‘Alice in Borderland’ Season 3 Episode 4 Recap: Tower of Terror

I’m calling it right now: If you’re afraid of heights, and I sure am, this episode of Alice in Borderland is the scariest hour of television you’ll see all year. I’d say it’s scarier than the similarly heights-based games in this year’s Squid Game, for the simple reason that none of us have ever seen a colossal game arena in real life. All of us, however, have seen towers and bridges and under-construction skyscrapers that are nothing but a pile of bolted-together metal for hundreds and hundreds of feet in the air. Hell, if you’ve ever looked up at the catwalks in a basketball arena and freaked out a little bit, you know what I mean. 

Anytime I even think of this stuff I get the shivers and shakes. Making me watch this nightmarish episode, in which half of our heroes are forced to climb Tokyo Tower by hand? Let me see what I wrote in my notes: “THIS IS AN ABSOLUTE FUCKING NIGHTMARE FOR ME” — boldface and all caps in the original — followed by “oh i hate it, oh i hate it so much lol.”

The “lol” is the give away. I hated it so much! I loved it!

One of Alice’s primary tasks is coming up with novel, recognizably awful new ways to kill people. Jumping from one moving subway train to another and getting pulped by a column between the tracks you didn’t see coming, for example. Or getting blown to smithereens knowing you’re just mere feet from your goal. Or getting a ball dropped on you from a great height, knocking you ass over teakettle as you bounce your way hundreds of feet down Tokyo Tower, colliding with girder after girder until your already broken body collides with the ground below. 

This is director Shinsuke Sato’s most spectacular visual yet this season, and he gives it real you-are-there immediacy. The camera provides vertiginous views up and down the length of the tower and swirls around it to show how ass-in-the-wind everybody is as the climb it. The red paint and bright lights are naturally cinematic. And you absolutely do gotta hand it to him: The kills are excruciating. 

In the end, the survivors on the team triumph, hitting enough buttons scattered in precarious positions around the tower to play a BINGO and win the game. Usagi herself hits the free square on the center, all the way at the top of the tower, and gets a full-on mountaineer-at-daybreak glory shot for her troubles.

Those troubles are about to get more serious. Banda, overlord of the Joker games, orders his man Ryuji to finally betray and kill his friend Usagi. In exchange, he’ll meet the real ruler of the Borderland and travel to the dead world beyond. At least, so Banda says — as Yaba, who implies he’s in charge of a different stage of the game now, tells his creepy friend, it seems like he’s just doing all this for fun. Is he really trying to recruit Arisu, using Usagi’s death as a catalyst for him joining the games as a citizen rather than a player? Is he really going to help Ryuji? Or is he just the kind of person who in another life would get a job with the Trump Defense Department and kill people purely for love of the game?

Arisu’s team, meanwhile, also made it through the subway game intact (though we don’t see how). However, they’re too slow to stop the train, which crashes, badly wounding Arisu. This leaves him at a great disadvantage in their next game, Kick the Can — a sort of relay race slash rugby game where you have to get an exploding canister back to its launch point within a certain time or it will blow up and kill you. With only ten cans, only ten survivors are possible, and since the players’ struggles can set off the bombs either by rough handling or missing the deadline, not even that many are guaranteed.

Arisu’s team does its best to help each other out, which gives it a distinct advantage over their redshirt rivals, none of whom is given much of a personality or even dialogue. Shion and Natsu both die when other players prevent them from returning the can. So does Katsuya, the last man standing, who voluntarily sacrifices himself so that the wounded Arisu won’t have to take on all the remaining players on his own. He strips off his shirt and reveals his full, glorious yakuza tattoo before battling to the death. 

That leaves Sachiko, Nobu, Rei, Tetsu, and Arisu himself to play the final game, set behind the massive construction walls that mark the outskirts of the still-damaged Shibuya district. But when Arisu steps inside, Shibuya is as it was the morning of the meteorite strike, full of people and noise. On this show, the fact that it seems normal gives you more cause for concern, not less.

But the real centerpiece of the episode is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment, at least within the world of the show. As their subway cars pass by one another, Arisu and Usagi see each other. They reach for each other, only to be thwarted by a divider column — and by Ryuji, who pulls Usagi back just in time. Is the professor saving her arm from being pulped, or keeping her from her husband for his own nefarious purposes?

I wonder. To the extent Alice in Borderland is about anything, it’s the same concept behind that My Little Pony cartoon: Friendship is magic. This show leans hard on the emotional bonds formed by the players, and works hard to create them with us, too. There’s a brother and sister on here now too, as well as a married couple. Everyone was crushed by the death of their teammates, even the once-untrustworthy Kazuya. Natsu is so determined to honor Shion that she gets herself killed in the process. Everyone refuses to leave the wounded Arisu behind when he asks them too, because they realizes he’s saved all their lives at one point or another. Even Banda has Yaba to joke around with.

So it’s entirely possible Ryuji will repent. We learn this episode that his experiments with near-death experience induction ended with the death of an enthusiastic student and protégé. It seems clear he’s looking for her on the other side of Borderland, just as Usagi is looking for her late father. But what if he decides that he values Usagi’s life more than the memory of the dead? 

Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.