncoat No-eul’s continued attempts to smuggle her old coworker out alive, this episode of Squid Game is all game, all the time. It’s been a while since we’ve had one of those, and the result is just as stunning and punishing as ever.

Set in a labyrinthine nighttime warren of alleys, staircases, and locked doors, all watched over by the blue-glow light of the fake starry sky painted on the low ceiling, the Hide and Seek game reduces the show to its barest components. Here’s a bunch of three-time losers who’ve willingly or unwillingly subjected themselves to all this to pay off their debts. Here’s a children’s game. Here’s a way to make it lethal. Now we just turn the people against each other, sit back, and watch.

The fight-or-flight nature of the game, in which members of the Red Team must hunt down and murder members of the Blue Team before they escape because failure to do so means they’ll be killed instead, creates a high-pressure atmosphere that never lets up. It also leads to alliances and rivalries that come together and fall apart based on the needs of the moment. But since the people making judgments about those needs are panicked and terrified — and, in a few cases, bordering on insane — who lives and who dies is practically a coin toss.

But not entirely. The Blue Team’s job is to hide using their keys and the Red Team’s job is to “tag” with their knives, that much is true. But the doors everyone must pass through in order to fully explore the playing field and find the exit to safety each have keyholes in one of three familiar shapes, circle, triangle, and square, corresponding to three different kinds of keys. Only by teaming up with others and completing the set can you hope to escape…or by killing people and stealing their keys, of course.

On both sides of the ledger, teamwork makes the dream work, up to a point. In an effort to increase his chance of survival so he can find and protect his beloved Jun-hee, crypto influencer Myung-gi teams up with his erstwhile tormenter, the increasingly deranged socipath Nam-gyu, to kill more efficiently. Meanwhile, Jun-hee delivers her baby with the help of her own teammates, elderly Geum-ja and kindly Hyun-ju, whose Special Forces training makes her an invaluable ally to the two infirm women. 

But when Myung-gi finally catches up with Jun-hee, he murders Hyun-ju, not not realizing who she was protecting. Devastated, Geum-ja and Jun-hee leave to find the exit that Hyun-ju told them she’d found before her death, but they’re met there by Yong-sik, Geum-ja’s nerdy son. Since he’s proven unable to kill, he knows he’s marked for death. Geum-ja offers to sacrifice herself to save her son, but he instead attacks Jun-hee as she tries to make it through the exit door while cradling her newborn. 

So Geum-ja stabs him with a knife she had hidden in her hairpin, and pink guards finish the job. All the while, Geum-ja screams in total emotional agony, as actor Kang Ae-sim delivers one of the show’s most harrowing and moving performances to date. It’s not a game to these people the way it is to us, it’s real, and you need performers capable of conveying that.

Central to the action this episode is Seon-nyeo, the wannabe psychic whose growing cult of followers refer to her as the “Shaman of the Sea.” Needless to say, she drops that gang of losers like yesterday’s diapers the moment she’s in trouble, allowing Myung-gi and Nam-gyu to slaughter the lot of them. This leaves her up shit creek with out a paddle when she reaches that three-keyhole exit door, however.

The Shaman discovers an unlikely ally in player 100, Jeong-dae (Song Young-chang), the rich old bastard who’s the ringleader of the “vote to keep playing” faction among the players. Using their combined keys, they open the door and, like Hyun-ju, hear the infuriatingly infantile “congratulations” music that plays when the door opens. But he quickly grabs a key and shuts the door behind him, locking the Shaman back inside. He, too, has figured out that a reduction in the total number of players, even ones on your “team,” only increases your share of the prize money if you survive, and he’s proven more than willing to get his allies killed if it means more for him in the end.

Seon-nyeo meets her fate at the hands of an unlikely killer. Timid Min-su, who’s only in the games at all because he fell for a scam and not out of any personal greed or vice, has been driven mad by his failure to protect his beloved Se-mi (Won Ji-an, appearing in a brief cameo) from Nam-gyu, whom he watched murder the young woman without intervening. By the time he stumbles across the Shaman in her exit room, he fully believes Se-mi is still alive…until he hallucinates that the Shaman is Se-mi’s killer, Nam-gyu, and stabs “him” to death over it.

In terms of major characters this leaves only the vengeful Gi-hun and his quarry, Dae-ho. Theirs is a prolonged cat-and-mouse game that ends at the edge of a precipice that looks down upon the vertiginous cavern in which the nighttime cityscape is built. Gi-hun winds up strangling Dae-ho to death with his bare hands, but the dying man’s words ring in his ears: As the ringleader of the rebellion, it’s Gi-hun’s fault that everyone died, not the fault of the guy who just failed to bring more ammo. The guards arrive just as he’s preparing to kill himself, shooting the knife from his hand and knocking him out. 

“A knockout” is how I’d describe this episode. Years after Squid Game’s debut, it’s obviously lost some of is initial shocking impact; we’re familiar with just how violent it’s ready to be, and just how hard on the heartstrings it’s willing to tug. We’ve seen the combination in action before, and we know how it feels to witness.

But a combination of the spectacular production design (people justifiably celebrate Severance’s excellent art direction, and this show makes it look like an IKEA showroom); the soulful, bottomed-out performances by Kang Ae-sim as Geum-ja, Yang Dong-geun as her son Yong-sik, Park Sung-hoon as Hyun-ju, and of course Lee Jung-jae as the broken-down Gi-hun help it all stick much deeper than it should at this point. Don’t let overfamiliarity cloud your vision: Squid Game is one of the most singular sci-fi visions to reach television since The Prisoner 60 years ago. 

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.