‘Alice in Borderland’ Season 2 Episode 6 Recap: Acid Rain

It would be a mistake to kick off this review of by saying “shit is getting real.” On Alice in Borderland, shit has been real since the very first episode, or certainly since the main-character bloodbath in Season 1 Episode 3. It’s just that the episodes seem to be getting longer — this one clocks in around 70 minutes minus the lengthy closing credits — and more jam-packed with stuff, as the scattered cast continues pursuing their own, uh, pursuits. Some of these end in naked makeout sessions in a hot springs while elephants bathe nearby. Others end with people getting melted by sulfuric acid. Such is life in the Borderland.

We’ll start with Usagi and Arisu. Unsurprisingly perhaps, they win their game against the Queen of Spades through a combination of parkour, perseverance, and Usagi’s ability to win the players who’ve moved to the Queen’s team back over with the promise that, if they make it back to the real world where so many of them felt terrible all the time, they’ll have a chance to start again. The Queen, deciding to live free until the end, jumps off the building (and gets laser-zapped in mid-air), but not before warning Usagi and Arisu that they’ll only find the answers they seek about this world if and when they clear the final game, as she once presumably did. 

Returning the little boy Usagi had been caring for to the woman who’d been tending to him before, Usagi and Arisu wind up in the smoldering ruins of the arena Heiya escaped from during her first game at the cost of her leg, which is now basically one giant hot spring. The two happily bathe when they’re interrupted by an incredible sight: two massive elephants, escaped from the zoo, bathing in the springs themselves. 

This brings the two humans closer together, physically as well as emotionally. They kiss, but break it off when light gleams off a nearby dead body. (At least that’s what I think it was. Damn laptop screens!) It’s a marvelously intimate, tender, surprising, even erotic sequence. I mean, look at these shots:

And it’s echoed soon after by equally emotional and bittersweet moments: Kiuna returning to the hospital room where her mother had been staying prior to the world’s disappearance; Ann connecting the fallen body of a dead deer to that of a murdered girl whose death she investigated as a cop. The cut from one dead eye to another, then the fade back at the end of the flashback, is blunt but effective montage.

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The bulk of the episode consists of a math-logic puzzle presided over by the King of Diamonds — aka Kuzuryu (Tsuyoshi Abe), the former second-in-command at the Beach compound last season. (He was undercover.) The rules are convoluted enough to not be worth explaining; the point, as Chishiya, our only identifiable player in the game, soon realizes, is that the King selected it precisely because it’s logic-based and thus “fair,” eliminating the need for him to decide which lives have value and which don’t.

Until, that is, it’s down to just Chishiya and the King. Flashbacks reveal their ethically compromised pasts: The King was a lawyer for a corporation that poisoned children with its factories, while Chishiya was a pediatric cardiologist (!!!) who routinely had to deny poor children lifesaving transplants in order to make room for the kids and grandkids of big donors and the politically connected. 

Eventually, Chishiya just begins telling the King his choices in the game, honestly so; his only hope is that this obviously very tormented man while choose to sacrifice his own life to save another, after a lifetime of failing to do so. Inspired in part by Momoka (Kina Yazaki), the “dealer” who killed herself at the Beach as part of its final game in order to live out her ideal that everyone else’s life has value, he deliberately throws the game, dooming himself to a sulfuric acid bath. Kind of like this:

(NB: That’s a player, not the King; I just picked the grossest death to gif that I could.)

Then we get one last around-the-horn view of all the protagaonists. Chishiya tells the dead man he envies him. Heiya kisses Aguni, who now seems to have died from his wounds at the King of Spades’s hands, goodbye. Arisu and Usagi watch the sunrise, vowing to fight on. Kiuna does the same in her mom’s hospital room. Ann keeps trekking through the forest. Niragi (boo! hiss!) shuffles his way through parts unknown. And Heiya sets off on her own.

Which means that this is the least cliffhangery, least tune-in-next-time, least don’t-touch-that-dial episode of Alice Season 2 thus far. It doesn’t cut off in the middle of a game, or present you with a shock reveal or return the ramifications of which must be explored immediately in the next ep. It’s just a bunch of people collecting themselves and moving on. Perhaps the show just wants you to be able to get up and use the bathroom and grab a snack before clicking “Continue watching,” or maybe it’s simply confident enough that at this point, you’ll be back no matter what. I’d say that confidence has been earned.

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.