Alice in Borderland Season Two Review (Spoiler Free)
This review contains minor spoilers for season one, but is spoiler-free for season two. There are also some spoilers for Squid Game. Check out the full review for season two of Alice in Borderland 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.
Games
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. Sure, there are some ill-intentioned players, but across the entire series, the main characters never sacrifice their beliefs to save themselves. For Gi-hun, the marble game forced him to confront the truth of what he would do to survive. There’s never really an equivalent for Alice in Borderland, not in season one, nor in season two. This just doesn’t seem like a theme the writers are willing to explore, which is a bit disappointing for me, because I think it’s such a crucial part of what makes the death game genre so horrifying.
Instead, the games in Alice in Borderland shine in another way. They are usually more intellectual, and there is often a “gotcha” moment at the end where Arisu realizes that there is a way to think outside of the box and win the game. It’s a neat bit of fantasy fulfillment: the nerdy gamer who is considered a loser in normal society gets to be a hero. Looking from this angle, the games in season two are a bit hit or miss. There are a few games with deep strategy, but we get less insight into what the players are thinking, which makes them less fun in my opinion. Other games, unfortunately, are disappointing. The show tells us that face card games are supposed to be more difficult than the numbered card games from last season, but this is rarely the case.
“The nerdy gamer who is considered a loser in normal society gets to be a hero.”
Another thing that bothered me in season two is that the players never really pause to contemplate death. They kind of just play, and if they die, they die. Squid Game does a much better job of this, for example showing us the courage needed for players to step on the glass tiles. This creates tension and adds more emotional complexity into the games which is lacking in Alice in Borderland.
Oh, and for some reason Chishiya gets much better games this season than Arisu and Usagi, which is just a bit weird because he’s not even the main character. But hey, I’m not going to complain. Chishiya was awesome. We all love Chishiya, right?
Big Reveal
Every series that is built upon on a huge, fundamental mystery (like Attack on Titan or Manifest) will eventually encounter the necessary problem of having to explain this mystery. And unfortunately, many of them fail. 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. 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.”
I knew the reveal for Alice in Borderland was going to be difficult, because there are more things to explain as compared to, say, Squid Game, which takes place solidly within our world. Alice in Borderland has to explain, at the very least, where the heck the lasers are coming from. I’m not going to give away too much here, but I will say that Alice in Borderland handles its reveals in a unique and refreshing way. I liked the ending. I don’t think it did injustice to the two seasons which preceded it. The show is pretty self aware and it asks us some interesting questions which can be applied to the genre overall. Why do we want to know the answer? Will it satisfy us? If we don’t like the answer, does it invalidate our enjoyment of the show?
Summary
There is a reason that Alice in Borderland never became the household name that Squid Game is. It just doesn’t have the same level of emotional impact or visual memorability. But Alice in Borderland has a different type of game, and it executes it well. It focuses on different aspects of the death game, and so it makes a meaningful contribution to the genre.
I do think that season two is a bit worse than season one. Not because of terrible execution, but because it didn’t live up to the potential that I thought it could. There was more they could have done with the games, with the characters, with the reveal. But at the end of the day, I enjoyed watching it. It kept me on the edge of my seat and made me miss my bedtime. After all, there is nothing more sweetly horrifying than hearing the robotic voice gleefully announcing the rules for a new game.
