Alice in Borderland Season 3’s ending was about the Watchman giving Arisu a choice: he could either die by throwing himself into a vortex or return to the world of the living to struggle through life with Usagi and their unborn child. How exactly did things come to that? When Arisu and Usagi reached the last stage of the games in Season 2 and essentially gave all the players the choice to return to the real world or stay in this fantastical realm, Yaba and Banda decided to hang back as citizens. They revered Arisu and wanted him to return to Borderland too. So, Banda recruited Matsuyama to lure Usagi into the realm so that Arisu would come after her. During the final stage, Matsuyama was tasked with killing Usagi—in exchange, Matsuyama would get to see the land of the dead—because with Usagi dead, Arisu wouldn’t feel the need to go back to the world of the living. And he’d perpetually play games in Borderland, thereby fulfilling Yaba and Banda’s desires for all eternity, I suppose. Was Banda’s gambit a success? Did Arisu stay in Borderland or return to the land of the mortals? Did we get a teaser for Season 4? Let’s find out.
Spoiler Alert
Ann Saw Banda
So, the final game was largely about the players analyzing their respective futures and rolling the dice until they made it all the way to the exit door. When they reached the room with the exit door, Arisu rolled the dice, and it landed on 7. Yes, technically there were 7 players remaining in that room, but since Borderland counted Usagi’s unborn child as a player too, that meant there were 8 players in there. Hence, one of them had to go for the sacrifice play so that the rest could survive. Arisu got everyone, including Usagi, to exit the game room, while he stayed back. When he saw Matsuyama raising the gun to kill Usagi, he instantly began regretting his decision. Thankfully, Matsuyama couldn’t compel himself to kill Usagi. That seemed like a win-win for all. However, the game turned the whole situation on its head by stating that those who weren’t in the game room were destined to die in a biblical flood, while Arisu would survive. It’s difficult; the flood wouldn’t have happened if Matsuyama had pulled the trigger. But there’s a good chance that since he didn’t, the flood was activated and it threatened to kill everyone, thereby fulfilling Banda’s plan of deleting Arisu’s motivation to go back to the mortal realm. Arisu wasn’t one to back down so easily, though. As soon as he learned from Banda that he had orchestrated this whole nonsensical affair just to bring him back to the fray, Arisu escaped the game room and went off to save Usagi from the flood.
Moments after he jumped into the turbulent waters to get to Usagi, who was getting further and further away from him, Arisu began drowning. Coincidentally, in the mortal realm, Banda appeared in the room where his physical body was in order to kill him. That said, Ann—the one who had put Arisu in that trance-like state so that he could go into Borderland—somehow noticed Banda and stopped him from suffocating Arisu. A couple of questions should be addressed here. Firstly, how can Banda shift between Borderland and the mortal realm? Secondly, how did Ann see Banda? To be honest, I don’t have the answers to either of these questions. I suppose being a citizen of Borderland allowed Banda to walk between the two realms in the form of a ghost as he willed. He was under the impression that he could choose who could see him and who couldn’t. He was clearly wrong, because maybe those who had been to Borderland and back had the ability to see the citizens, especially when they were in the same room as a person who had one half in the mortal realm and the other in Borderland—which in this case was Arisu.
Banda Died
When Banda failed to kill Arisu in the mortal realm, he returned to Borderland. By this time, Arisu, after hearing Ann’s screams from the mortal realm, had managed to avoid drowning and swam to a broken building to get his bearings back. Banda appeared before him and, realizing that there was no way to compel Arisu to hang back with him, pulled out his gun to shoot Arisu in the head. That’s when the laser from the sky made an appearance and killed Banda. Before Arisu could make head or tail of this situation, a mysterious-looking individual, played by the legendary Ken Watanabe, who referred to himself as the Watchman, appeared before him and said that he had made a mistake in assigning Banda the post of handling the games. With Banda gone, the Watchman needed somebody to fill in. So, he paused the flood and invited Arisu to a game of cards. The rules were simple. If Arisu chose any card other than the Joker, he’d get a chance to decide his fate. If he chose the Joker card, then Arisu’s fate would be in the Watchman’s hands. By some odd stroke of luck, both the cards that the Watchman drew from his pack were Joker cards. Hence, the Watchman gave Arisu some leeway and gave him a choice: he could either jump into the vortex that the flood was leading to and end it all, or swim back to reality and struggle through life with Usagi and their baby. Of course, Arisu chose life over death and re-entered the mortal realm with Usagi.
Meanwhile, Matsuyama, who had gotten to Usagi while Arisu was drowning, chose to go into the vortex and ended his life. I’ll take a brief pause to go over some of the questions that the interaction between the Watchman and Arisu raises. Okay, so this much is clear: Borderland is a purgatorial realm. Those who are about to die in the mortal realm end up in Borderland, and the games are a way of testing their will to live. If they have the determination to make it all the way to the end of the games, they’ll get to live in the mortal realm. If they fail at the games, they’ll die in Borderland as well as the mortal realm. Those who choose to stay in this in-between place, like Banda and Yaba, essentially become ghosts. But they don’t have the freedom to just roam around in these realms; they have to earn the right to exist as a ghost by getting in the Watchman’s good graces. And if they slip up, they’ll get lasered. As for the Watchman, he’s clearly a psychopomp who ferries the living from the mortal realm into the afterlife. He apparently tells people to choose death all the time for reasons that I can’t quite comprehend. However, Arisu is a rare case who not only chooses life every time, he also manages to pull people around him away from the proverbial ledge.
Borderland Is Purgatory
Who turned this purgatorial realm into Borderland? Is the show set in a universe where gods exist? If so, are they the architects of this realm? Despite not being explicit about its stance on religion, Alice in Borderland Season 3’s first task did take place in a shrine of sorts. Which means that the writers are drawing from real-life myths about religion, spirits, and everything that exists in between. Since the existence of gods or aliens hasn’t been brought into the mix, I’m just going to assume that Borderland came into existence when the first person from Japan simply refused to die. They had a near-death experience or even up in a coma, and during that period, Borderland formed spontaneously to make room for that individual. They were joined by several others, and in order to make their time fruitful in this realm between realms, they invented games. Maybe the nature of these games was innocent in the beginning. However, as Borderland started getting populated by nefarious souls, they turned it into the nightmare that we’ve been seeing for three seasons. That leads to an interesting conundrum: how long does one survive in Borderland if their physical self is rotting away?
Much like in Inception, two minutes in the real world means several hundred hours in Borderland. So, if someone stays in a coma for decades, even without proper care, they’ll be alive for centuries in Borderland, and that’ll give them enough time to play games or become the one who constructs the games. By the way, I don’t think there’s a heaven or hell in this universe. You are either alive, playing games in Borderland, or it’s lights out. If you die in a cataclysmic event like the meteor that dropped in Shibuya, you are dead. If you have a brush with death, you end up in Borderland, where you have to choose between life and death. If you win the games or survive until somebody has gotten to the end of the games, you get a second choice, where you can either be one of the most revered champions of Borderland or go back into the mortal realm to be a nobody. This is just a hypothesis, by the way; only the showrunners can tell us what’s actually going on. Okay, so, at the end of Alice in Borderland Season 3, Arisu chose to go back to the mortal realm with Usagi and live a relatively normal life. I know that some will see that as the “boring” choice.
As someone who has not been through anything like what happens in Borderland but was hospitalized a few days after being born, nearly drowned when I was 10 years old, survived an earthquake 3 hours from the epicenter, and faced the COVID-19 pandemic—I don’t think being boring is cowardly or a sign of weakness. Being with the one you love, choosing baby names, and working a 9-to-5 job, going on vacations occasionally, eating good food, and watching great movies is a great way to live. Life should be an adventure, not a demented version of Battle Royale. During the closing moments of the show, we saw Arisu giving therapy lessons to his friends and enemies from the first two seasons. They seemed to be doing fine. The survivors of the latest installment of the game were also turning a new leaf in their respective lives as a result of the vague memories they had of being in the games. It looked like peace and tranquility had been restored in this universe, and the show was about to bring down the curtains. But, as predicted by the Watchman, Borderland was about to be flooded by new contestants because the whole planet had recorded a number of earthquakes. One of those contestants will apparently be a woman named Alice from Los Angeles, USA. What the hell does that mean?
The Meaning Behind the Earthquakes
Has the show turned into a commentary on climate change? Does Borderland have any sway on the state of the mortal realm? Are we going to get an American spin-off? Since we’ve already seen a biblical flood, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that, yes, the earthquakes are a direct result of what humans have done to this planet. We keep saying that we don’t need to care about climate change because if Earth implodes or explodes, we won’t feel a thing. This level of apathy is making things worse, and I suppose the showrunners want to inject some fear into such people by saying, “What if the last seconds of your life are filled with the most horrifying adventures imaginable?” What if the apocalypse didn’t kill you, and while you were fighting for your life in the mortal realm, you were exposed to horrors beyond human comprehension in Borderland? Would you want to go through that, or would you like to ensure that the climate doesn’t get so bad that you find yourself playing a bunch of games in Borderland? I am on the side of climate activists; I don’t know about the rest.
As for Borderland manipulating the mortal realm so as to push people into purgatory—that’s a stretch. Yes, Banda did oscillate between the mortal realm and Borderland, and if he could touch somebody physically and asphyxiate them, is it possible for enough psychopaths like them to combine their powers to destabilize the mortal plane? Sure, why not? This isn’t sci-fi anymore. We are dealing with mythological, spiritual, and supernatural stuff anyway. Hence, yeah, maybe it’s possible there’s some kind of scale that needs to be balanced in order to maintain the peace in the mortal realm, chaos in Borderland, and dead souls in the void. Arisu’s actions have upset that equation, which is why the most powerful people in Borderland are causing an apocalyptic event to keep the games going. Maybe Yaba is responsible for it. We didn’t see much of that guy as Banda kept hogging the limelight.
In Banda’s absence, it’s possible that Yaba has taken center stage and shifted the scales in favor of Borderland via earthquakes. And since this is a global event, I suppose we are going to see players coming in from all over the world, not just Japan. I understand that Alice in Borderland is a play on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. With the whole “normal life is boring and Borderland life is awesome,” the show kind of pays homage to The Matrix, where Thomas Anderson was asked to follow the rabbit down the rabbit hole in order to become Neo. But for some reason, having a character called Alice, who is also from the USA (Carroll was from England, by the way), just seemed too on the nose. I’m not the biggest fan of this show, but if we get an American spin-off, much like Squid Game and Train to Busan are doing, I’m going to be miffed. Anyway, those are just my thoughts on Alice in Borderland Season 3. If you have any opinions on the same, feel free to share them in the comments section below.
