Alice in Borderland has always been about human relationships first and foremost. It doesn’t have any grand statement to make about capitalism, conformity, wealth inequality, fascism, or anything else you might expect a show in this genre to explore. It’s about coming up with cool, complicated murder games, then watching normal people fight like hell to save strangers they’ve come to care about during the course of the game, or get back to the people they’ve left behind. It’s about the human spirit under adversity — random-ass sci-fi adversity, but adversity nonetheless — and what becomes of that spirt under those circumstances.

The new game once again relies on the players’ ability to calculate probabilities and solve logic problems, all while wearing a collar that will explode if they fail — y’know, for that added degree of difficulty. Assigned 15 points apiece, the players start in one room with multiple exits that correspond to colored Dungeons & Dragons–style dice placed in each room. A roll of the dice determines the maximum number of players permitted to exit through the corresponding door and enter the next room.

Meanwhile, footage seemingly culled from their memories and imaginations plays on each room’s walls (the rooms are basically giant walk-in television monitors), reflecting their hopes and fears for the future and their fondest and worst memories of the past. This colors their decisions, though they don’t seem to have any actual effect.

The goal is to find the Exit Room, hidden within the 5 x 5 grid of rooms, and escape. But opening a door costs a player a point, and rooms often come with multi-point penalties just for entering them. It’s up to the players whose points get used — unless, of course, you wind up in a room all by yourself, in which case you have no wiggle room whatsoever.

Arisu’s plan is for everyone to stick together as much as possible, especially now that he and Usagi have been reunited. This will minimize wasted time finding each other again and maximize the chance for them to keep subtracting points equally so no one dips into the danger zone. 

Ryuji has other plans. Once he’s separated from Arisu, he begins planting doubts in the other players’ heads, and suggests their goal should be to find the corner rooms first and foremost, as they are most likely to be the exits. (On this, at least, Arisu agrees.) Of course his real plan is to find, isolate, and murder Usagi, then himself, to enter the land of the dead. That’s a complication no one else is counting on.

People do start dying, of course. Tetsu, we learn through the smeary home-movie-like recordings on the wall, has long had dreams of being an architect, and (this isn’t clear) may even have been one already before his addiction derailed his life and cost him his relationship. After seeing all this, he greets the realization that he’s run out of points and is about to die with smiling fatalism. 

Sohta (Joey Iwanaga), the male half of the brother-sister pair we’ve been following, dies too, after sacrificing many of his points to save his sister, Yuna (Akana Ikeda). He dies smiling, watching her wedding play out on the video screen in front of him. Yuna, of course, is so devastated she’s almost immobilized when she finds his body, costing her and Arisu a valuable round. 

For a while it looks like Rei may join them, too. Trapped in a room by herself for a time, she’s subjected to cacophonous noise and a whirlwind of imagery, indicating abuse and bullying. Rei’s an artist as it turns out, so at least she has an outlet for her pain. Sachicko, whom we witness being mocked and beaten by her alcoholic husband, can only grin and bear it.

But the walls may serve a purpose other than psychologically messing with the contestants. If indeed they do show real possible futures, Arisu sees the one in which Ryuji murders Usagi. Now he knows she’s in danger and that he must save her — well, to the extent you can trust a telepathic video wall in an elaborate deathtrap, I guess.

This is the first episode of this six-episode season to focus on one game and one game only, and there’s only one episode to go. It makes sense for the show to drill down on the surviving players’ lives, revealing what makes them tick, showing what’s truly important to them. Of course they’d show you the happy life Tetsu could have lived, with a fulfilling career and a stable and loving romantic relationship, before they blow up his carotid artery. Of course they’d show you the happy life Sohta wishes for his sister before ensuring he’ll never see her live it. 

And of course it ultimately comes down to Arisu, Usagi, and Ryuji. The two men love Usagi, but one love is healthy and the other is what passes for love in a sociopath. Maybe that’s ultimately what Alice in Borderland is about: revealing that walking round out there among people who really care, who really love, are lots of people who don’t, and can’t.

Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.