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Alice in Borderland Season 2 Review

The second season of Alice in Borderland is a slight improvement upon its predecessor. It still has its issues, but for the most part it delivered.

This season is much more epic in scope and tone than the original. Whereas the first season was pretty much concerned with action, this season has a lot of fights and exciting action sequences, but it also becomes a genuine science fiction story toward its end.

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The ending itself was terrific. The finale is by far the highlight of the season as the episode was both thrilling and narratively compelling. This is where we got some solid answers to our questions and the result was a series that treated its fans fairly. It could turn out that we get another season, but in my opinion this is where the show should end as the conclusion was quite satisfying.

Where the show floundered is in its characterization. Arisu is the protagonist and he does get some solid development, but he still wasn’t as interesting as the series clearly wanted him to be. Chishiya was definitely the more memorable character of the two and he got such a meaningful, strong arc. The female characters are also solid and the villains are actually excellent, but the character roster is too large for such a short season, resulting in many of these people getting the short end of the stick in terms of development.

Alice in Borderland Season 2 has another great episode besides that finale. That is the second episode with the tagging game that was actually incredibly entertaining and intense. This episode featured the best action of the season and it genuinely resembled an anime show in those scenes.

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The second half of the season except the finale featured too many shootouts and thriller crime elements, and tonally speaking it’s not the deftest of shows. You can also see throughout that the budget that they got was quite small, but they made the most of it and created what is one very thrilling exercise in SF world building.