“Alice” goes down the rabbit hole again

Why would anyone reenter a world of death games after surviving the last time?

On “Squid Game,” Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) had a noble albeit ill-conceived plan to dismantle the deadly enterprise preying on those in debt, thereby saving numerous future lives. Worth it, if he succeeded. Over on “Alice in Borderland,” Arisu (Kento Yamazaki) probably wouldn’t choose to return, if not for an outside force compelling him.

Back when the series started, Arisu had been a video game-obsessed guy with little direction in his life. But after he and other strangers were transported into an alternate Tokyo where they’re forced into competitions with deadly outcomes, he came into his own. His gaming know-how, unwavering compassion and ability to understand others’ motives led to Arisu ultimately winning the games. Those who made it to the end with him had the choice to return to the real world, where they awoke as survivors of a meteorite impact in Shibuya with no recollection of the Borderlands. During recovery Arisu met fellow meteorite survivor Usagi (Tao Tsuchiya) whom – unbeknownst to him thanks to a spotty memory – had also been a player in the Borderlands.

In its third season “Alice in Borderland” presents a driven Arisu who is now married to Usagi and pursuing a career as a counselor. But when Usagi goes missing, Arisu slowly begins to understand that she’s been lured back to the world between life and death, participating in twisted games just as he once did. A woman named Ann (Ayaka Miyoshi), a forensic scientist who was once in Borderland alongside Arisu, helps him return in order to bring back his wife.

Based on the best-selling manga series by Haro Aso, “Alice in Borderland” winks at Lewis Carroll’s novel first through this version of Alice: Arisu (pronounced ah-ri-seu). In the first two seasons, the difficulty levels of the Borderland games were designated by the number on playing cards, with actual people embodying the face cards for the most challenging games. Arisu even met up with a mad hatter (Nobuaki Kaneko) and a mysterious smiling guy named Chishiya (Nijiro Murakami), a stand-in for the Cheshire Cat. Although those characters do not return for these new games, there’s still a nod to the literary classic this season.

“We alluded to the original Lewis Carroll ‘Alice in Wonderland’ in our own special way that is a bit different from the original manga series,” director Shinsuke Sato told Salon through interpreter Mihoko Imai. “Arisu is forced to chase Usagi back into this other world. Usagi, as you probably know, is ‘rabbit’ in Japanese. He’s essentially doing the same thing that Alice is doing, chasing the rabbit down the rabbit hole in Lewis Carroll’s novel. So Usagi has been kind of summoned again into this world, and he has to chase after the quote, unquote rabbit.”

Risky business

Although Alice never ran the risk of actually perishing in Wonderland, Arisu is another matter because of the very nature of the Borderland and how you gain entry through a near-death experience. In the trailer, just before Arisu heads off to Borderland, Ann tells him he has two minutes to rejoin to the land of the living. While this doesn’t seem like much time, as we’ve seen, time in the Borderlands is stretched much longer, with two seasons’ worth of death games occurring in the space of mere minutes in the real world. The clock is ticking for both Arisu and Usagi, the rabbit who also must return on time.

“It’s the shift of the central question that has changed in Season 3,” said Sato. “Whereas in Season 1 and 2, it was, ‘What is this strange world? We can’t figure it out. And all of these people disappear, and then we’re forced to play this game.’ At the end of Season 2, we finally figure it out . . . that they are in a sort of purgatory.

“Because the central question has already been solved in Season 2, what new question do we bring to the table?’ And that was, ‘So we have to return to [Borderland] – but can we come back to the real world?’”

From a storytelling standpoint, Season 3 is also taking some risk by venturing into untested territory. While the first two seasons were based on the manga series, creator Haro Aso had ended its original run at Arisu’s return to the living world in 2016. Once the show premiered in 2020, he wrote a shorter “Alice in Borderland: Retry” bonus story focusing on a one-off game, which isn’t enough material for a full season. So where could the Netflix series go now? As “Game of Thrones” fans might attest, once the TV series outpaces the source material, things can get dicey.

In addition, Netflix has made it known that many of the fan-favorite characters would not be returning to the games this season for various reasons. Besides Arisu and Usagi, the only other familiar faces that had been confirmed are Ann, serial killer Banda (Hayato Isomura) and domineering con man Yaba (Katsuya Maiguma). That means the series had to create a whole new cast of characters for fans to love and loathe.

(Netflix) “Alice in Borderland” Season 3 cast

This season, one of those characters is Ryuji (Kento Kaku), a man who is seen in the trailer using a wheelchair. Sato gave some hints about how Ryuji is tied to the central question for the return to Borderland.

“We now clearly know in Season 3 that this world of the games is the world after which we die, and we didn’t know that in Season 1 and Season 2,” he said. “I wanted Ryuji to be a character who embodies this huge question, ‘What is the afterlife? What does it all mean?’ We know that we’re all going to die, but Ryuji is the character that really intellectually takes on the question head-on and wrestles with it. That was very challenging and also very, very interesting and rewarding to do.”

Ryuji also appears to be collaborating with Usagi during the games. In the first two seasons, Usagi had been grappling with the death of her mountain climber father, and actress Tao Tsuchiya feels that underlying pain could be a point of a connection.

“For Usagi, Ryuji almost was like a mirror, in a way,” she told Salon through interpreter Yoshiko Okura. “Like Usagi and her trauma that has to do with her father, [Ryuji] himself had things he had to face within his own life. I think they were similar in that sense. For Usagi, he was exuding a tenderness as a person, and maybe that overlapped a little with her father.”

A new game plan

(Netflix) “Alice in Borderland”

Of course, no return to the Borderland would be complete without partaking in sadistic games, and that required inventing new ways to test the players. Some diehard fans, after catching a glimpse of Usagi in the trailer wearing a gas mask on the subway, have speculated at least one game might be inspired by a side story from the manga.

While Sato couldn’t confirm exactly what Season 3 would bring, he does reference a game that was test of endurance and pushed the limits of the production team to create.

“In terms of CG, computer graphics and effects and so forth, all of the games were very, very challenging. But I think the most challenging was the final game in the series,” he admitted. “I can’t go too much into detail because I don’t want to give away any spoilers, but it was indeed a technical feat. But this one in particular was challenging because it is a mind game, that mind game that really plays with the characters’ emotions. And they have to play in these close quarters; it was a very close kind of set. It took about one month to shoot that entire game, and all of the crew unanimously mentioned that that was the most challenging game to shoot. So I think we visually achieved something that probably has not been done before.”

“Alice in Borderland” returns for Season 3 on Sept. 25 on Netflix.