But beyond that, what’s the meaning of Alice in Borderland’s finale? Love. That’s always been the meaning of this show. While there are many dystopian life-and-death game shows and movies out there — from Squid Game to The Running Man to Battle Royale to The Hunger Games — they typically stand as commentary on a malevolent force at work in our own world: capitalism, fascism, conformity, the class system, culture-wide callousness towards suffering and death. 

Alice, by contrast, has never struck me as political in this way. The meaning of this show has long been that people should love one another and take care of one another, because it’s the right thing to do. Time and again, people who’ve only just met put their lives on the line, often sacrificing them, for each other. Arisu is granted his final “win” because he volunteered to stay behind so that others might live. 

Since we now know all of this is taking place on the border between life and death, the Borderland now really does feel like some kind of final testing ground for people’s character. Are you gonna go feral and launch a one-person war against everyone in your quest for victory? Or are you gonna create a real community and help it survive? Even the games are structured so that cooperation is key. The Borderland is a harsh judge, and an unfair one, but in its own weird way it’s enforcing the Golden Rule. The basic human dignity of the people around you is worth fighting for, even dying for.

Huh, maybe this show is political after all.

I wrote a servicey piece explaining the Alice in Borderland Season 3 finale for Decider, and as usual I get a little philosophical.

What am I gonna do, complain about that Tokyo Tower sequence, or about characters like Rei and Tetsu and Ryuji, or about A HUNDRED MILLION FLAMING ARROWS? I am not. Even if Alice S3 is the definition of an inessential sequel, “inessential” is not a synonym for “bad” or “not worth watching.” The bottom line is that I like these people a lot, and I like the way Shinsuke Sato puts them through the wringer. That’s enough.

I reviewed the Alice in Borderland finale for Decider.

Alice in Borderland has always been about human relationships first and foremost. It doesn’t have any grand statement to make about capitalism, conformity, wealth inequality, fascism, or anything else you might expect a show in this genre to explore. It’s about coming up with cool, complicated murder games, then watching normal people fight like hell to save strangers they’ve come to care about during the course of the game, or get back to the people they’ve left behind. It’s about the human spirit under adversity — random-ass sci-fi adversity, but adversity nonetheless — and what becomes of that spirt under those circumstances.

I reviewed the fifth episode of Alice in Borderland for Decider.

I’m calling it right now: If you’re afraid of heights, and I sure am, this episode of Alice in Borderland is the scariest hour of television you’ll see all year. I’d say it’s scarier than the similarly heights-based games in this year’s Squid Game, for the simple reason that none of us have ever seen a colossal game arena in real life. All of us, however, have seen towers and bridges and under-construction skyscrapers that are nothing but a pile of bolted-together metal for hundreds and hundreds of feet in the air. Hell, if you’ve ever looked up at the catwalks in a basketball arena and freaked out a little bit, you know what I mean. 

Anytime I even think of this stuff I get the shivers and shakes. Making me watch this nightmarish episode, in which half of our heroes are forced to climb Tokyo Tower by hand? Let me see what I wrote in my notes: “THIS IS AN ABSOLUTE FUCKING NIGHTMARE FOR ME” — boldface and all caps in the original — followed by “oh i hate it, oh i hate it so much lol.”

The “lol” is the give away. I hated it so much! I loved it!

I reviewed episode four of Alice in Borderland for Decider.

This remains such a fun, inventive show. It’s capable of recognizing when it needs to course-correct, following up the complex zombie card game with a very basic round “dodge the flying killer frisbees.” The nerve gas on the Tokyo subway, meanwhile, is a still-provocative image that calls to mind the lethal terrorist attacks by a religious cult years ago. The canaries are a great visual, too. 

And Ryuji emerges now as a compelling antagonist — the kind of explorer in the further regions of experience obsessed with going beyond the limits that drove the narrative of the first two Hellraiser films. This is an archetype I like a lot, and as with so much else in this show, I like it here plenty. 

I reviewed the third episode of Alice in Borderland‘s third season for Decider.

I dreaded watching this episode of Alice in Borderland. Not because I’m squeamish, or sensitive, or artistically or philosophically opposed to random acts of gratuitous violence. It’s just that I like my gratuitous violence to mean something, man. If I’m going to watch characters get senselessly mowed down in agonizing terror for an hour at a stretch, I want to know they did so in order for the filmmakers to make a statement about the wielding of power against the powerless, however personal or political you want to make it. I want to know those characters died for a purpose.

That’s never been Alice’s strong suit. This isn’t Squid Game, with its candy-colored Verhoevenesque anti-capitalism. This is just a bunch of cool violent shit happening to nice people who deserve better and try and help each other. I feel for the characters of course, but their plight seems very arbitrary and narrow. I don’t foresee circumstances in which getting sucked into a warp-zone afterlife where you get shot by lasers reveals much about the human experience, you know?

But here’s the thing: The moment you shoot a flaming arrow through some rando redshirt’s neck, all my objections go up in smoke. So to speak.

I reviewed the second episode of Alice in Borderland‘s third season for Decider.

Adapted by writer-director Shinsuke Sato from the manga of the same name by Haro Aso, Alice in Borderland is one of the most complex, complicated, convoluted TV shows I’ve ever covered. The obvious point of comparison is Squid Game, but with more players, way more games, and way more uncertainty as to what the hell is even going on. 

This premiere clears a lot of that uncertainty right up. Obviously it’s possible the show is just straight-up lying to us, but it certainly appears as if Arisu’s adventure’s in Borderland took place during a near-death experience that plunged many people into a sort of shared consciousness where the games took place in classic “if you die in the dream, you die in real life” fashion. 

Now, this obviously still leaves a lot of questions unanswered. If this is just some dream world, why do all the games involve guns, booby traps, and other relatively realistic means of killing people? Why are they themed around a deck of playing cards? Is it connected in a direct way to the meterorite, in the sense that its origin is extraterrestrial? How is Banda able to pass to and fro? Has this happened before, and if so where and when and how often?

But still, given the show’s adamant refusal to answer a damn thing for nigh on two seasons, this return felt like finding the answer key to a chemistry exam. What’s more, there’s no new normal to familiarize yourself with that takes more than two seconds to get accustomed to: “Oh wow, Arisu and Usagi are married now? Cool, good for them.” And other than Ryuji, there aren’t any new characters to familiarize yourself with, not yet anyway. This may be the easiest Season 3 premiere I’ve ever had to review, from a “recapping the action” perspective.

To me, however, the standout moment isn’t any of the explanations receive. It’s not even the disgusting electrocution sequence, as fun as that is if you’re a gorehound. It’s Arisu’s long twilit walk from the sanitarium to the game zone through the cobalt-blue streets of empty Tokyo. It’s then that it truly feels we’re on the border of some new and terrible thing. At least, so I hope.

I reviewed the season premiere of Alice in Borderland for Decider. I’m covering this whole season in the next few days as well!