Alice in Borderland will return. It is an unexpected renewal because, as viewers may remember, she said goodbye with a proper ending that resolved the main questions of both the characters and the mythology of the series. But, as Netflix has made known, there will be a third season after being its most successful Japanese series and that achieves something difficult in Asian productions: penetrating Western audiences.
The science fiction thriller, so we understand each other, was a The Squid Game before The Squid Game. The protagonist is Arisu (Kento Yamazaki), a video game lover, who suddenly meets his friends in a deserted Tokyo. They don’t understand where people may have gone. But, when they enter a building and are given a cell phone, they discover that this reality is terrifying: they must agree to compete in games to survive but the problem is that the games are deadly. If they exceed them, they obtain a visa to live a few more hours or days.
In this context without head or tail, where no one has answers as to why there are hardly any human beings left on the streets, they soon discover that there are different types of games depending on the suit of the deck. Spade games have a physical component; diamond ones require intelligence; those with hearts consist of manipulating, trusting or betraying others; and finally the clubs force you to combine these disciplines. But when does the game end? Can you win or do you simply overcome competitions until you lose and die mercilessly?
When Alice in Borderland premiered in December 2020, it caught the interest of fans of Battle Royale style survival fiction. But, when the second season premiered in December 2022, the fiction finally exploded on a commercial level, entering the list of the most viewed in ninety markets, reaching first place in 17 of them and accumulating 200 million hours watched.
It suddenly became the biggest Netflix phenomenon to come out of Japan and for a very simple reason: many got hooked on it between seasons while searching the catalog for content similar to The Squid Game, which had premiered in September 2021. The algorithm had done its job and, luckily for the followers, they were able to verify that the scriptwriters Yoshiki Watabe, Yasuko Kuramitsu and Shinsuke Sato did not want to lengthen the mystery excessively, answering Arisu’s questions.
At the moment, according to The Hollywood Reporter, of the new episodes it is only known that Shinsuke Sato will remain as director of the series after directing the first two seasons and that Kento Yamazaki and Tao Tsuchiya will reprise their roles. Is it time to understand what the Joker card means?
