A lot of time in “Alice in Borderland” is spent talking about different worlds. There’s the one that its characters find themselves in and the one that they want to return to. The first is a largely-abandoned Tokyo, with only a fraction of its citizens left to roam the streets after being mysteriously transported there. One afternoon, Arisu (Kento Yamazaki) and some friends duck into a bathroom to hide and emerge to find their city almost entirely empty.
In this Netflix show based on Haro Aso’s manga, Arisu is just one of a roughly undefined group of people looking to stay alive in their new alternate reality, where each person staves off death by playing wickedly manipulative games designed to pit players against each other and themselves. Each game corresponds to specific playing card in a deck. The higher the stakes, the longer the reward for making it through to the end.
So the first season of “Alice in Borderland” was a primal story of survival. There was the discovery of the rules of this purgatorial city, with Arisu and a shifting team of compatriots trying to figure out how see tomorrow, much less get back to the version of life they knew before.
That home is the second world that gets talked about even more in Season 2. Death still lurks around every corner, but for those who’ve lasted long enough for the city to be covered in vines and grass and overgrowth that “The Last of Us” would be proud of, survival has become a job. And, naturally, stuck at their daily makeshift offices waiting for the next test of wits and/or brawn, many of them are dreaming about what it would take to quit.
“Alice in Borderland”
Kumiko Tsuchiya
For those afraid those atmospheric changes may lead to a change in scope, fear not. There may not be anything in Season 2 quite as striking as the image of Arisu and his two pals standing dumbfounded in a completely empty Shibuya intersection, but director Shinsuke Sato is still taking full advantage of painting on a giant, citywide canvas. Picking up right where the last season left off, there’s barely time to take a deep breath before the real threat of violence comes charging up the abandoned avenue. Before long, Arisu and the gang are thrust right into the heart of one of the most thrilling car chase sequences on any-sized screen in recent memory.
Having cleared the rest of the deck in Season 1, Arisu, Usagi (Tao Tsuchiya) and the remaining friend group find themselves picking off the Face Cards, signaled by giant blimps that hover the sky. Everyone’s playing by similar “win to stay alive” rules that governed Season 1. But this time, it’s not some shadowy force calling the shots. Each test involves face-to-face meetings with the Jack of Hearts or Queen of Spades or any other of the Final 12. Staring into the eyes of the mastermind of each challenge makes it less of an ambiguous test and more of an elimination round. Arisu’s ticket home has to be punched at the expense of an official challenger.
Of course, it’s hard to describe the logistics of “Alice in Borderland” without putting words like “real” and “home” in the imaginary quotes that the show’s characters basically put around them when spoken out loud. A lot of the philosophizing here can get repetitive over the course of the season, especially when it comes to different players psychoanalyzing each other mid-game. Sometimes, there are some legitimate breakthroughs (both for the audience and the people involved) about what people value. There are also plenty of times when members of this capable cast are reduced into voicing the faintest subtext out loud.
And as dazzling as these game designs are — watching Sato move the camera across multiple planes during a labyrinthine game of tag is just one example of Season 2 indulging in some pure, turn-off-your-brain fun — “Alice in Borderland” has never fully cracked the happy medium between letting the audience put together pieces for themselves and having characters pause during the action to outline the specific stakes and strategy at crucial turns. Drawing from Aso’s original illustrations, there are times when the clear scoreboards and visual signifiers that the show uses would be plenty. Having the players be de facto commentators often takes time away from more nuanced gameplay or a more cerebral approach to some heady challenges.
Where “Alice in Borderland” does land on some semblance of subtlety is in leaning into being a pandemic parable. The first season dropped on Netflix in the waning weeks of 2020, when those echoes were unmistakable but unintentional. This follow-up season was made in the heart of a time when barren city centers, abandoned stores, and cooperative struggles against mysterious forces were more a recent memory than a fantasy. Season 2’s underlying emphasis isn’t so much on the overwhelming desire or need to get back to the way things were, but whether the old normal was ever all that desirable to begin with.
“Alice in Borderland”
Kumiko Tsuchiya
Though they range from short and trite to genuinely enlightening, those flashback sequences do show that “Alice in Borderland” is aware it can’t just survive on game intrigue forever. The violence in Season 2 is overwhelming and grueling, filled with nameless members of crowds shot through with more than just the first season’s ominous sky lasers. The process of justifying why the more familiar characters would want to submit themselves to all this carnage becomes a main Season 2 focus. When it slides into that repetitive “What is life, really?” Philosophy 101 loops, the show around it starts to feel shaky. When it lands on genuine character relationships and sacrifices that feel motivated, “Alice in Borderland” also earns its chance to head to whatever challenge is next.
Each character then becomes a balancing act. When the main group from the end of Season 1 is forced to split up, “Alice in Borderland” shrewdly finds challenges to cater to each of their individual strengths. This past-present, logic-strength, quip-profoundness balancing act is best handled in Chishiya (Nijirô Murakami), the blond, hoodied enigma who quickly establishes himself as the season’s biggest star. Murakami plays such a compelling, steely remove from the whole process, even when Chishiya is on a knife’s edge. What began as something closer to an affect when Arisu met him in the first season becomes a magnetic display of ultimate confidence whenever it’s tested in Season 2.
“Alice in Borderland” is coy almost by necessity. Almost all of the memorable visual components of the series invite far more questions than answers. The second you start to think about who’s piloting those Face Card blimps and the sheer number of hours it would take to put together those 20-story-sized banners flowing underneath them, you’re sliding down a logistical slippery slope. (Or, I guess, since we’re in “Alice” territory, you’re falling down a rabbit hole.) So the series (as we mentioned in our Best International Shows list) never really has room for anything other than the impossibly big and impossibly small. Avoiding that middle ground leads to some messiness, all the way up until the last episode starts to fill in some of those strange gaps.
But it’s that spectacle that pretty much makes up for all the other shortcomings. It’s in Iwao Saitô and Hidefumi Onishi translating these games from the page and giving them weight, whether they take place in skyscrapers or around a single table. It’s in the mammoth VFX effort to wreak destruction on those same large and small scales. It’s in the operatic, expansive melodies of Yutaka Yamada, with melodies that sometime sound like they’re being played an orchestra of hundreds. All of it is put toward a show that’s trying its utmost to harness imagination. Like a dream you try to remember the next morning, it doesn’t always make sense. When you’re deep in it, though, there’s nothing else that’s quite like it.
“Alice in Borderland” Season 2 is now available to stream on Netflix.
In this Netflix show based on Haro Aso’s manga, Arisu is just one of a roughly undefined group of people looking to stay alive in their new alternate reality, where each person staves off death by playing wickedly manipulative games designed to pit players against each other and themselves. Each game corresponds to specific playing card in a deck. The higher the stakes, the longer the reward for making it through to the end.
So the first season of “Alice in Borderland” was a primal story of survival. There was the discovery of the rules of this purgatorial city, with Arisu and a shifting team of compatriots trying to figure out how see tomorrow, much less get back to the version of life they knew before.
That home is the second world that gets talked about even more in Season 2. Death still lurks around every corner, but for those who’ve lasted long enough for the city to be covered in vines and grass and overgrowth that “The Last of Us” would be proud of, survival has become a job. And, naturally, stuck at their daily makeshift offices waiting for the next test of wits and/or brawn, many of them are dreaming about what it would take to quit.
“Alice in Borderland”
Kumiko Tsuchiya
For those afraid those atmospheric changes may lead to a change in scope, fear not. There may not be anything in Season 2 quite as striking as the image of Arisu and his two pals standing dumbfounded in a completely empty Shibuya intersection, but director Shinsuke Sato is still taking full advantage of painting on a giant, citywide canvas. Picking up right where the last season left off, there’s barely time to take a deep breath before the real threat of violence comes charging up the abandoned avenue. Before long, Arisu and the gang are thrust right into the heart of one of the most thrilling car chase sequences on any-sized screen in recent memory.
Having cleared the rest of the deck in Season 1, Arisu, Usagi (Tao Tsuchiya) and the remaining friend group find themselves picking off the Face Cards, signaled by giant blimps that hover the sky. Everyone’s playing by similar “win to stay alive” rules that governed Season 1. But this time, it’s not some shadowy force calling the shots. Each test involves face-to-face meetings with the Jack of Hearts or Queen of Spades or any other of the Final 12. Staring into the eyes of the mastermind of each challenge makes it less of an ambiguous test and more of an elimination round. Arisu’s ticket home has to be punched at the expense of an official challenger.
Of course, it’s hard to describe the logistics of “Alice in Borderland” without putting words like “real” and “home” in the imaginary quotes that the show’s characters basically put around them when spoken out loud. A lot of the philosophizing here can get repetitive over the course of the season, especially when it comes to different players psychoanalyzing each other mid-game. Sometimes, there are some legitimate breakthroughs (both for the audience and the people involved) about what people value. There are also plenty of times when members of this capable cast are reduced into voicing the faintest subtext out loud.
And as dazzling as these game designs are — watching Sato move the camera across multiple planes during a labyrinthine game of tag is just one example of Season 2 indulging in some pure, turn-off-your-brain fun — “Alice in Borderland” has never fully cracked the happy medium between letting the audience put together pieces for themselves and having characters pause during the action to outline the specific stakes and strategy at crucial turns. Drawing from Aso’s original illustrations, there are times when the clear scoreboards and visual signifiers that the show uses would be plenty. Having the players be de facto commentators often takes time away from more nuanced gameplay or a more cerebral approach to some heady challenges.
Where “Alice in Borderland” does land on some semblance of subtlety is in leaning into being a pandemic parable. The first season dropped on Netflix in the waning weeks of 2020, when those echoes were unmistakable but unintentional. This follow-up season was made in the heart of a time when barren city centers, abandoned stores, and cooperative struggles against mysterious forces were more a recent memory than a fantasy. Season 2’s underlying emphasis isn’t so much on the overwhelming desire or need to get back to the way things were, but whether the old normal was ever all that desirable to begin with.
“Alice in Borderland”
Kumiko Tsuchiya
Though they range from short and trite to genuinely enlightening, those flashback sequences do show that “Alice in Borderland” is aware it can’t just survive on game intrigue forever. The violence in Season 2 is overwhelming and grueling, filled with nameless members of crowds shot through with more than just the first season’s ominous sky lasers. The process of justifying why the more familiar characters would want to submit themselves to all this carnage becomes a main Season 2 focus. When it slides into that repetitive “What is life, really?” Philosophy 101 loops, the show around it starts to feel shaky. When it lands on genuine character relationships and sacrifices that feel motivated, “Alice in Borderland” also earns its chance to head to whatever challenge is next.
Each character then becomes a balancing act. When the main group from the end of Season 1 is forced to split up, “Alice in Borderland” shrewdly finds challenges to cater to each of their individual strengths. This past-present, logic-strength, quip-profoundness balancing act is best handled in Chishiya (Nijirô Murakami), the blond, hoodied enigma who quickly establishes himself as the season’s biggest star. Murakami plays such a compelling, steely remove from the whole process, even when Chishiya is on a knife’s edge. What began as something closer to an affect when Arisu met him in the first season becomes a magnetic display of ultimate confidence whenever it’s tested in Season 2.
“Alice in Borderland” is coy almost by necessity. Almost all of the memorable visual components of the series invite far more questions than answers. The second you start to think about who’s piloting those Face Card blimps and the sheer number of hours it would take to put together those 20-story-sized banners flowing underneath them, you’re sliding down a logistical slippery slope. (Or, I guess, since we’re in “Alice” territory, you’re falling down a rabbit hole.) So the series (as we mentioned in our Best International Shows list) never really has room for anything other than the impossibly big and impossibly small. Avoiding that middle ground leads to some messiness, all the way up until the last episode starts to fill in some of those strange gaps.
But it’s that spectacle that pretty much makes up for all the other shortcomings. It’s in Iwao Saitô and Hidefumi Onishi translating these games from the page and giving them weight, whether they take place in skyscrapers or around a single table. It’s in the mammoth VFX effort to wreak destruction on those same large and small scales. It’s in the operatic, expansive melodies of Yutaka Yamada, with melodies that sometime sound like they’re being played an orchestra of hundreds. All of it is put toward a show that’s trying its utmost to harness imagination. Like a dream you try to remember the next morning, it doesn’t always make sense. When you’re deep in it, though, there’s nothing else that’s quite like it.
“Alice in Borderland” Season 2 is now available to stream on Netflix.