Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Tori Preston | TV | October 7, 2025
Netflix’s Alice In Borderland returned for its third (and final?) season after a three-year hiatus, and that’s fine because this season doesn’t require a detailed memory of the previous installments. Seasons one and two adapted the manga of the same name, and ended with the protagonists, Arisu (Kento Yamazaki) and Usagi (Tao Tsuchiya) - along with several other players - surviving the Borderland and returning to reality. Season three, however, is only loosely inspired by the events of the two sequels to the manga that were released. For the most part, it’s an original story, and a damn good one at that. Usagi is lured back into the Borderland, and Arisu, who is now her husband, follows her. Oh, and Usagi is pregnant - but she doesn’t know it yet.
For anyone who isn’t familiar with the wildly popular Japanese series, what you need to know is that the Borderland isn’t just a place - it’s a sort of purgatory between life and death. People on the verge of death, like patients in comas, awaken there and are forced to compete in deadly games for survival. Die in the Borderland and you die in the real world, but win the games and you get the chance to choose to return to life, or remain in the Borderland as a citizen running the games.
A show about death games can’t help but earn comparisons to the biggest Netflix series of all time, Squid Game, even though the Alice In Borderland manga launched nearly a decade before the South Korean sensation entered production. The entertainment landscape is littered with common ideas and odd coincidences - we saw two whole cartoon movies about ants in 1998, after all - but a similar premise was all that linked the two shows heading into Alice In Borderland’s third season. Where Squid Game explored the lengths people will go to survive under the yoke of capitalism, Alice In Borderland takes a more philosophical bent with its conception of the afterlife as a place where you can compete for a chance to go on living. So perhaps the most surprising part of Alice In Borderland season three is that, as it departs the text to tell its own story, it winds up following two big story beats Squid Game already hit.
You may be able to predict the first one: Usagi’s unborn child becomes a player. In a nailbiter of a final game, Arisu, Usagi, and the other remaining players are trapped in a grid of rooms that reveal potential fates for their lives in the real world. They have to navigate the rooms to find the only exit, but in doing so, they are forced to choose doors that promise their lives, should they survive, could be everything they’ve ever hoped for… or lead to future tragedy. They roll dice to determine how many people can pass through any given door each round, and points are deducted for unlocking doors. If a player’s points reach zero, they lose - and a collar around their neck explodes. Usagi is given two wristbands to tally points, one for herself and one for her fetus. She can’t pass through a door unless it has a capacity for at least two entrants, and when the roll for the exit comes up with one less than the total number of survivors, Arisu stays behind to ensure Usagi, their baby, and everyone else can escape. Unfortunately, his sacrifice is for naught; staying behind makes him the winner, and everyone who escaped finds themselves in a flood zone. Arisu has to break out of his safe room to rescue Usagi and the other players.
In Squid Game, Jun-hee (Jo Yu-ri) actually gives birth to her child during the games, and goes on to sacrifice herself so her baby can advance. The child’s father, Myung-gi (Im Si-wan), is also a player, but unlike Arisu, he attempts to sacrifice the baby to ensure his own survival. In the end, Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) protects the baby by eliminating both himself and Myung-gi, leaving the infant as the final winner - a bittersweet ending, considering how close Gi-hun came to surviving once again. In both shows, the pregnancies up the emotional stakes, though in Alice In Borderland it doesn’t go much beyond being a motivating factor. In Squid Game, the child is pivotal to the big finale.
Still, pregnancies and babies are common enough to be chalked up to coincidence. The far more interesting similarity between the two shows lies in their final moments, which seem to leave the door open for… an American version. In Squid Game, the Front Man travels to the US and spots Cate freakin’ Blanchett challenging a man to ddakji. Is this a hint at what lies ahead in the rumored remake David Fincher is working on, or just an acknowledgement that the games exist around the world? Who knows!
Likewise, Alice In Borderland leaves the door open for more games when a mysterious figure called The Watchman, played by Ken freakin’ Watanabe, hints that the Borderland will soon be “flooded by many people.” Then, after returning to the living world, Arisu hears a news report about a series of simultaneous earthquakes around the world, hinting at some looming tectonic catastrophe. The broadcast transitions to English as a similar story covering an earthquake in Los Angeles airs on a television in an LA bar, where a waitress named “Alice” works. Though we don’t see her face, her nametag is the final, lingering shot of the series. Which seems pretty intentional! Like you can play off “Oh, Squid Game exists everywhere!” as a twist in and of itself, but “Oh, more people are named Alice!” sure is a weird thing to land a whole show on without any further payoff.
Though Alice In Borderland doesn’t rank in Netflix’s top-10 non-English shows of all time - a list topped by all three seasons of Squid Game — it was successful enough to be renewed twice, thanks to its popularity predominantly in the Asian market. If anything, a US version of the show makes more sense than a US version of Squid Game to me. The point of an American remake, or reboot, would be to appeal to new viewers, but how many new viewers even exist for Squid Game? Everyone has seen it! Instead, Netflix knows the US market is hungry for shows about death games, and yet it largely hasn’t discovered this one. Though there’s no announcement yet on the future of Alice In Borderland — either a fourth season or a full reboot - I wouldn’t be surprised if the show comes back to life after what seemed to be its last game.
