Content Team 
Alice in Borderland is a Netflix show you don’t want to miss!
Alice in Borderland is a Japanese thriller series that made its debut on Netflix in December 2020. This live-action adaptation follows the main character, Arisu, and his friends as they find themselves transported to a post-apocalyptic alternate reality in Japan. In order to survive, they are forced to participate in dangerous social games while also trying to uncover the truth behind this strange world.
The story of Alice in Borderland originated as a manga series created by Haro Aso back in 2010 and ran until 2016. Netflix’s adaptation of Alice in Borderland has been praised for staying true to its source material. While some minor changes were made to enhance realism and character development, the core storyline remains intact.
If you enjoyed Squid Game, you will probably like Alice in Borderland, as both are foreign language shows best watched using subtitles and both feature strange alternative worlds that consume our main characters (although Alice in Borderland takes this concept up to an 11).
The show’s initial season was a hit and its popularity soared after its release. Netflix concluded the series, releasing its highly anticipated second season earlier this year. And fans responded, with an astonishing 80 million hours of viewership in the second season’s first week, surpassing other popular hit shows such as Squid Game in popularity and a setting record for a non-English show.
Summary
Alice in Borderland combines an intense mystery about their environment with well-developed characters that are engaging and thoughtful and whom you very much want to see succeed. The world itself is both bewildering and chilling as you unfold its fictional history and keeps you on the edge of our seat through its gruesome and macabre social games which add to the confusion of the setting.
While you follow and engage with the plight of the characters, the games are the main attraction. Within the alternate world of the story, everyone is forced to play a game every 3 days to survive. And the games themselves are all wildly different from one another, require a wide array of different skills to be successful in, and are extremely, highly deadly.
The game system itself is shown to contain a pattern, which is based around a standard deck of cards. Each game is assigned a suit and a number (i.e., 8 of Spades). A specific suit denotes a specific game type (mental, physical, teamwork, emotional) and the number denotes its general difficulty. The difficulty increases as the numbers get larger with the face cards rating at the top of the scale.
This pattern in the games keeps you guessing on what might come next and also provides clues to the show’s primary mystery that you are always thinking about, which is… “where are they and what is this absolutely demented world?”.
As Arisu and other characters continue to complete games, you learn more about the world and even more about the main characters. One of the delights of the show is watching each character learn, grow and develop as they undergo tests that challenge their perspectives on life, death, survival, and friendship. The characters you see in the first couple of episodes are not the same people you see at the end of the series.
And with a main character named “Arisu” and the name being as it is, the show definitely has scattered elements and themes related to the story and world of Alice in Wonderland. Its themes match the original, by placing its main characters in strange lands and are hoping with all their strength that they can survive and find their way back home. You may even pick up some similarities between characters in this story and the original, as they definitely seem to be intentional.
Conclusion
Even with all I enjoyed during the series, the best part of the story has to be the ending. With many shows that have a central mystery as a core component, they often seem to fall short in terms of a satisfying conclusion. This is not one of those stories.
The conclusion not only satisfies, but is smart, creative and all-encompassing enough to really give you a really good ending that wraps up the show but is sensible and reasonable enough (for a fantasy premise) to answer the overall mystery. Plus, it leaves enough unanswered and to your imagination, that you can continue working on those questions long after the story is done.
Alice in Borderland will keep you on the edge of your seat and each episode will leave you both emotionally drained and craving more. If you enjoy mystery box shows, and don’t mind blood and gore, I can’t recommend this show enough to you.
