While many viewers may point to Squid Game as the definitive peak pandemic death match show, Alice in Borderland is technically the one that came first. In December 2020, the first season of the Japanese series premiered on Netflix, adapted from a manga of the same name by Haro Aso. Season 1 introduced protagonist Arisu (Kento Yamazaki), a twentysomething gamer who is mysteriously transported to a mostly empty, alternate universe Tokyo, known as Borderland. Once in Borderland, Arisu must compete alongside other people in a series of deadly games. If a player wins a game, they earn an extension of their visa to stay in Borderland. If they lose, they are killed by a laser to the head, shot mercilessly from the sky. In the midst of the life-or-death chaos, Arisu grows closer to Usagi (Tao Tsuchiya), an athletic loner mourning the death of her mountain climber father.
A lot has happened since Alice in Borderland Season 1, in both the real world and in Borderland. When the second season of the series was released in 2022, it became the most-popular Japanese show on the streamer, with about 61 million viewing hours in its first four days. Though the end of the second season sees Arisu and Usagi return to the real world, as they do at the end of the manga, Netflix greenlit a third season.
At the end of Season 2, the Borderland is revealed to be a liminal space between life and death. Arisu, Usagi, and many of the people they met in Borderland were transported there following a freak meteorite strike at Tokyo’s busy Shibuya Scramble Crossing. When they fought for their survival in Borderland, they were also fighting for their survival in the real world.
For director and co-writer Shinsuke Sato, a third season that moved beyond the main action of the manga allowed for greater freedom to explore the questions provoked by this Borderland reveal. “There are so many directions we could have gone in Season 3, many stories we could have told,” Sato, who is known for…
