After four years, three seasons, two Games, and one newborn baby, Squid Game, Netflix’s biggest non-English series ever, is finally over. But while we wait for whatever David Fincher has planned for a possible spin-off, where else can you get a hit of Squid-Game-style deadly games with the same tragic backstories, shocking betrayals, and terrifying villains?
Well, before there was Squid Game, there was Alice in Borderland, a gripping dystopian sci-fi thriller showing a strange parallel world where players are forced to participate in games in order to carry on living. Now, after three years, we finally know when the show will come back for Season 3, where Arisu and Usagi will face off against the ultimate villain: the Joker. Check out the teaser for Alice in Borderland Season 3 below:
In Alice in Borderland, games are run by “gamemasters,” masterminds named after face cards in a deck of cards. Each suit represents a different type of game: clubs are team challenges, spades are physical games, diamonds are games of wit, and hearts are games of betrayal. In Season 2, Arisu faced off against all the face cards and, presumedly, even escaped the game itself, which was revealed to be a shared delusion after those in Borderland were in comas in real life.
In the manga, this is revealed to be one of multiple endings, but the appearance of the Joker card seems to imply that Usagi and Arisu are going to have to re-enter the game. But with no suit to go off of, there’s no telling what game — or games — the Joker will force them into.
The teaser seems to support something the manga implied: that the Joker isn’t just another game master, but actually the creator of Borderland itself and a legendary figure who may or may not serve as the Grim Reaper. After all, everyone experienced Borderland somewhere between dying and living, so an argument could be made that the entire realm is nothing more than purgatory.
Now that we know the way out of the game, why do these players need to go back, and what will they find out during the Joker’s games? We’ll find out this fall.
