Alice in Borderland is a Netflix death game series that’s long been caught in the gravitational pull of Squid Game. Its second season dropped in the wake of Squid Game‘s breakout first, and its newly released third followed months after Squid Game‘s. For a time, the two shows felt like twin series with Squid Game as the breakout star and Alice in Borderland as the cult favorite. Their thematic overlap made comparisons inevitable, but also exciting: two cakes, cool.
Alice in Borderland, created by Haro Aso, the creator of Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead, follows Arisu (Kento Yamazaki), a shut-in gamer who one day is transported into a parallel world with his friends, known as the Borderland. There, Arisu and his love interest, Usagi (Tao Tsuchiya), compete in death games to extend their visas in the mysterious world. If they fail, they’re executed by a laser from the sky.
Initially, Alice in Borderland stood apart. Its games were crueler, more cerebral, and less about class warfare and more about the randomness of the universe, with psychological torment abounding. Where Squid Game leaned into spectacle and capitalism’s failings, Alice explored survival as introspection. Its puzzles were more like pop quiz death traps, inviting viewers to play along, decipher hidden clues, and suffer when characters unceremoniously bite the dust.
Still, the show’s tone managed to be less dour and more communal, with characters forming makeshift bonds that felt more like summer camp camaraderie in hell than a group of assholes bound to double-cross each other and not grumble over doing so. Throughout its seasons, Alice in Borderland gave its cast domestic and interpersonal depth, avoiding the trope of disposable side characters or “fridged” motivators while still engaging in the narrative of the death game.
In its latest season, Alice in Borderland returned with the opportunity to be more than a placeholder, poised to capture those lingering viewer cravings for psychological carnage and narrative closure in a death game. What starts as a gripping evolution of the series slowly morphs into a perplexing imitation of its genre peers, leaving behind the originality that once made Alice in Borderland stand apart.
In a tale set years after the events of season two, Arisu returns to the Borderland to save his wife, Usagi, who’s been abducted and transported back into the sci-fi death game realm. At first, it delivers: its games are inventive, the stakes are high, and Arisu’s evolution from a hikkikomori to a survival-horror husband feels earned. The show’s quickly abandoned amnesia storyline with Arisu and Usagi is clunky, but it manages to serve the show’s sci-fi mystery box well enough, allowing the story to unfold fully as they recall the horrors of the Borderland without dragging viewers through endless memory-recovery scenes.
Yet, as the season unfurls, the similarities to Squid Game‘s second and third seasons go from coincidental to uncanny. For one, Arisu and Usagi’s return mirrors Gi-Hun’s solo reentry. While one can chalk that up to death game series tropes, its story—especially its moral dilemmas and trolley problem scenarios—begins to feel like a copy-paste job. Technically, Alice in Borderland can’t be called a copycat because it was released first, and its manga concluded in 2016, a full four years before the Netflix live-action series premiered. Plus, its second season ended where the manga did.
And therein lies the problem: season three, untethered from source material, veers into canon fanfiction territory. It’s Alice Returns, but more with the slapdash fashionings of Game of Thrones‘ infamous eighth season.
To its credit, Alice in Borderland‘s games—including poisoned bullet trains, explosive kick-the-can, and zombie-infested card wars—are thrilling. But the “why” behind them is foggy as hell. Ryuji (Kento Kaku), the pseudo-antagonist ally to Usagi, offers vague motivations that shift without payoff. The reason behind Usagi’s return to the Borderland, which is revealed to be less an abduction and more a voluntary decision between her and Ryuji, is even less defined.
What’s more, a late-stage love triangle between the three comes off like a desperate gasp for drama, with Usagi and Ryuji displaying more chemistry than the central couple. Arisu and Usagi, despite being married, still feel like they’re in the early awkward stages of dating. And in a show whose whole intrigue is buckling at its very foundation, the one meritorious wink towards something worthwhile to watch as an epilogue to an otherwise great show is a travesty—especially considering that from the halfway point onward, Alice in Borderland goes full Squid Game in the most unimaginative way possible.
Season three’s finale leans hard into Squid Game déjà vu, introducing a defied game master who waxes poetic about nihilism and tosses in a quandary that thankfully spares us a CGI baby, only to replace it with something even more absurd. The philosophical stakes, already murky, become obscured by spectacle. And just when you think it might wrap with grace, the final episode pivots toward franchise expansion with all the subtlety of a death laser from the sky.
It’s the kind of ending that doesn’t leave you breathless—it leaves you slumped, watching the credits roll in quiet resignation. Honestly, Cate Blanchett could’ve walked in wearing an embroidered suit with “IP Synergy” on the front pocket, and it wouldn’t have felt out of place. That’s how proudly the show parades its mimicry, echoing the same unnecessary sequel bloat that’s turned its twin series into a scavenged husk—its once-brilliant premiere now a distant, commodified memory.
And that’s the tragedy. Alice in Borderland had the bones of a standout death game series whose original third season could’ve served as the decadently drawn horse head to complete the whole stallion. Its cinematography is sleek, its CGI polished, and its homage to Cube and Battle Royale is sincere. Up until now, Alice in Borderland never felt derivative. But in trying to stretch its barely-there ideas into a third season, it became what Squid Game already was: a series bloated by its own success, gorging on spectacle while starving its story.
In the pantheon of death games, Squid Game may have devolved into a child’s sketch of a horse’s head. But Alice in Borderland already had the outline of a complete sketch to adapt—decadent, detailed, and daring. Unfortunately, season three is the epitome of creative greed, and if not that, something as bereft as it, drawing past the finish line and losing the plot.