‘Alice in Borderland’ struggles to escape its own maze

"Alice in Borderland" first arrived in 2020 as a survival thriller that felt both audacious and emotional, weaving brutal games with character-driven storytelling. Its second season upped the stakes, resolving the central mystery of the Borderland while giving fans a near-perfect conclusion capped by the teasing Joker card. It was the kind of ending that satisfied and yet left just enough room for speculation. That tease eventually became reality, and Season 3 has now landed on Netflix. The question is whether the series, freed from the boundaries of Haro Aso's manga, could justify reopening the door, however, what becomes clear is that "Alice in Borderland" Season 3 is an ambitious but uneven continuation, weighed down by contradictions in pacing, character choices, and its search for closure.

The new season begins back in the mortal world, where Arisu and Usagi are living as a married couple, supposedly free of the horrors that nearly consumed them. Their peace, however, does not last. Usagi, still haunted by her father's absence, becomes vulnerable to the manipulations of Ryuji Matsuyama, a researcher obsessed with proving Borderland's existence. His obsession leads him to Sunato Banda, who, along with Yaba, had chosen to remain a citizen of Borderland in Season 2. Banda now plays the role of salesman, luring people into the games under the guise of reunion or revelation. Through Usagi's grief, Banda finds his opening, drawing her back into the liminal realm. Arisu, inevitably, follows her, and the game begins anew. This time the Joker card presides, promising chaos and unpredictability.

Initially, the setup works. The early games carry the tension the series is known for where flaming arrows streak across the sky, poisonous train rides choke their passengers, and elaborate puzzles force the players into desperate calculations. There are moments that recall the brilliance of Season 1, when each game felt both terrifying and solvable, placing the audience in the players' shoes. The flaming arrows challenge in particular stands out, both as a callback to the original manga and as a showcase of the series' talent for spectacle. And there is a thrill in seeing Arisu and Usagi fall back into their old dynamic with Arisu as the thinker, a man whose brains have carried him through countless scenarios, and Usagi as the physical force, resilient and fearless. Together, they remain one of the most compelling duos in contemporary genre television. But the cracks appear quickly. The season is six episodes rather than eight, but each instalment stretches past seventy minutes, and the bloat is unmistakable. What starts as taut survival storytelling morphs into sluggish melodrama. Games run too long without sustaining tension, their rules so convoluted or inconsistently applied that the audience's suspension of disbelief begins to fray. What once made "Alice in Borderland" so addictive, the clear sense that there was always a strategy to be found, gives way to noisy spectacle that feels arbitrary. The Tokyo Tower Bingo game fizzles without tension, the zombie card sequence drags to excruciating length, and even the inventive finale stumbles under its own complexity. The Joker's supposed unpredictability ends up translating less as mystery and more as incoherence.

This structural fatigue might have been forgiven if the characters had carried the weight, but Season 3's handling of its cast is one of its most divisive elements. Arisu and Usagi, once rational, emotionally grounded leads, are now entangled in storylines that feel alien to their established arcs. Arisu is nudged into a chosen one figure, burdened with a mythic significance that undercuts his everyman appeal. Usagi, meanwhile, makes baffling choices that clash with the woman we came to know across sixteen episodes. Her willingness to follow Matsuyama, a man she barely knows, back into the games stretches plausibility, and once in Borderland, her motivations veer wildly from her supposed quest for her father to singular devotion to Arisu. What once made their relationship compelling, their rationality and shared resilience, becomes a contrivance to drive the plot. The supporting cast fares no better. New characters are introduced with intriguing seeds, particularly Matsuyama and Ryuji, but the show delays developing them until late in the season, reducing their backstories to clumsy emotional bait. Viewers are asked to care just as these characters' lives hang in the balance, a far cry from the careful, deliberate building of Season 1 where supporting deaths struck with full force. Banda and Yaba, who were established as chilling presences in Season 2, are surprisingly underutilized here, floating in and out of the story without the menace their premise deserves. Only Ken Watanabe, in a brief but magnetic appearance, makes a lasting impression, his gravitas turning a handful of minutes into some of the most affecting of the season.

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Visually, the show remains striking. Cinematographer Taro Kawazu paints the games with cinematic flair: densely lit arenas glow with menace, desolate landscapes capture the liminal dread of the Borderland, and even quieter moments carry a surreal charge. The technical craft is never in question. Thematically too, the series continues its interrogation of survival, sacrifice, and the meaning of life when faced with mortality. By tying Borderland explicitly to near-death experiences, the writers attempt to root the fantasy in the anxieties of our own world.

 In its closing moments, there is even an attempt to gesture toward climate change, as if to suggest that humanity's flirtation with environmental collapse might birth purgatories of our own making. These are bold strokes, but because they arrive late and unevenly integrated, the effect is less profound than perfunctory. And perhaps the central problem of Season 3 is one of necessity. The first two seasons adapted a complete manga story and their mysteries balanced on ambiguity and slow revelation. Their conclusion was satisfying precisely because it left just enough unresolved to linger in the imagination. Season 3, without source material to lean on, feels compelled to provide answers where none were needed, to expand what was better left liminal. The writer's anxiety about sustaining interest manifests as over-explanation, complicated rules, and melodramatic arcs that flatten once-nuanced characters. What was terrifying in its mystery becomes pedestrian in its concreteness, a story that once demanded our imagination now instructing us what to think.

That is not to say Season 3 is without merit. There are moments of brilliance, games that remind us why the show became such a phenomenon, and moral dilemmas that cut uncomfortably close to home. For fans of the leads, there remains a joy in watching Arisu and Usagi fight, think, and endure, even if their journey here is uneven. And for those who cherish survival thrillers in general, the show's ambition and scope still set it apart from many of its contemporaries. Yet as the finale collapses under spectacle and ends on a cliffhanger that feels sloppy rather than enticing, the season closes with more disappointment than satisfaction. And in the end, the show is a paradox. It is technically polished but narratively uneven, ambitious but unfocused, emotionally earnest but dramatically contrived. For some, it will be a thrilling continuation, a chance to revisit a beloved world and wrestle with new moral questions. For others, like me, it will feel like an unnecessary resurrection, a series that mistook closure for incompleteness and squandered the chance to exit on a high. The Borderland, after all, was most powerful when it was terrifying in its ambiguity. And by attempting to pin it down, the show may have lost the very thing that made it extraordinary.

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