The third season of the Netflix series “Alice in Borderland” was recently released, and perhaps we should pretend that it doesn’t exist.
The first season of “Alice in Borderland” opens with the main character, Arisu, and his two best friends, Chota and Karube, goofing around in a shopping center in Shibuya. They hide from the police in a bathroom, but when they leave, the area is abandoned and unrecognizable. Outside the buildings are run down and covered in vines.
On top of being thrown into a new world, the friends also have to play strange games. Refusal to play in the games results in death by laser beam, and one will suffer a similar fate if they lose a game.
Each game has a playing card attached to it, with each suit representing the type of game — spades games involve more physical activity while diamond games use more intellect — and the number representing the difficulty level. In the first season, they play games with playing cards from one to ten.
While his friends don’t survive the first season, Arisu meets a woman named Usagi and many other characters like fan favorites Kuina and Chishiya. In season two, they fight against the face cards who in this case are actual people and seem to be permanent residents of this world. At the end of season two, everyone who survived the games is given a choice: stay or leave.
We then learn that in the first episode, there was a meteorite strike that hit the shopping center. All the people in these death games are trapped in the “borderlands,” essentially the space between life and death, including Arisu’s friends whose death in the games translated to their deaths in the real world.
Their time spent in this world is actually the two minutes they flatlined in the real world. Their choice to return was essentially what brings them back into their physical bodies with no real memories of this strange world.
This ending was bittersweet, as it meant all the dead characters were really gone, but the ones who survived did not suffer in vain. It also highlights indiscrimination of death. While Arisu was a compelling main character, he wasn’t the chosen one. There wasn’t anything special about him that made him enter the world, and while he did have skills to win some games, there was also a lot of luck that went into his survival. This felt like the perfect series finale.
And then we got season three.
They introduce a character called the Joker, a very minor character from the second season who chose to stay in the borderlands. He also never interacted with Arisu once in the whole show, but he wants him to stay in the borderlands for some reason.
This season takes place a few years after the season two finale. We also meet a completely new character, Ryuji, who quickly became my least favorite on-screen character of all time (which is saying something). His obsession with the land of the dead leads him into making a deal with the Joker, who for some reason can cross the boundary between life and death. Ryuji’s job is to get Arisu to go back to the borderlands by using Usagi — she and Arisu are now married — as bait.
I truly assumed Ryuji ended up kidnapping Usagi, but we learn that she went back willingly. She also did not know she was pregnant — this is used to raise the stakes — which would have been my least favorite element of the season had it not been for everything else in it.
They also play more death games in this season, but the rules feel needlessly complicated, and the games ultimately lack the cleverness that the previous ones had. The show also introduced a new cast of characters, who were given very rushed backstories, intending that the audience might feel bad when they died despite us only knowing them for a few episodes.
This season also betrayed the first two by having Arisu be some special player in the game of death when the whole point of the season two finale was highlighting that Arisu is not special. Death came for him as randomly as it did for everyone else in the show.
Finally, Arisu ends up meeting the watchman of this world, and he delivers the most nonsensical speech about how the sum of playing cards’ value is 365, which is every day of the year, and the Joker makes up the extra day on a leap year, and I did cackle a little at the absurd monologue to end the absurd season.
It feels difficult to justify this season’s existence. Yes, there were some unanswered questions about the borderlands after season two. I always had the sense that there was some higher power in the world above those who chose to stay, but I think it was better left ambiguous and unexplained. How could we truly understand the rules and logic of the land of the dead?
When I had two episodes of the series left, I decided to see it as well-produced fan fiction: impressive enough, but not canon. I also recently learned that the manga the show is based on ended after season two as well, and that made this make a lot more sense. So if anyone asks, “Alice in Borderland” ended after season two.
