More deadly games, more philosophising.

At the end of my review for episodes 2 and 3, I said I was still enjoying Alice in Borderland, although I wasn’t sure it could sustain for another five hours. Having plodded through two more parts, I’m sad to report that my doubts have been confirmed.

I should preface all this by adding that it’s a largely enjoyable show. It’s well made, the acting is good, the characters are likeable. The problem is that the format has become drearily repetitive and appears to have nowhere to go. Arisu and his chums are locked into a seemingly endless cycle of deadly games (most of which are essentially versions of tag with increasingly byzantine rules) interspersed with long slow scenes where the participants ponder the meaning of life, and wonder whether having to fight to the death is really much worse than living in contemporary Japan (Duh! Obviously it is!).

After the cycle rotated a couple more times in these episodes, I’m afraid I decided I had better things to do, rather than watch the same narrative on repeat. The other effect of all this repetition is that you stop caring about the outcome of the games. You know that all the new characters will die, so you don’t bother to invest in them, and any sense of jeopardy is lost.

Having decided to bail I took a naughty peak at the plot synopsis for the series finale. I haven’t seen it, so it might be executed brilliantly, but if multiple websites are to be believed then two words come to mind and they are ‘Bobby’ and ‘Ewing’, and I’m definitely not sitting through three more hours for that. The problem with that kind of ending is that it means the narrative has no rules at all, and if they spin it out to a third series I won’t be coming back.

Verdict: I hope that everyone who sticks with the show to its finale finds it worthwhile, but for me, Alice in Borderland is an object example of the over-extended format. If you are into ‘nothing-is-what-it-seems’ drama, then it will do the trick nicely, but endless enigmas are ultimately meaningless, and start to pall very quickly (cf. Lost). Let’s just hope that the second season of Squid Game doesn’t fall into the same trap. 6/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com