‘Alice in Borderland’ Season 3 Episode 2 Recap: Rain of Fire

I dreaded watching this episode of Alice in Borderland. Not because I’m squeamish, or sensitive, or artistically or philosophically opposed to random acts of gratuitous violence. It’s just that I like my gratuitous violence to mean something, man. If I’m going to watch characters get senselessly mowed down in agonizing terror for an hour at a stretch, I want to know they did so in order for the filmmakers to make a statement about the wielding of power against the powerless, however personal or political you want to make it. I want to know those characters died for a purpose.

That’s never been Alice’s strong suit. This isn’t Squid Game, with its candy-colored Verhoevenesque anti-capitalism. This is just a bunch of cool violent shit happening to nice people who deserve better and try and help each other. I feel for the characters of course, but their plight seems very random and narrow. I don’t foresee circumstances in which getting sucked into a warp-zone afterlife where you get shot by lasers reveals much about the human experience, you know?

But here’s the thing: The moment you shoot a flaming arrow through some rando redshirt’s head, all my objections go up in smoke. So to speak.

And when you shoot a hundred million flaming arrows? Buddy, gimme all of that ya got.

How quickly do I forget that co-writer/director Shinsuke Sato’s talent for violent spectacle is so formidable it overwhelms any other objections I have about this show. Do I wish it was, y’know, about something, the way The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is “about” Vietnam or The Babadook is about the challenges of single parenting? You bet. Do I fucking care about any of that in the slightest when, again, the unseen forces that run Borderland launch a hundred million flaming arrows in our hero’s direction? I do not. I’m only human!

The arrows descend based on the margin of error in math problems presented to the players in a game of fortunes, where randomly drawn pieces of paper foretell your fate and present increasingly difficult math equations, logic problems, riddles, and trivia. The wronger you are, the more arrows get shot in the direction of you and the other players. 

Before long the place is an inferno and only a handful of survivors remain. This includes Arisu, our hero; Sachiko (Risa Sudou), an unhappy housewife; Kazuya (Hiroyuki Ikeuchi), a gangster whose name is literally an acronym for yakuza; Nobu (Kotaro Daigo), who attempted suicide over bullying; Shion (Hyunri), a tall and beautiful (I’m guessing) model who was once attacked by a stalker; Natsu (Sakura Kiryu), an ebullient young woman who takes a shine to Shion and who, like Arisu, is a survivor of the Shibuya meteorite impact; Tetsu (Koji Ohkura), a grumpy, seen-it-all meth addict who knows first aid because he’d get arrested if he visited a legit doctor; and Masato (Yugo Mikawa), a nerd-presenting guy who doesn’t actually seem to be all that good at math.

All these people, they realize after they escape that final, colossal barrage of arrows, have been in Borderland before. All of them got there during near-death experiences. Note that this means the meteorite has nothing to do with Borderland itself — that falling space object just happened to trigger Arisu and Netsu’s near-death journeys, the way suicide did for Nobu or stalking did for Shion. (You have to presume Kazuya was shot or stabbed, Tetsu OD’d, and so on.)

But things are different now. They’ve all been recruited by the same man giving out the same Joker cards — Banda, the psychopath from Season 2 whom I’m pretty sure Arisu never even actually met. (Banda’s dialogue in the Season 3 premiere would appear to confirm that.) From this they surmise that he’s the Joker, the final card in the deck that they have to defeat. 

They also realize that the game has changed. No longer can they wander at will, selecting which games to play. Instead, they’re all frogmarched from one to the next and forced to play the same game, after which they’re funneled to a new game in which they play against other survivors from previous rounds. In other words, it’s a tournament — which means Arisu might be forced to kill his wife Usagi, or vice versa, even if they do find each other.

In the meantime, Arisu has a more pressing issue to face: the next game. Staged in a large viral research facility, which like everything else in Borderland Tokyo is completely abandoned except for the players and whatever’s powering the games, it’s a card game with complicated rules. In essence, there are zombie cards, one per each of the game’s four large teams, that enable you to infect other people, which is your goal as a zombie. However, they also enable you to get shot to death if an opponent plays a shotgun card, of which every player has one. Yet an unknown number of vaccine cards are also scattered out there, and can be played to de-zombify someone. In the end, the team with the most survivors wins.

The gameplay is quickly commandeered by a character who gets the most “aaaaand here’s the windup…aaaaaaaaaaaand here’s the pitch” introduction I’ve seen in a minute: Rei (Tina Tamashiro). A blue-haired e-girl who looks like Ramona Flowers from Scott Pilgrim, she concocts a concept she refers to as “the barricade of trust.” In essence, players on Arisu’s team — which she infiltrates — will promise to use any vaccine cards they accrue on each other if they become zombies. 

In exchange, the zombified players will divulge who infected them, and those players will be threatened with death by shotgun card. This will discourage other teams from messing with them, until the game’s final round has passed and everyone survives. As the possessor of both a zombie card and a vaccine card, she offers herself up to the group as proof of her logic: They could easily kill her if they wanted, but she’s promised to use her vaccine card on any of them who need it, and they know she’ll come through because they’ll kill her if she doesn’t. 

Got all that? Because I’m not sure I do. 

Anyway, the system works well enough until this one mop-haired creep (Motoki Ochiai) whom the expanding team has incorporated realizes they can improve their chances still further if they actually go out and kill the zombies they learn about, shaking them down for information first. Kazuya takes the job, and a brief flashback indicates this isn’t his first time killing people, either. In response, the zombies start networking and planning retaliation. But when Arisu raises this possibility to Rei, she just shrugs it off. “It’s starting to feel like a real game!”

I’ve sat through enough Saw movies to tell you that telling stories about sadistic ritualized booby-trap competitive murder games is a lot harder than it looks to do well, especially when you’ve got fuck-all else going on in your story. Maybe that’s why I find myself so won over by Sato’s bright, glossy camerawork, and the creativity that goes into each game, environment, and kill. Just the slowly building roar of those hundred million arrows, lighting the night sky with their improbably multitude, is more interesting than anything a lot of similarly themed horror can pull off put together.

The spectacle is anchored by Arisu. Not so much the character at the moment — he’s only just remembering his last stint in Borderland, and he’s been unable to locate his wife Usagi, so he doesn’t have a ton going on right now besides survival. I mean the actor, Kento Yamazaki. Just in skimming this episode looking for interesting imagery, I’m struck by how much of the surreal horror is communicated by the look in his eyes alone. Seriously, rewind to that first arrow strike and look at how he reacts: He’s as confused and repulsed as you or I would be.

Which is a good thing. Alice in Borderland is a show about near-death experiences that transport you to an abandoned Tokyo turned into a playing card–themed death amusement park capable of flinging enough flaming arrows at you to murder everyone in Spain and South Korea combined. You need someone to root you in the experience, to communicate your very simple sense of what the fuck? That’s Arisu’s job here in Borderland, and he’s good at it. 

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.FINAL SHOT OF REI LAUGHING AND WALKING AWAY