Review by C.J. Bunce
Waiting for Season 3? With last year’s announcement that Netflix renewed for a third season its live-action series Alice in Borderland–a Top 10 international hit in more than 70 countries–it left fans wondering what comes next. Your best filler while you’re waiting? Going back to the source novels. When the series’ first two seasons aired, English audiences didn’t have access to writer-artist Haro Aso’s one-of-a-kind manga. We’ve been reviewing each of the volumes here at borg since, as each has been made available by mega-manga publisher VIZ Media.
At last we have Volume 9 (available here at VIZ Media and here at Amazon), and fans of the series can see how close the show matches the manga. You may be surprised what you find and what that means for the content of the coming third season on Netflix.
If you were to give award for the best adaptation of a TV series from its source material, Alice in Borderland wins, especially in Volume 9 where the story and the TV show really stuck the landing. It did it in the ultimate genre mash-up–something Life on Mars and its sequel Ashes to Ashes–the best TV genre mash-up ever–didn’t do so well. In Volume 8, writer-artist Haro Aso stepped back to take a look at nearly 2,500 pages of storytelling. Where was it all heading? Is this a game he has been playing with us? Is there something more to this ride than we’re picking up on? Was this a science fiction story? A supernatural fantasy? A time travel story? A superhero tale? If you saw the TV series season 2 finale you know the answer already.
Volume 9 is that kind of satisfying ending you only find in the very best novels, and rarely in any TV production or film. But what you don’t know is how closely the TV episode matches Volume 9–the final chapter–of the manga. Even the casting, especially of Riisa Naka as the Queen of Hearts, is just a stunning mirror of the books. If you liked Marvel’s Moon Knight series, you’ll appreciate what is going on in Volume 9.
The genre of the story? Everything. All the above. Or maybe it was just a simple drama reflecting the fears of modern day, young Japanese citizens. But the books are over now. So what next? That is the big question as the third season of a TV series approaches.
Two paths present the most likely avenues for where to take Haro Aso’s world, and maybe his characters. As I said in my review of Volume 8, Netflix didn’t adapt all the original source material to the screen. Season 3 could take the route of–here’s a throwback for you–the sequel to the 1970s disaster movie The Poseidon Adventure. The sequel took secondary characters seen only briefly in the first film and made an entire movie out of them. That wouldn’t be too hard with Alice in Borderland, considering the number of secondary characters cut for the show.
The third season could also revisit the world again but from characters we didn’t meet in the first two seasons. But is that what viewers want? The actors, and the characters they built and portrayed, are why we loved the show this far. It would be a shame if we don’t see them again. So how would you do it? How about let the characters move forward, with that Joker card–continuing the parallels of Alice in Wonderland–giving us a chaotic, uncertain driver of madness for the players from the manga as he–or she–tries to undo the normalcy the players found themselves returning to at the end of Volume 9 and Season Two.
What’s going to happen? We don’t know yet, and we don’t yet know when Season 3 will arrive. But it must be close.
Keep coming back as we look forward to Season 3 of Alice in Borderland. We reviewed Volume 1 here, Volume 2 here, Volume 3 here, Volume 4 here, Volume 5 here, Volume 6 here, Volume 7 here, and Volume 8 here. Alice in Borderland Volume 9 is available in print and digital now here at Amazon, or add it to your VIZ digital account here. It’s an incredible, gigantic, and fantastic piece of storytelling.
