Alice in Borderland Season Two Review
This review contains spoilers for season two of Alice in Borderland. Check out the spoiler free review here.
Given the recent success of Squid Game, I’m guessing I’m not the only one who has an obsessive fascination with the “death game” genre. Although Alice in Borderland came before Squid Game, it never enjoyed the mainstream fame that the latter did; instead it has mostly been a top recommendation for people who google “shows like Squid Game”. That’s certainly how I discovered it. But season one impressed me, and when I opened Netflix a few days before Christmas I was pleasantly surprised to find an early present: season two. In this article I’m going to share some thoughts about these eight episodes, whether they are a worthy successor to the first season, and how they compare to other titles like Squid Game and the overall genre.
In the first season, protagonist Arisu inexplicably finds himself, along with best friends Chota and Karube, in an alternate version of Tokyo devoid of people. They learn that they have to play a series of games in order to survive. These games involve other people who have been brought to this world, and winning the games extends the ‘visas’ of the players for some time, scaling according to the difficulty of the game (represented by playing cards). Losing the games means, of course, death. Likewise, if your visa runs out, you are instantly executed by a laser from space.
At the start of season two, the players have cleared all of the games associated with the numbered playing cards. A billboard announces the start of the next stage, while blimps arrive flying enormous canvases of face cards. It looks like there are twelve games left to play.
Jack of Hearts
This was by far my favorite game of this season, and probably across both seasons. In no small part I suspect this is due to the presence of the extremely likable Chishiya, who always seems calm, composed, and most of all, logical. This game is a bit strange in the sense that it doesn’t involve our main characters, Arisu and Usagi, and so it doesn’t contribute much to the plot progression. But in that way it is a perfect study of the “game” part of the “death game” genre.
The game starts with 20 players putting on electronic collars inside a prison. Every hour, the display at the back of the collar will change to a new card suit, and at the end of every hour each player has to enter a solitary cell and state their suit. If they get it wrong, well, the collar explodes. No big deal. Oh, and the creator of the game, Jack of Hearts, is hiding amongst the players. He wins when everyone else loses. The game only ends when he dies.
The point of the game quickly becomes clear. You need someone else to tell you what your suit is. You need to find a person, or people, that you can trust. But the threat of the Joker-like Jack hangs over all the players like a swinging ax. How can you be sure your partner isn’t Jack? If nobody lies, and nobody dies, then how will the game ever end?
A large part of the fascination we have in death games comes from seeing how people behave when they are pushed to the extreme limit. It’s easy to think logically and behave morally when the stakes are low, but when death is on the table, everything goes out the window. Fear clouds your judgment, and you stoop to all sorts of deception and scumbaggery that you would usually never consider. The most horrible death games are the ones where you must fight against your friends. Squid Game has a terrifying example of this in the marble game: I still remember the sinking feeling in my stomach when it was announced that only one of each partner could survive.
“It’s easy to think logically and behave morally when the stakes are low, but when death is on the table, everything goes out the window. ”
In contrast, I actually think that Alice in Borderland offers a more optimistic outlook towards human nature. In season one, Arisu is pitted against his friends in the Seven of Hearts game. But that game ends with his friends willingly sacrificing themselves for an unwilling Arisu. Sure, there are some ill-intentioned players, but across the entire series, the main characters never sacrifice their beliefs to save themselves. Apart from the aforementioned game, the friends are never forced to fight against each other, and thus they are able to maintain their integrity. In Squid Game, it felt like the organizers of the games were trying to reveal some truth about human nature, to show that even the common person could be “evil” under the right circumstances. In Alice in Borderland, the burden of evil is mostly shouldered by the organizers themselves, like the Jack of Hearts.
In a way, I think this has made the characters in Alice in Borderland less compelling. For Gi-hun, the marble game forced him to confront the truth of what he would do to survive. But we never wonder if Arisu would let his friends die to save himself, because we know that he wouldn’t. Of course not, he’s the anime protagonist. Arisu and Usagi never play games where the majority of players have to die. Chishiya does, but he never plays with other characters that we know. So Chishiya gets to maintain his likability while being a badass.
Going back to the Jack of Hearts game, I think there is one major flaw with the design of the game. There is never any real urgency, and it’s not evident that some players have to die for others to win, which is one of the main drivers of tension in Squid Game. Instead, people kill each other for seemingly petty reasons. There isn’t really that long, focused contemplation of death that lends such horror to these scenarios. And for most of the game, there isn’t much emphasis on the layered logic and game theory that makes these scenarios fun.
“There is never any real urgency, and it’s not evident that some players have to die for others to win.”
Despite these shortcomings, I still enjoyed this game. Perhaps it’s the traces of the classic whodunnit that leaves you guessing until the very end. Perhaps it’s seeing the imperturbable Chishiya get himself out of situations he has no business surviving. Perhaps it’s the horror and mystery of how one person could design such an evil game.
Queen of Spades
Unfortunately, apart from the Jack of Hearts, the other face card games feel lacking, especially when compared to the numbered card games from last season. These games are supposed to be harder and more intense but they rarely are. Take the Queen of Spades game. There are two teams of players, and each team has a “king”. Every five minutes, each team takes turns trying to tag the other, and tagged players switch teams. At the end of the game, the team with more players wins.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that this game is very easily winnable. There is only one catch: the king of every team cannot switch sides. One team’s king is the eponymous Queen of Spades, and the other is a child that Usagi has befriended. So there is a small dilemma here: one of these players will have to die, no matter what.
Very quickly the blue team dwindles to just Arisu, Usagi, and the kid. So now they are looking the dilemma in the face: will they switch to the other team to save themselves, and let the kid die? Or will they sacrifice themselves for their ideals? Well, they never even contemplate this question. They somehow turn the tide from Usagi giving an extended speech to other players about returning to their original lives, even though it’s never clearly established that this is a consequence of the game. And somehow, they manage to tag every person on the other team in the final round and defeat the Queen.
“Will they sacrifice themselves for their ideals?”
So what’s the problem with this? For one, the premise of the game is not supported by the plot. The main conceit of this game is the fate of the child, not about returning to the home world. That should have been the argument for convincing the other players: take a risk by joining the weaker team, but have a chance at doing the right thing. And the strategy is entirely skimmed over; the team going last should have a huge advantage, as players will allow themselves to get tagged if they see the tide turning. This is never explicitly acknowledged by any of the players. Most egregious of all, there just happens to be no stragglers, no players on the losing team dying except for the Queen, no innocent victims of the protagonists doing the right thing.
Oh, I almost forgot to mention the worst part of this season. There is an absurd amount of moralizing by the people running these games. We even get some flashbacks of who they were in previous lives: a lawyer who feels responsible for denying a settlement to disaster victims, a veteran who witnessed the horrors of war. All this seems just a bit hollow to me. Okay, these people lived horrible lives and saw the dark parts of humanity. But does that justify them to create such sadistic games and force people to play them? Aren’t they making the world even worse than it was before? Why does this show try so hard to force us to sympathize with them? Like Squid Game, the villains are so much more terrifying when we don’t know them. “You have way more freedom here, you know,” the Queen of Spades tells the protagonists. Color me a doubter.
Queen of Hearts
The Queen of Hearts is the last game, and Arisu and Usagi finally get some answers about the whole damn thing. What is this world that they are in? Who is making these games, and who is forcing them to play? Will they ever get to leave? This is the crucial point of the series, the moment that decides whether or not it’s filed away as yet another show with a disappointing ending, or if it cements itself in pop culture history. It’s easier to create a mystery than to explain it; oftentimes shows have mysteries that become so convoluted and complicated that we won’t be satisfied with the answer, no matter what it is. We see this with shows like Attack on Titan and Manifest. The prestige is the most important part of the magic trick: we find out if the author actually bothered to plan a coherent story from the beginning, or if he was just flying by the seat of his pants.
“The prestige is the most important part of the magic trick.”
Alice in Borderland actually does this in a pretty unique and clever way. The Queen of Hearts starts off by giving an explanation about cryogenics and virtual reality. Okay, I guess that’s plausible, even though there hasn’t been any evidence towards this in the show. It’s not the worst explanation.
Then the Queen laughs, and says she’s just kidding.
The show gives us a few more plausible explanations, but pulls it back each time. It’s definitely a fourth wall break: it’s like the writers saying to us directly, “See? You wanted the explanation so bad, but I told you you wouldn’t be satisfied.”
I think this strikes at the heart of the genre. Does it really matter what the explanation is? Why can’t we just enjoy the show for what it is? Do we really need to know the exact mechanics of this world? We don’t even understand the mechanics of our own. Asking why people have to die playing silly children’s games in Borderland is like asking why innocent people have to die of disease and natural disasters in our world. Is there even an answer? Would we be able to comprehend it if there was?
Maybe the only thing we can do is play on.
