Ah what a shame it is to report that I didn’t love Alice In Borderlands second season.
That’s right: Didn’t love. Not didn’t like, not hated. Just didn’t love.

I was tempted to write my review immediately after finishing the finale but decided that I had to read at least the last few chapters of its source material, to determine how much blame I could actually place on the screenwriters. So, have it confirmed that I am aware that this is accurate to the manga. Okay, that fact acknowledged, I am still unhappy with it.

Alice In Borderland continues to deliver outstanding cinematography. But it also seems to be a case of style over substance. While I wanted to happily welcome this drama’s entire change in atmosphere, many creative decisions invited more questions than answers. Back in 2020, when the first season aired, pictures of the almost empty modern Shibuya seemed to unintentionally mimic a COVID-19 reality. This second season was created during a period when deserted shopping malls and shuttered businesses were more current memories than fiction. Which is why the choice to move away from such images, even if it might be true to the source material, seemed a tad puzzling. While compositions of Tokyo in ruins were beautiful to look at and reminded of post-apocalyptic titles such as The Last Of Us, they failed to generate the familiar eeriness the first season provided.
I thought that at some point, there would be a point to this decision beyond aesthetics. Multiple characters comment on how weird it is, that nature has taken over the city this quickly. How the growth of plants seems impossibly fast. But we never get an answer as to why this development took place. It actually doesn’t do anything for the plot in the long run, except underline how this world “doesn’t seem to function like the normal one”. But we already knew that, because our world also doesn’t contain gigantic Battle-royal-esque games or killer lasers.
When Alice in Borderland featured more familiar settings such a courts, prisons or deserted halls, I found myself in awe of its picture compositions. Now that I have read at least a good bit of the manga, I can truly appreciate how masterfully this show recreates comic panels into moving images. During the games, every aesthetic choice taken felt very intentional.

I don’t want to compare this title to Squid Game because I feel like they both function perfectly as its own thing and they honestly don’t seem that similar to me. However, in my opinion, the deciding advantage this show had compared to the Korean title, was the thought and care put into its games. Squid Game never bothered to feature complex challenges, because that was never its focus. Instead, the games in Squid Game almost had to be arbitrary to highlight the random and cruel nature of capitalism. Alice In Borderland had the privilege that it could have complex trials where the players got a chance to outsmart the system they were up against. It’s thrilling, to watch Arisu come up with complex and clever solutions to challenges that are rigged against him.
While season two does have a few interesting concepts for games, quite a few of them are riddled with logistical errors. The show seems to be aware of that fact, so often the players only can win based on conveniences or by trying to gaslight their rivals. And a good chunk of the time, our characters play no real games at all. Instead of clever challenges, this season wastes a lot of time on action segments that get so repetitive that I almost started feeling bored with them. While these scenes were executed well technically, I found myself missing the days when we were provided with games that truly tested their players. I made the mistake of believing that this show was supposed to be about missed potential. Arisu spent his pre-Alice In Borderland-days, wasting his talents by sitting home and being a NEET, so now he gets challenged to show what he’s actually capable of. But he can’t do that when the majority of this season he is preoccupied with being chased by an almost omnipotent master-shooter.

So then, what is the point, really? What is it all about? When Arisu and Chishuya no longer win by making use of their talents and no longer get a chance to self-actualize themselves, what is this show trying to tell me, really?
The writers seem to wonder the same thing. Which is why we get a lot of dialogues of characters philosophizing out loud. A lot of subtlety is lost that way but Alice In Borderland has always been everything but subtle. What does it all mean? Why are we still doing this to ourselves? What is the meaning of life?
Those are all valid questions. Problem is, no one in Alice In Borderland seems to have an answer for anything that has been going on. While the drama's last episode got closer and closer and none of my questions got answered, I worried that I would be subjected to a finale of tiring exposition. But I didn’t even get that, or at least not really. Alice In Borderland fails to answer its biggest riddles, not only about its theme but also its logistics. Who is the mastermind? She’s just a random person. What was her end-goal? Who knows, she doesn’t even seem to be real. Who were the aces of the game and how did they even get to this position? I don’t know and it doesn’t matter because turns out that all of this has just been a mass hallucination.
When Arisu had his last conversation with the gamemaster and she gave him multiple possibilities of what the reality behind this world might be, I found myself preferring every single one of them to the real one. The one where all characters willingly put themselves through a cruel simulation in the future, because they were so bored with their lives, could have been a powerful commentary about how we the viewer also seek thrill in gruesome fiction to distract ourselves. A world where the rich and powerful bet on the players as a form of entertainment, might not have been particularly original, (hello Squid Game, hello Hunger Games), but it would still have had a tighter theme and message than the actual ending. Hell, even the visual of Arisu trapped in a mental hospital could at least have been haunting. But then the show's mastermind literally laughed in my face for believing that the finale could have been something cooler than what it ultimately was. I was a fool for thinking this show was about anything meaningful in particular. What is the meaning of life really? The gamemaster gives the answer to the viewer: “Life is a game. You should try to have fun.”
So there you have it, the theme of Alice In Borderland is to turn our brains off and have fun.

Arisu walks out of the experience and we have to just believe that he is a changed person. But even if that should be the case, the reason in his fundamental change does not lie in the things he learned while playing games, he doesn’t even seem to remember any of them. He’s changed because he lived through a traumatic environmental catastrophe that tragically killed his friends. He doesn’t get to remember all these times he has been clever or brave and he doesn’t learn about the potential within him.

Here you go, those are all the reasons I ultimately felt let down by this finale. Rest assured, I did find myself turning off my brain at some points and having fun. I loved the character King Of Clubs, I cried over Ann's and Hikari's tender moments of friendship. I found myself smiling at Arisu's and Usagi's blooming romance. But ultimately this show has been all spectacle trying to make up for its very apparent flaws. Like an elephant in a hot spring. It’s beautiful to look at, sure, but eventually, you ask yourself how it even got here.