Alice in Borderland

Expect more mayhem, mysterious violence, spirited gameplay, and character reveals in season 2 of Netfllix's Alice in Borderland.

But it revels in making or breaking the rules it’s created for its topsyturvy world, and the core characters are compelling and fully rendered. [Squid Game](https://decider.com/show/squid-game/), the runaway Netflix hit that functions on a life-or-death axis of competition similar to Alice in Borderland. Once we do that…” Arisu has always put his faith in the natural rules of gameplay. (The latter’s transgender identity was explored in one of last season’s most powerful and emotional flashbacks.) The moral compass is totally destroyed in Alice in Borderland, along with the trappings of our daily existence. Parting Shot: So far, the King of Clubs and his accomplices haven’t shared much about their identities or intentions beyond their leader’s promotion of a nudist lifestyle, and Arisu wants answers. The Gist: At the conclusion of that first season of Alice in Borderland, Arisu, Usagi (Tao Tsuchiya), Hikari Kuina (Aya Asahina), and Chishiya (Nijiro Murakami) fought their way from the carnage of the Beach back to the city center and a whisper-quiet Shibuya Station. Our Take: Alice in Borderland continues to trade easily on the fates of its non-player characters. But from a viewer’s perspective, everyone in the background of the main characters’ gameplay seems to be cannon fodder for advancing their narrative. Opening Shot: In a flashback that itself is a flashback to the beginning of the first season, obsessive gamer Arisu (Kento Yamakazi) is in his bedroom, playing first person shooters on repeat instead of attending job interviews. Once it’s determined that joining a different game might avoid more immediate destruction, the group roars off in Tatta’s commandeered Mustang convertible and approaches a part of town apparently controlled by the King of Clubs. [Alice in Borderland debuted on Netflix in December 2020](https://decider.com/2020/12/11/alice-in-borderland-netflix-review/), as the world reeled from lockdowns and the pandemic. As refugees from the Beach are shot down around them, Arisu and Usagi infer that it’s the King of Spades causing all of this mayhem.

This sprawling Japanese manga adaptation is rarely subtle, but its ability to deliver on expectations of scope make it a true TV standout.

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. 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. 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. Where “Alice in Borderland” does land on some semblance of subtlety is in leaning into being a pandemic parable. So the first season of “Alice in Borderland” was a primal story of survival. 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. Staring into the eyes of the mastermind of each challenge makes it less of an ambiguous test and more of an elimination round. There’s the one that its characters find themselves in and the one that they want to return to. 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. 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. [Netflix](https://www.indiewire.com/t/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.

Episode 8 of Alice in Borderland Season 2 starts this finale with a look at the devastation caused by the King of Diamonds. Akane and Aguni are barely ...

I appreciate the manga continues with Alice in Borderland: Retry, but the ending we get here is actually really solid and it’s not really needed to drag this one out. It would appear that the game is now over but of course, there could be another twist to the tame. The game world serves as a sort of gateway between life and death. Then again, there’s also the idea that the Joker represents unexpected changes in fortune, which could have a simple meaning of showing that Arisu has now changed his fate and managed to find good fortune among all this misery. While Arisu and the others head down to the bottom of the train station and hide out, a meteor crashes and smashes into Tokyo, blowing the entire place to smithereens. Kuani is reunited with her mother and father, while Arisu looks out the window and notices all the characters we’ve seen over the course of the season with their loved ones or recovering in hospital. The Joker card at the end generally tends to act as a wild card. All the cards disappear, with the only one left happening to be the Joker. They encourage Arisu to live his life to the fullest and not waste a second of it. This seems to be part of the Queen’s game, given Usagi is bleeding out and is on borrowed time. Of course, this brings us to the final game. To win, they need to pass their balls through the six hoops in a certain order then hit the final finishing peg.

As much fun as it was to spend some hours in the company of Arisu (Kento Yamazaki), Usagi (Tao Tsuchiya), and Chishiya (Nijiro Murakami) in Alice in ...

In all card games, the Joker is a wild card that usually subverts the pre-established rules, and that last addition would fit in perfectly with the Alice in Borderland world. If that’s the case, there could be blind spots to the game master’s world, and that would be a nice element to explore in the future. If there’s one thing we learned from Season 2 is that the citizens – who initially seemed to be a level above the rest of the players – don’t know much. On top of that, in the same videos, there is some evidence of people who managed to live outside the realm of the Borderland games. By the end of Season 2, we still don’t know who are the game designers, who controls Borderland and other details that we don’t even imagine. Halfway through the season, Arisu and Usagi find some home footage in which there is a girl who claims she remembers everything about the day everyone was taken from Tokyo. And they all – or most of them – ended up in the afterlife because a meteorite exploded over central Tokyo and killed them all. All the players we rooted for throughout Season 2 decline, and they are transported back to Tokyo and find out that only a few minutes had passed. The way that Season 2 ends provides closure for most characters – especially the main ones – and wraps up the citizens' arc. While [Season 1](https://collider.com/alice-in-borderland-season-1-recap/) provided us with virtually no information about the game makers, Borderland itself, and what exactly are the rules, Season 2 had the job of finally helping us understand what the heck is going on in the Japanese series. But now, we finally have the answer: What are the games and Borderland after all? She adds that he will be presented with two choices and no matter what he chooses, the answer will be given.

Alice in Borderland is (finally) back and hopefully providing some answers to the meaning behind the game world. A recap of season two, episode one of ...

It’s what much of the audience is looking for too: an explanation of why this world was constructed and to what end. He leads the group to the outskirts of Tokyo to start a new game with the King of Clubs. For now, we’re left with the promise of more answers about the organization of this world and the possibility of escaping back to our reality — should these characters want it. The episode ends without revealing much about who the King of Clubs is and what his game might require of Arisu and his friends (um, and Niragi). The King of Spades was a major dick, but the King of Clubs seems like he could be fun to hang out with. And the players have a foe to escape or defeat, so Arisu comes up with a plan: They can’t effectively fight the King of Spades with the resources they have, but they may be able to avoid him by joining a different game. Niragi was set on fire by Chishiya and tackled over a railing by Aguni in last season’s finale, but he’s still kicking and is looking to join the King of Club’s game with Arisu and his friends. [Toyota Crown](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Crown) that makes for the best part of the episode: a seven-minute car chase with the King of Spades through the streets of Tokyo that starts with Chishiya getting left behind (he’s fine — probably) and ends with our crew somehow walking away from a rollover. As no-names get struck down viciously and viscerally around them, our protagonists duck, weave, and commandeer a classic Toyota Crown in an attempt to avoid the King of Spades. When we’re not in the car with the characters, we’re racing behind with the camera, fitting through even smaller spaces at just as fast a speed. The end of season one left us with the critical reveal that people who were seemingly players in the games could be involved in orchestrating them. Most of the first third of the episode is devoted to our wide-eyed gamer Arisu, stoic mountaineer Usagi, terminally underwhelmed Chishiya, trans badass Kuina, forensics expert Ann, and the behatted Tatta’s sprint to escape the clutches of the King of Spades, and it’s proof that this show still has it.

Packed with puzzles and elaborate betrayals, few shows will leave you on the edge of your seat like this one. We've already covered that ending, but is there ...

Once again Ryōhei Arisu finds himself in Borderland and has to play a series of games to escape. One day she wakes up in a desolated version of Kyoto with the Queen of Clubs card in her hand. Haro Aso’s manga of the same name ran in Shōnen Sunday S from 2010 to 2015 before moving over to Weekly Shōnen Sunday in April of 2015. In order to stay in this world and avoid death, they have to play an increasingly difficult series of games. Volumes 9 and 10 set to be released in March of 2023. If they win, they get the chance to hopefully evade death again and possibly see their friends die.

Here's the true meaning behind all of the cards featured in the hit Netflix series 'Alice in Borderland.'

Viewers catch a brief glimpse of the Jack of Clubs game in Episode 7 and it is not pretty. The average of the selected numbers is then multiplied by .8 and the winner is the team whose final number is closest to the King of Diamond's hidden number. However, a game that requires physical combat is briefly shown in Episode 5, featuring Kuina (Asahina Aya), which one could only assume is the Jack of Spades game given the context of what Spades entail. With 10,000 points a team, players are pit against each other and against their entire opposing team in order to steal points and end the game with the higher total point valuation. The first face card to pose an issue to players is the King of Spades. He is a constant throughout all of Season 2 and the game will not end until players manage to kill him. Right from the beginning of the show, he spawns as a mercenary who will stop at nothing to attempt to kill all the players. We see this occur right at the beginning of Season 2 when the King of Spades' game draws everyone into a deadly circumstance that lasts the whole season. If there's one type of card game that a player doesn't want to face, it's the heart card. Club games were featured twice in the first season of the show. When it comes to club cards in Alice in Borderland, the name of the game is trust. During the first season of the show, players were tasked with beating as many games as possible.

(Though, also, who hired an in-over-his-head Tatta?) It's an interesting backstory for a character who loves and seems to know cars. (In the season premiere, it ...

In addition to building out the world and these characters, it highlights the complexity of the face card games and the relative arbitrariness of who is “innocent” and who is “guilty” here. • In the manga, Chishiya doesn’t participate in the Jack of Hearts game, but I am glad we get to spend more time with his character here. Like the “real” world, the morality of Borderland is rarely as simple as it seems, and even those with relative power (the dealers and citizens of Borderland) still have to play deadly games. While it may be tempting to see the face card players or the citizens of Borderland as the bad guys here, Kyuma and the players we meet in Prison Cell complicate that judgment. Yaba and the woman he domineers, Kotoko; convicted killer Banda and his banged teammate Matsushita; and Chishiya and Ippei, a man “too kind for this world.” That is until Ippei succumbs to the stress of the game and lets his collar explode. The second half is devoted to the beginning of another game: Prison Cell, set in a penitentiary, run by the Jack of Hearts, featuring a familiar face: Chishiya! Even the Jack of Hearts could choose to stay in Prison Game indefinitely, as the prison is stocked with snacks. The King of Clubs isn’t a bad guy — he’s sad to see Arisu and the others die — he simply wants his band to survive more. Rather than trying to force the battle, which could result in Kyuma running away and eluding Arisu for the rest of the game, Arisu appeals to Kyuma’s sense of honor. Because no metal objects are allowed in the game arena, Tatta is attempting to use one of the shipping containers’ doors to do the bloody deed. Nothing in the game rules says a player’s wristband can’t be carried by someone else, and while the wristbands can’t be unlocked, there are other ways to get the band off of a wrist … That’s one of the things I learned in this episode, which saw Tatta sacrificing his hand and life to ensure his team’s victory.

Arisu and Usagi go searching for answers about Borderland, but just find more trouble. A recap of season two, episode four of Netflix's 'Alice in Borderland ...

The vegetation is increasing at an incredible rate.” This is her way of looking for answers. “This is the only world that is worthy of my control,” adds Yaba. • Kuina leaves Arisu and Usagi to look for Ann and Chishiya. • I was low-key rooting for Kotoko to win the Jack of Hearts game. • “I’ve never been in a land as beautiful as this one,” says Banda of Borderland. As we transition from one game to another, check in with our ensemble, and hear one woman’s chilling account of how she came to be in Borderland, this show weaves the elements in a way that breathes further life into this fictional world. The film ends, and the King of Spades appears again, like a bad penny. But Arisu finds some new and old friends in the terror: A young woman with a running blade as a foot and a bow in her hand saves Arisu’s life with her arrows, knocking him out in the process. I like that this show takes time to show the effects of this trauma. [last episode](https://www.vulture.com/article/alice-in-borderland-season-2-episode-3-recap.html), he makes it through the next round not by convincing anyone to tell him the truth about his suit but by guessing and then telling others the truth. In her interview with Kameyama, she tells him about the fireworks that weren’t fireworks the day they all came to Borderland. As the midway point in the season, the fourth episode has a lot of disparate work to do.

Somehow Arisu (Kento Yamazaki), Usagi (Tao Tsuchiya) and the others manage to band together to orchestrate the most calculated assault against the King of ...

We're ready for the fall and like a season one Arisu faced with the death of his friends, we'll be much stronger for it. Let's also not forget that it was Heiya's seemingly inevitable demise that gave Aguni the fire he needed to take on the King of Spades. It was a key moment that became less impactful when she dragged her flagging, pin-cushioned body over to the far away spot where Aguni lay (not) dying. In season one the core friendship between Karube (Keita Machida), Chota (Yūki Morinaga) and Arisu was expected to have longevity. Ann's non-death is not the only sign that the show has lost its stomach when it comes to high-stakes deaths. A nervous titillation that can only be achieved through the cost of losing core characters. The King is beaten enough for a bullet to easily finish the job. But undercutting the emotional impact of her death by backtracking allows the previous emotionally charged moment to fall flat. Later on, when the surviving players are given the choice of becoming residents, Kuina looks over to a lifeless Ann, holds her hand and says: "Let's go back together". [Alice in Borderland](https://www.digitalspy.com/tv/a42082612/alice-in-borderland-ending-explained-joker-card/) really knows just how to put its players through the wringer. His attempt to end the King of Spades once and for all worked… However their strike-back runs about as smooth as a river of blood (their own).

It all started with fireworks, or so we thought. As Ariusu, Chota, and Karube run into the subway station at Shibuya Crossing in the very first episode of Alice ...

The Joker, our ferryman to Borderland, still exists, which means Borderland is still there, just beyond the veil of our world. In the manga, the Joker is a mysterious character, implied to be a kind of Borderland ferryman. The proof is in Arisu and Usagi: Because of their Borderland connection, or perhaps because they simply like one another, the two strike up a flirty conversation by the vending machine in the hospital. during the Civil War and was originally created as a trump card in the trick-taking game of Euchre. The Joker as a card originated in the U.S. Much of Alice in Borderland Season 2 was devoted to exploring the role of “dealers” and “citizens” in Borderland. Yaba and Banda, two characters who revel in the violent abuse of power Borderland allows even more than our real world, choose to stay.) Ann, who seemingly dies in Borderland and therefore is unable to make a choice, survives; in the hospital, we see the doctors successfully able to restart her heart. Their hearts stopped, and that is the time they spent in Borderland. (The first phase being the numbered-card games that the Borderland players collectively clear in Season 1.) In a flashback, we see the man who would become the King of Spades accepting the position at the end of the previous cycle; it is implied that, before becoming the face card-killer, he was someone like Aguni, fighting to take down the previous King of Spades. At the end of Season 1, we discover that Momoka and Asahi are “dealers,” people who have been recruited to make and monitor the games in exchange for extended visas and the hope they might eventually be able to leave Borderland. Alice in Borderland is back on Netflix, just in time to celebrate the holidays. As Ariusu, Chota, and Karube run into the subway station at Shibuya Crossing in the very first episode of Alice in Borderland, fireworks explode in the sky above the city.

For sixteen episodes we've followed slacker Arisu and his friends (living, dead, miraculously revived and flashbacked) as they've battled their way through a ...

Just like Alice, our heroes have had a surreal and dangerous experience in a frightening netherworld dominated by living playing cards and packed with riddles that twist reality inside out. Some English sounds just don't work in Japanese. (Not for long, stick with us.) "Beer" is rendered as "biiru", "English" is "Igirisu" and so on. The final episode suggested at first that the games were a fugue state conjured in Arisu's mind as a way of coping with the guilt of killing his friends on the traffic crossing in the first episode, but later scenes showed a flashback in which Tokyo – and all the games' combatants – were hit by a meteorite. At the end of season two, it's revealed that the games have been a way for Arisu to find purpose in his life, that purpose being friendship, love and community.

The second season of the Netflix series "Alice in Borderland" tells us how hypocritical and pretentious human beings are. Its narrative gives a critique of.

The Joker is considered to be a wild card of the highest order, and maybe Shinsuke Sato and his team of writers wanted to hint at what we could expect from “Alice in Borderland” Season 3. Aguni decided to be the bait, but the King of Spades’ ferocity was unparalleled, and eventually, everybody had to come out of hiding and fight with him. Aguni, on the other hand, was hiding in the forest with Akane Heiya and making a strategy to kill the King of Spades. He told Niragi that though he desperately wanted to go to the real world, he was not ready to do it at the cost of someone else’s life. The group believed that together they could kill the King of Spades and proceed to the next game. He said that in his world, the games were a personification of conversations, but the difference was that here, the participants always spoke the truth. A person might have pretended to be a sage who was ready to sacrifice his life for the sake of others and the games in the Borderland proved whether what he said was right or wrong. Chishiya also had to face a similar dilemma when the grandson of the board of directors was given preference on the heart transplant list, and the one without any such backing was left to die by the doctors. Arisu, Usagi and others soon found out that the motive of the games was not only to pose a challenge in front of the competitors but also to make them privy to their own real selves. Human beings live a life of contradictions and ostentatiousness, and the games were devised in such a manner that they peel off the layers and expose the real nature of each and every individual. Kyuma and his teammates, i.e., Shitara, Uta, Maki and Goken used to play in a band together, but in due course of time, they made the decision to stay in the Borderland. So, let’s see what kind of challenges Face Cards pose in front of the players and if they are able to return to their real world once they have completed the games successfully.

We break down the ending of Alice in Borderland Season 2, from the Queen of Hearts game to Arisu and Usagi returning to the real world.

There is a deck of cards on a table outside the hospital building, and the final shot zooms in on the joker card. In the manga, one of the last scenes is Arisu asking his brother about going to college. For most of the show, Arisu has seemingly believed that his life is worthless unless he found a clear answer to this question of why he survived. There is of course also the scene with Arisu and Usagi meeting for what appears to be the first time in this reality, in front of the vending machine. The answer was in the title all along: "Borderland" is a place where you go when you're at the border of life and death. Niragi's face was covered in burns this season, and the scene of him back in real life shows the same wounds. In the manga, the tea that Mira gives Arisu in between the rounds of croquet is laced with a hallucinogen. Once the survivors give their responses — everyone rejects the offer besides the two characters we met in the Jack of Hearts game, Banda and Yaba — we finally learn the truth about this alternate world. While Arisu is experiencing this vision where he's receiving treatment from Mira, the Queen of Hearts probes his deepest fears and regrets about having survived instead of Karube and Chota. [Riisa Naka](https://www.tvguide.com/celebrities/riisa-naka/3000385270/)), who was revealed to be the one orchestrating the games at the end of Season 1. It's here that Arisu once again asks about "the real world," and Mira begins her trickery. [Keita Machida](https://www.tvguide.com/celebrities/keita-machida/3030647899/)) and Chota ( [Yuki Morinaga](https://www.tvguide.com/celebrities/yuki-morinaga/3030886906/)) — RIP to those two, we're still not over Seven of Hearts and will never get over it — finding themselves in a Tokyo where most humans have disappeared.