By chance I recently watched the first episode of Alice in Borderland, a strangely titled show on Netflix. The opening seemed somewhat boring; three loser friends run around Tokyo goofing off, hiding in a toilet when they think the police are after them for some silly act. When they emerge from the toilet, however, the resulting scene actually made me sit up and take notice. It was almost on par with the scene of Neo waking up in his pod in The Matrix. For, instead of a bustling downtown Tokyo, the friends emerge to an empty city. This made me think of the Twilight Zone episode, where a man wakes up and finds himself alone in a small city. Did they cross into another reality, I wondered. Is it a game, a dream, or simulation?
Walking around the empty city, the three friends, Arisu, Chota, and Karube, come across one other person, who cryptically says something about an expired visa before a red laser shoots from the sky and through the man’s brain. It’s a shocking moment, for neither the characters nor the audience expected this to happen. The next thing they see is a sign pointing to a “game.” They follow the sign, entering a building where they encounter two young women. A voice instructs them to each pick up a mobile phone, which shows a playing card, and begins a countdown. They must find their way out of the building, from room to room, before the room catches on fire. It’s a harrowing experience, and their introduction to life in this new world, where to keep living you earn visas by playing games. Each visa lets you live a few days. The games are deadly, but not playing them, just as deadly.
With Chota injured by the flames in the first game, Arisu and Karube enter another game to try to figure out more about this strange new world. They join a large group in a game of tag, pursued through an apartment building by a machine-gun wielding man wearing a horses’s head. Arisu, the show’s protagonist, learns the meaning of the cards: Spades correlate to games of strength, Clubs are team battles, Diamonds are a battle of wits, and Hearts correlate to games of betrayal. Their first game was clubs, and this is a game of spades. They’re joined by new characters: the agile climber Usagi; the brooding ex-soldier Aguni; and the aloof and mysterious Chishiya. Of all the characters, Arisu seems the one most capable of surviving in this strange gaming-based situation. He figured out how to beat the first game, and how to beat the second one. However, as they need to extend the visas for Chota and a young woman who survived the first game with them, not every game is winnable.
Their third game is a hearts game, which as Arisu learned means betrayal. The quartet don strange headsets in a botanical garden. To their horror they learn that they’ve strapped bombs to their heads, and the game is set up so that only one of the four will survive. It’s a tragic situation, and as Arisu emerges as the sole survivor, he is wracked by guilt. He lays down in the street to die, having given up, as by living he caused the death of his friends. He’s saved by Usagi, the climber from the game of tag. She has learned to survive, hunting for food in the deserted city, foraging for materials to build a small sanctuary. As Arisu slowly returns to life and finds the will to live, they team up, hoping to live through the games and find a way home.
Eventually, they find their way to “the Beach,” a community of survivors who live in a resort, teaming up to solve games and extend their visas. They meet Hatter, the enigmatic leader of the Beach, as well as his executive committee and a violent group of gun-toting maniacs. Arisu protects Usagi from the rapacious Aguni, the leader of the militants, and earns their enmity. He gains the trust of Hatter and the other leaders, but when Hatter is brought back dead from a game, the world turns upside down again. The militants take over. A new game takes place inside the Beach, and the militants go on a killing spree, intent on murdering every inhabitant in the Beach.
As the season ends, Arisu and Usagi find their way to the location of the gamemasters, the people who have been orchestrating all the games. As they wander around the room they see that all the gamemasters are dead. They run into two other survivors, and as they wonder what’s next, a person appears on the screens, announcing a new level of games to challenge them all, laughing with excitement.
It’s a breathtaking series, a nail-biter of a show. I didn’t know what to expect, and the writers threw in twists and turns in nearly every episode. Few people are safe. After I finished the show, some research informed me that Arisu is Alice, based on how this is pronounced in Japanese. Usagi is the White Rabbit. Hatter, of course, the Mad Hatter. There are other analogies to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass. The always smiling Chishiya is the Cheshire Cat. The woman who appears at the end might be the Red Queen. Kuina, a trans person who partnered with Chishiya, is the blue caterpillar (she always wear blue and goes through a transformation like caterpillars). Not every character in the show has a matching source in Carroll’s books, and the plot, aside from falling down the rabbit hole into a strange and mad world, is vastly different.
A sequel is in the works. It will be interesting to see where it goes, and what this world means. How could Tokyo be turned into a deadly video game on such a grand scale? Are all the deaths real, or imagined? What’s Chishiya’s backstory? Will any characters survive and if they make it back to the real world, what happens to them? The easy way out would be for the loser Arisu suddenly to realize that he’s wasted his life, and now he has a chance to take control and make a difference.
