Don’t Hate the Player

Alice in Borderland (今際の国のアリス)

With a disappointing Squid Game Season 3 Finale, I’m turning towards another Asian show called Alice in Borderland, obviously named after Alice in Wonderland… but the name reminds me of the video game Borderlands. Anyway, we recently got a trailer for Alice in Borderland Season 3, set to premiere on September 25, 2025. To get me excited for the third season, I revisited the original first season.

Alice in Borderland is a weird Sci-Fi/horror television show, based on the manga by Haro Aso. The story is about a group of friends who accidentally found themselves in an empty Tokyo and forced to play these deadly games. If you win a game, your life is extended until your visa expires… then you’re forced back to playing the game.

The whole thing is fantastical. Lasers from the sky will execute players if they break the rules or go outside a boundary… which they are calling in the show ‘borderland’.

At first, you think the show is going to be about three friends, two brothers and a gangster-ish friend. The show changes direction and suddenly it’s about someone else, a rock climber girl. My least favorite arc in the first season is our characters found themselves at the mysterious “The Beach”. That whole storyline was way too long in the series. There were so many (young) players, partying… it just felt out of place. That is the weakest part of the first season… otherwise by the end, they discover the game master.

Squid Game: Season 3

You guys already know that I really love the first season of Squid Game, the Netflix series that took the world by storm in 2021. To me, they never should have continued the story, it had a good ending with the first season… yet, show creator Hwang Dong-hyuk couldn’t turn down the dump truck full of money. So, he created a sequel, which was broken up in two parts: Season 2 and Season 3.

Season 2 ended on a cliffhanger, so now that Season 3 has finally aired, you have the full complete story of Player 456.

There were many problems with the Squid Games finale, first off some of the games were poorly thought out, like the hide-and-seek game. Basically, you have a group of people trying to hide and a group trying to murder them. There’s no strategy, it’s just here’s a knife, go murder people.

The VIPs were also terrible. The worst part of Season 1 were the VIPs… yet Hwang Dong-hyuk brought them back. Truly terrible. If you go back and remove all the VIPs from the story, it would make the show more enjoyable.

The worst part of the final Squid Game show was the introduction of the baby. It was just so stupid. The baby became a player, and, oh god, who thought this was a good idea? That whole baby storyline was just awful.

This universe is quite interesting, perhaps the filmmakers could have written a totally different player and taken place in a different country (where they play Squid Game differently). It could have been a brand-new breed of players, and the survivor (winner) could eventually meet up with Player 456 or something to tie it back to the first game. Instead, what we have with the second and third game is that it was unsatisfying and unnecessary.

Like The Last of Us Season 2 ruining everything good about the first season… so did Squid Game: Season 3. It ruined the first well-crafted series.