Zombies or humans: Who are the real monsters? That question has animated much of the modern zombie subgenre since George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead in 1968. In recent times, thanks to the influence of The Walking Dead, it’s become voguish for the human characters to embrace their monstrousness as the only way to ensure their survival and the survival of their loved ones. It’s an eat-or-be-eaten world to these people.
In this episode of Alice in Borderland, the opposite proves true. Midway through the game, the calculating blue-haired player Rei tells our hero Arisu that the zombies will outnumber the humans and win the game in the end. Why? Because the players are people, and people have feelings that will prevent them from using the mechanisms that stop the zombie spread. They’ll be too scared to use up their precious vaccine cards, and too decent to want to shoot other people to death over a game.
She’s right. The zombies badly outnumber the humans in the end, reduced to a gaggle of sociopaths and their hangers-on. Kazuya, the yakuza member who’d been working with Arisu, is saved at the last minute by Nobu, the kind-hearted young guy who Kazuya was prepared to kill to win the game for the humans. Nobu infects him, thus keeping him alive on the winning side.
After a brazenly sappy transition involving the two long-lost lovers looking up at the same stars, we meet up with Usagi at last. Accompanied by Ryuji, the wheelchair-bound professor who got her back into Borderland, her team endures a sort of neon-rainbow laser-sword dodgeball game that can only be described as bitchin’. They survive by the skin of their teeth, and through the athleticism of mountain-climber Usagi. Actor Tao Tsuchiya brings a limber physicality to her ole that makes for a marked contrast with Arisu’s trademark move of standing in one place and figuring things out.
That’s when things take a turn for the sinister. Ryuji is actually an agent of Banda, the serial killer who seems to be at least presiding over this round of games, even if he’s not the Joker himself. The deal is simple: a visit to the world of death beyond Borderland, in exchange for Usagi.
The final game of the episode, “Runaway Train,” is another game that bends logic and luck. The players have to make their way through eight cars on a moving subway train to stop it before it crashes. Four of the cars have been rigged with poison gas, the others with harmless oxygen. Each player is given a gas mask with five canisters that neutralize the poison when inserted.
In other words, they have a margin of error of one missed guess, i.e. unnecessarily using the canister in a safe car, and they blow this in the first round. Any mistakes after that and death is guaranteed. Of course, if they guess wrong in the opposite direction and don’t wear the masks when they should, that’s their first and last strike.
For a while the team gets lucky, a combination of good guesses and intel from a train nerd on the team (Kanro Morita) who recognizes which cars would be too loaded with electrical equipment to make room for poison gas canisters. Then he realizes he was wrong about the model of the train, he’d just been making lucky guesses, and they really don’t have any way of knowing what to do.
Usagi makes their next decision for them. Acting on a hunch, she puts on her gas mask…and the little canary in a cage that indicates whether the gas is poison or not doesn’t keel over and die. They’ve wasted their second cartridge, and have no way to survive.
The issue with this game from a viewer perspective is that it’s so all-or-nothing. I don’t really believe the show has just doomed both its female protagonist and its biggest new character to death by poison subway car. The real question now is how they’ll get out of it, not how we’ll get over it when they get bumped off.
But that’s fine, because this remains such a fun, inventive show. It’s capable of recognizing when it needs to course-correct, following up the complex zombie card game with a very basic round “dodge the flying killer frisbees.” The nerve gas on the Tokyo subway, meanwhile, is a still-provocative image that calls to mind the lethal terrorist attacks by a religious cult years ago. The canaries are a great visual, too.
And Ryuji emerges now as a compelling antagonist — the kind of explorer in the further regions of experience obsessed with going beyond the limits that drove the narrative of the first two Hellraiser films. This is an archetype I like a lot, and as with so much else in this show, I like it here plenty.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.