Alice in Borderland season 2

Episode 4 of Alice in Borderland Season 2 starts with us back at the prison. Chishiya is alone but he manages to convince Matsushita (the emo-kid) that ...

In the present, rumbling ensues as the King of Spades catches up to Arisu and Usgi, his blimp flying overhead. Meanwhile, Arisu and the others try to work out the next phase of attack. With a razorblade in hand, Banda and Yaba have their way, eventually resulting in the Jack of Hearts blimp exploding. Chishiya is convinced that he’s the Jack and warns that he’s going to start getting aggressive soon. They were communicating through the snacks they picked up, with Chishiya realizing that the colour of the packaging correlated to their symbols, helping them through the game until this point. Chishiya is alone but he manages to convince Matsushita (the emo-kid) that Sunato Banda (the man he’s hanging around with all game long) is a serial murderer and it was all over the papers.

As much fun as it was to spend some hours in the company of Arisu (Kento Yamazaki), Usagi (Tao Tsuchiya), and Chishiya (Nijiro Murakami) in Alice in ...

In all card games, the Joker is a wild card that usually subverts the pre-established rules, and that last addition would fit in perfectly with the Alice in Borderland world. If that’s the case, there could be blind spots to the game master’s world, and that would be a nice element to explore in the future. If there’s one thing we learned from Season 2 is that the citizens – who initially seemed to be a level above the rest of the players – don’t know much. On top of that, in the same videos, there is some evidence of people who managed to live outside the realm of the Borderland games. By the end of Season 2, we still don’t know who are the game designers, who controls Borderland and other details that we don’t even imagine. Halfway through the season, Arisu and Usagi find some home footage in which there is a girl who claims she remembers everything about the day everyone was taken from Tokyo. And they all – or most of them – ended up in the afterlife because a meteorite exploded over central Tokyo and killed them all. All the players we rooted for throughout Season 2 decline, and they are transported back to Tokyo and find out that only a few minutes had passed. The way that Season 2 ends provides closure for most characters – especially the main ones – and wraps up the citizens' arc. While [Season 1](https://collider.com/alice-in-borderland-season-1-recap/) provided us with virtually no information about the game makers, Borderland itself, and what exactly are the rules, Season 2 had the job of finally helping us understand what the heck is going on in the Japanese series. But now, we finally have the answer: What are the games and Borderland after all? She adds that he will be presented with two choices and no matter what he chooses, the answer will be given.

Alice in Borderland season 2, episode 4 recap - this article contains major spoilers for the Netflix series.

It’s also a useful way to reintroduce both the King of Spades and Arisu and Usagi eventually stumble upon an RV and the film of a man named Kaito which allows them to connect some dots about the inception of the city-wide games. [Episode 3](https://readysteadycut.com/2022/12/22/alice-in-borderland-season-2-episode-3-recap/) saw Chishiya temporarily incarcerated with a bunch of other players, trying to deduce who the Jack of Hearts was in a game of trust and manipulation.

Alice in Borderland is (finally) back and hopefully providing some answers to the meaning behind the game world. A recap of season two, episode one of ...

It’s what much of the audience is looking for too: an explanation of why this world was constructed and to what end. He leads the group to the outskirts of Tokyo to start a new game with the King of Clubs. For now, we’re left with the promise of more answers about the organization of this world and the possibility of escaping back to our reality — should these characters want it. The episode ends without revealing much about who the King of Clubs is and what his game might require of Arisu and his friends (um, and Niragi). The King of Spades was a major dick, but the King of Clubs seems like he could be fun to hang out with. And the players have a foe to escape or defeat, so Arisu comes up with a plan: They can’t effectively fight the King of Spades with the resources they have, but they may be able to avoid him by joining a different game. Niragi was set on fire by Chishiya and tackled over a railing by Aguni in last season’s finale, but he’s still kicking and is looking to join the King of Club’s game with Arisu and his friends. [Toyota Crown](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Crown) that makes for the best part of the episode: a seven-minute car chase with the King of Spades through the streets of Tokyo that starts with Chishiya getting left behind (he’s fine — probably) and ends with our crew somehow walking away from a rollover. As no-names get struck down viciously and viscerally around them, our protagonists duck, weave, and commandeer a classic Toyota Crown in an attempt to avoid the King of Spades. When we’re not in the car with the characters, we’re racing behind with the camera, fitting through even smaller spaces at just as fast a speed. The end of season one left us with the critical reveal that people who were seemingly players in the games could be involved in orchestrating them. Most of the first third of the episode is devoted to our wide-eyed gamer Arisu, stoic mountaineer Usagi, terminally underwhelmed Chishiya, trans badass Kuina, forensics expert Ann, and the behatted Tatta’s sprint to escape the clutches of the King of Spades, and it’s proof that this show still has it.

They attack the game with a fighting spirit that Arisu's ragtag bunch lacks, apart perhaps from Arisu himself, who retains the determination to protect the ...

Just a handful of points have the King’s team in the lead by the time we cut to black — definitely a small enough deficit to overcome, depending on whether Usagi can get away from Niragi or if Tatta gets his act together. But once Arisu heeds Kyuma’s words and decides to go for broke, the game gets a lot closer. As the King of Clubs he presides over a teamwork-based game, driving Arisu to find the best way to distribute the game’s points, divvy up assignments, and so forth. Not the rules of the game that Arisu and company are playing mind you — those are the most convoluted in the history of the series, though you can get the hang of it quickly. They attack the game with a fighting spirit that Arisu’s ragtag bunch lacks, apart perhaps from Arisu himself, who retains the determination to protect the lives of others at all costs rather than sacrifice them as he (ultimately unwillingly) sacrificed his friends back near the start of Season One. The in-it-together nature of a struggling band winds up being what gives the King his strength as an opponent: Not only does his team only act when everyone agrees rather than relying on a majority-rules vote or a single leader calling the shots, but they’re also ready and willing to die for one another.

They haven't stood up on a stage and bared their souls to a crowd of strangers as a music-making team. Kyuma, Goken Kanzaki, Uta Kisaragi, Sogo Shitara, and ...

If they touch a player of the opposing team while possessing infinite points, they will gain 10,000 points, and the other player will lose 10,000 points. • On a related note, Shitara did come up with Osmosis, which you think would give his team an edge in the game. While it’s been two years for the viewer since Arisu lost his friends in a game of hearts, it’s been mere days for Arisu. If Kyuma is right and the games in this world reveal a human’s true nature, then Arisu shows us who he is: a team player. Arisu comes up with the strategy for his team, splitting the group up into pairs composed of a faster player with fewer points and a slower player with more points: Kuina (fast) with Arisu (slow, supposedly), and Usagi (fast) with Niragi (slow, actively coughing up blood). Kyuma, who loves to wax poetic about game strategy and the nature of humanity in between battles, tells Arisu the band is winning because they value each other equally and aren’t afraid to risk it all for one another. Arisu uses the final minutes of his life to thank Tatta for always cheering him up, and then he runs. With 15 minutes left in the game and Arisu’s team behind by 3,000 points, morale is low. Shitara — he of the grunge rock mane — dies in the effort (RIP), but his three bandmates gain 10,000 points each, making them more or less undefeatable in battle and giving their team a substantial lead. The rules of Osmosis are as follows: Each team begins with 10,000 points to be distributed across the five members at the start of the game; each player must have a minimum of 100 points. The most valuable and risky of the methods, players can gain 10,000 points if they touch the other team’s base — a tall, thick pole with a plasma orb affixed to the top. While Arisu, Usagi, Tatta, and Kuina may have bonded while escaping The Beach, they haven’t lived together in crappy apartments and on tiny-venue tours.

(Though, also, who hired an in-over-his-head Tatta?) It's an interesting backstory for a character who loves and seems to know cars. (In the season premiere, it ...

In addition to building out the world and these characters, it highlights the complexity of the face card games and the relative arbitrariness of who is “innocent” and who is “guilty” here. • In the manga, Chishiya doesn’t participate in the Jack of Hearts game, but I am glad we get to spend more time with his character here. Like the “real” world, the morality of Borderland is rarely as simple as it seems, and even those with relative power (the dealers and citizens of Borderland) still have to play deadly games. While it may be tempting to see the face card players or the citizens of Borderland as the bad guys here, Kyuma and the players we meet in Prison Cell complicate that judgment. Yaba and the woman he domineers, Kotoko; convicted killer Banda and his banged teammate Matsushita; and Chishiya and Ippei, a man “too kind for this world.” That is until Ippei succumbs to the stress of the game and lets his collar explode. The second half is devoted to the beginning of another game: Prison Cell, set in a penitentiary, run by the Jack of Hearts, featuring a familiar face: Chishiya! Even the Jack of Hearts could choose to stay in Prison Game indefinitely, as the prison is stocked with snacks. The King of Clubs isn’t a bad guy — he’s sad to see Arisu and the others die — he simply wants his band to survive more. Rather than trying to force the battle, which could result in Kyuma running away and eluding Arisu for the rest of the game, Arisu appeals to Kyuma’s sense of honor. Because no metal objects are allowed in the game arena, Tatta is attempting to use one of the shipping containers’ doors to do the bloody deed. Nothing in the game rules says a player’s wristband can’t be carried by someone else, and while the wristbands can’t be unlocked, there are other ways to get the band off of a wrist … That’s one of the things I learned in this episode, which saw Tatta sacrificing his hand and life to ensure his team’s victory.

This sprawling Japanese manga adaptation is rarely subtle, but its ability to deliver on expectations of scope make it a true TV standout.

When the main group from the end of Season 1 is forced to split up, “Alice in Borderland” shrewdly finds challenges to cater to each of their individual strengths. Avoiding that middle ground leads to some messiness, all the way up until the last episode starts to fill in some of those strange gaps. When it lands on genuine character relationships and sacrifices that feel motivated, “Alice in Borderland” also earns its chance to head to whatever challenge is next. Where “Alice in Borderland” does land on some semblance of subtlety is in leaning into being a pandemic parable. So the first season of “Alice in Borderland” was a primal story of survival. Of course, it’s hard to describe the logistics of “Alice in Borderland” without putting words like “real” and “home” in the imaginary quotes that the show’s characters basically put around them when spoken out loud. A lot of the philosophizing here can get repetitive over the course of the season, especially when it comes to different players psychoanalyzing each other mid-game. Staring into the eyes of the mastermind of each challenge makes it less of an ambiguous test and more of an elimination round. There’s the one that its characters find themselves in and the one that they want to return to. Before long, Arisu and the gang are thrust right into the heart of one of the most thrilling car chase sequences on any-sized screen in recent memory. Picking up right where the last season left off, there’s barely time to take a deep breath before the real threat of violence comes charging up the abandoned avenue. [Netflix](https://www.indiewire.com/t/netflix/) show based on Haro Aso’s manga, Arisu is just one of a roughly undefined group of people looking to stay alive in their new alternate reality, where each person staves off death by playing wickedly manipulative games designed to pit players against each other and themselves.

Arisu and Usagi go searching for answers about Borderland, but just find more trouble. A recap of season two, episode four of Netflix's 'Alice in Borderland ...

The vegetation is increasing at an incredible rate.” This is her way of looking for answers. “This is the only world that is worthy of my control,” adds Yaba. • Kuina leaves Arisu and Usagi to look for Ann and Chishiya. • I was low-key rooting for Kotoko to win the Jack of Hearts game. • “I’ve never been in a land as beautiful as this one,” says Banda of Borderland. As we transition from one game to another, check in with our ensemble, and hear one woman’s chilling account of how she came to be in Borderland, this show weaves the elements in a way that breathes further life into this fictional world. The film ends, and the King of Spades appears again, like a bad penny. But Arisu finds some new and old friends in the terror: A young woman with a running blade as a foot and a bow in her hand saves Arisu’s life with her arrows, knocking him out in the process. I like that this show takes time to show the effects of this trauma. [last episode](https://www.vulture.com/article/alice-in-borderland-season-2-episode-3-recap.html), he makes it through the next round not by convincing anyone to tell him the truth about his suit but by guessing and then telling others the truth. In her interview with Kameyama, she tells him about the fireworks that weren’t fireworks the day they all came to Borderland. As the midway point in the season, the fourth episode has a lot of disparate work to do.

It has been a long time getting here, in more ways than one. As if the two-year wait for a second season wasn't agonizing enough, the expanded episode runtimes ...

The connotations of the Joker card are rarely positive — in most card games they have some kind of special, often detrimental effect, and the very idea of them is that they don’t look or behave like any other cards in a deck, which are all defined by their suit and number. However, one of the final things we see is a table in the gardens containing several cards that are carried and scattered by a light breeze, leaving only a Joker card behind. And yet there is a quiet, unspoken connection between them as they walk through the hospital gardens, that sense of shared experience and feelings. She claims to be a doctor treating him in a psychiatric facility, and that Usagi is a fellow patient. To recap, briefly, Arisu and his friends, only some of whom have survived this far, have made it to the final battle with the Queen of Hearts, aka Mira. As if the two-year wait for a second season wasn’t agonizing enough, the expanded episode runtimes of Alice in Borderland’s eight-episode sophomore outing – this finale alone is feature-length – made the journey a lengthy but never quite arduous one.

It all started with fireworks, or so we thought. As Ariusu, Chota, and Karube run into the subway station at Shibuya Crossing in the very first episode of Alice ...

The Joker, our ferryman to Borderland, still exists, which means Borderland is still there, just beyond the veil of our world. In the manga, the Joker is a mysterious character, implied to be a kind of Borderland ferryman. The proof is in Arisu and Usagi: Because of their Borderland connection, or perhaps because they simply like one another, the two strike up a flirty conversation by the vending machine in the hospital. during the Civil War and was originally created as a trump card in the trick-taking game of Euchre. The Joker as a card originated in the U.S. Much of Alice in Borderland Season 2 was devoted to exploring the role of “dealers” and “citizens” in Borderland. Yaba and Banda, two characters who revel in the violent abuse of power Borderland allows even more than our real world, choose to stay.) Ann, who seemingly dies in Borderland and therefore is unable to make a choice, survives; in the hospital, we see the doctors successfully able to restart her heart. Their hearts stopped, and that is the time they spent in Borderland. (The first phase being the numbered-card games that the Borderland players collectively clear in Season 1.) In a flashback, we see the man who would become the King of Spades accepting the position at the end of the previous cycle; it is implied that, before becoming the face card-killer, he was someone like Aguni, fighting to take down the previous King of Spades. At the end of Season 1, we discover that Momoka and Asahi are “dealers,” people who have been recruited to make and monitor the games in exchange for extended visas and the hope they might eventually be able to leave Borderland. Alice in Borderland is back on Netflix, just in time to celebrate the holidays. As Ariusu, Chota, and Karube run into the subway station at Shibuya Crossing in the very first episode of Alice in Borderland, fireworks explode in the sky above the city.

Episode 6 of Alice in Borderland Season 2 wastes absolutely no time picking up where we left off. Usagi tries to defend herself from the Queen, ...

and allows Chishiya to win the round. Kuina too makes the same choice, deciding to fight for salvation, setting everything up for an intriguing couple of episodes to close this season out with. He manages to outsmart her by the round of deduction, leaving two players left. Through flashbacks, we learn that Kuzuryu was a righteous lawyer until he was convinced by his superiors to simply do his job and not even think about the right and wrong thing to do. The King of Diamonds seemed to have been a lawyer in a previous life, especially if the Supreme Court location is anything to go by. Secondly, choosing the correct number will cause the other players to lose two points instead of one. Of course, we still have the King of Spades, but equally, at the Supreme Court, we have the King of Diamonds, to deal with. And with that, the Queen jumps off the side of the site and leaps to her doom, but the laser hits her before she touches the ground. With the Queen defeated, Arisu confronts her on the rooftop and quizzes whether she was actually one of the players originally. In doing so, the group walk right into their trap, and the Challengers manage to clear everyone onto their side… However, they need to get another 5 and there’s only one solution – play the Queen at her own game. Usagi tries to defend herself from the Queen, who knocks her down and chases after Arisu.

The third episode of Alice in Borderland's second season is a terrific hour of television that should probably have been two terrific half-hours of...

Given all the heartstring-pulling that went on during the end of the King of Clubs game, it’s a smart move to make the Jack of Hearts game comparatively squalid and nasty. It’s a mood that befits the prison setting, which is the closest to the urban-wasteland aesthetic of the Saw franchise (another obvious influence on the story) than the show has ever gotten before. There’s one more important thing to note, about the King of Clubs game: Other than putting as much distance between themselves and the King of Spades as possible, Arisu’s big reason for choosing an ultra-difficult King game was his theory that the Kings are high-ranking enough in the game’s architecture to have information to share about the game masters and how to beat them and escape. Then, with a literal boom (the blimp carrying the King of Clubs banner blows up and crashes into the sea), we’re off to the second half of the episode. The nudity is both funny and sexy of course, but it’s just as obviously a metaphor now that we’ve gotten to know the guy: He lived his life with no regrets, completely comfortable in his own skin. Here he mostly watches from the sidelines with his usual preternatural calmness as players fitted with explosive collars (those things again!) must trust one another to tell them the randomized card suit that appears on a screen on the back of the collar. Before long, only the alpha and his gal, the manipulator and his new friend, and Chishiya himself survive. (It also ties directly to Tatta’s introductory flashback, in which he causes an accident at the auto shop where he works that costs his supervisor his hand and his job.) Indeed, Tatta dies from his injuries even as the rest of his team survive — including badly beaten Usagi, who looked like another casualty for a moment, and even Niragi, whom Arisu beats up before he slinks off with a reluctant but heartfelt thank-you to the late Tatta for saving his life. A great deal of credit must go to the actors playing the two team leaders. Well, maybe not nothing: For the scheme to work, Tatta must pulverize his hand in a shipping container door so badly that his crushed bones allow the bracelet to slip off. It’s true that beyond the overall conceit of people being forced to play lethal games the two stories don’t have a ton in common, whether in terms of game mechanics or the underlying fears and desires being exploited by the game masters. But, he reasons, if he can somehow get his point-tallying bracelet off — there are no rules against it, after all — and hand it to someone else, that person would be playing with both sets of points, and therefore be able to beat Kyuma or anyone else.

The Japanese battle royale series Alice in Borderland is based on the Haro Aso manga series and has thus far enjoyed two seasons on Netflix, both of them pretty ...

The show pulls the same trick with Ann, implying she has expired for the emotional moment and then retreating from that decision to undercut its emotional power in the end. Returning to the real world has been a persistent theme all throughout the season, with several characters speculating on whether that would even be possible. Alice in Borderland is a show that obviously requires a healthy suspension of disbelief, but some of these survivals push that idea to breaking point. Given that Alice in Borderland is about deadly games of physicality and psychology, it’s surprising in the second season how many people don’t die. They’re still under the impression that if they can accumulate a complete deck of cards they will be able to “win” the game and return to the real world. The plot revolves around a group of people in an abandoned, almost otherworldly Tokyo who are forced to compete in a series of games, many themed around Lewis Carroll’s literary classic [Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice%27s_Adventures_in_Wonderland).