‘Alice in Borderland’ Season 3 Episode 6 Recap: When the Levee Breaks

Game over already? After only six episodes compared to the first two seasons’ eight apiece, Alice in Borderland Season 3 has reached an abrupt end. Arisu and Usagi’s story is wrapped up, the villainy of Banda and Ryuji has been thwarted, a mysterious figure — maybe not the mysterious figure, but a mysterious figure — behind the scenes, played by a major actor in an unadvertised cameo, has been revealed, a sequel has been set up. I can’t be the only one who feels like we were a few levels short of clearing the game, right?

There are seven surviving players in Alice in Borderland, eight if (like the unseen game master) you count Usagi’s two-month-old fetus. Through yet another nail-biting combination of intelligence, ingenuity, and luck, all of them make it out of the final game alive. Usagi, Ryuji, Sachiko, Rei, Nobu, and Yuna exit and are almost immediately beset by a massive earthquake and flood that destroys abandoned Borderland Tokyo completely. Arisu is told he won the game by staying behind, but he won’t accept this fate, and smashes his way through the wall to rescue his friends.

With some help from Ann back in the real world, Arisu, who’s near death, shakes off a blow to the head and surfaces from the water to face off with Banda, whom he’d long presumed to be the Joker. But the game master’s laser beam takes care of the creep, and from out of the mist steps…Ken Watanabe?

Billed as “Elderly Gentleman,” dressed in all black with a bowler hat and milk-white irises, this man is no more the Joker, the master of the games, or the ruler of the Borderland than Banda was. He does, however, seem to have the power to freeze time. 

He claims he’s just a gatekeeper, there to oversee everyone’s transition from life to death via the Borderland and the whirlpool-like vortex in which it terminates. The Joker isn’t a person, he says: “It’s simply a card,” one that represents the liminal space between the cards, between life and death. I mean, it’s Ken Watanabe, are you gonna disagree with him? The world, he claims, is in such a space: Something is coming that will send countless people to the Borderland, presumably connected with the destruction of Tokyo all around them.

When the flow of time resumes, Arisu leaps into the raging waters and rescues Usagi from Ryuji’s clutches, not by prying her away, but by winning the strange, death-obsessed professor over with his devotion to the woman he loves. (Keep in mind it’s Ryuji’s devotion to a beloved former student that has driven him to seek death in the first place.) Then Usagi mentally comes to terms with her late father’s suicide, embracing him, granting herself the strength to help them both climb clear of the flood. They then get back into a more placid river, which whisks them along toward a break in the clouds through which sunlight shines down.

Then we’re back in the real world. Everyone’s doing great! Sachiko and her son are happy. Yuna is gonna bring her boyfriend to her beloved brother’s grave. Nobu has graduated school and is ready to be there for his mom like she was for him. Rei is an accomplished anime cartoonist, and she’s reconciled with her estranged parents. Usagi and Arisu are picking out names for their baby.

And Arisu still works as a counselor, talking to many of the characters from Seasons 1 and 2 about their current lives. It doesn’t seem like any of them remember their experiences in Borderland, though we know Arisu does. (So does Ann, the survivor who helped him go back, and who looks at him with what sure appears to be love.)

Right near the end, earthquake tremors shake Arisu’s workplace, not for the first time. They’re not localized, either: A news report claims environmental factors have triggered tremors due to “global tectonic activity” all around the world. We take this opportunity to travel to Los Angeles, where a camera zooms in on the nametag of an unseen waitress: ALICE.

Alice in Borderland isn’t even the first East Asian dystopian game-themed sci-fi horror thriller to end by flagrantly teasing an American remake/reboot/sequel on Netflix this year! That would be Squid Game, which ends almost identically. Seriously, swap out Ken Watanabe for Cate Blanchett and you barely have to change a thing. 

As such, I’m not sure, in retrospect, how necessary this season was. Once you set up the deck-of-cards rubric for the story, the Joker is an inevitability, yes. But this season, despite the skill involved in its execution (no pun intended), feels superfluous, tacked on, a needless epilogue designed to get us to the U.S. of A. in the end. Did we really need six more episodes of mayhem to convince us Arisu and Usagi are in love, or that  human connection is so valuable that sadists will stop at nothing to sever it? I think that ground is pretty well covered in Seasons 1 and 2, personally.

With two fewer episodes than either of the first two seasons, too, this one had no room to maneuver or meander, either. One episode of set-up, a few episodes of games, a half-episode of wrap-up, the end. There was no way this wouldn’t feel slight compared to the original seasons, because in a very real way, it is slight compared to the original seasons.

But what am I gonna do, complain about that Tokyo Tower sequence, or about characters like Rei and Tetsu and Ryuji, or about A HUNDRED MILLION FLAMING ARROWS? I am not. Even if Alice S3 is the definition of an inessential sequel, “inessential” is not a synonym for “bad” or “not worth watching.” The bottom line is that I like these people a lot, and I like the way Shinsuke Sato puts them through the wringer. That’s enough.

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.