Warning: this post contains spoilers for the first seasons of Squid Game and Alice in Borderland.

Last month a little show called Squid Game debuted worldwide on Netflix. There’s a good chance you may have heard of it. The show is an original from Hwang Dong-hyuk, featuring debt-ridden characters competing in deadly children’s games for a chance to win millions of dollars. Soon after its release it became a worldwide pop culture phenomenon, something most companies can only dream of in this current age of streaming wars. The show has inspired countless memes, TikTok challenges, and Halloween costumes. With Squid Game’s popularity came comparisons to other films and TV shows in the “death games” genre, like Battle Royale and The Hunger Games. The most popular comparison, though, is another recent Netflix show called Alice in Borderland, based on the manga of the same name by Haro Aso. The Japanese show debuted in late 2020 and enough people tuned in for Netflix to renew it just two weeks after its release. Frankly, I’d never heard of Alice in Borderland, but fans all over the internet brought attention back to the show upon Squid Game’s unexpected success, with some claiming it’s even better than Squid Game. With such a bold statement, I decided to watch Alice in Borderland immediately after finishing Squid Game. Disappointingly, I felt the show was much weaker than Squid Game. I explain why below:

Thematic Resonance

Like Squid Game, Alice in Borderland features characters competing in games in which losing means literal death. This basic premise is where their similarities end, though. The death games genre has obvious appeals (mostly in its thrills), but one reason Squid Game is a better show than Alice in Borderland is because it has richer (no pun intended) themes.

Acclaimed filmmaker Bong Joon-ho (Memories of Murder) famously said about his worldwide hit film Parasite, “I tried to express a sentiment specific to Korean culture, [but] all the responses from different audiences were pretty much the same. Essentially, we all live in the same country, called Capitalism.” Like Parasite, Squid Game offers biting commentary on the state of capitalism in South Korea, but it’s a theme that resonates with all of us, hence its worldwide appeal.

Squid Game offers subtle allusions to real-life events that inspired creator Hwang Dong-hyuk, such as the Ssangyong layoffs in 2009. The show depicts the exploitation of undocumented immigrants. Its games symbolize the highly-competitive capitalistic society South Korea has become. It shows how people risk morality, or even death, for a chance at life-changing money.

After watching Alice in Borderland I struggled to find any noticeable themes in the season. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. While there’s a reason such depressing shows like Parasite and Squid Game hit hard—because they’re so darn relatable—some people watch things to escape from reality, and that’s something Alice in Borderland offers. The show doesn’t necessarily have to mean anything to be good, but the fact that it’s lacking in so many other areas, which I describe below, makes the lack of thematic resonance that much harder to forgive.

Character Development

It’s undeniable that the characters in Squid Game are more developed than Alice in Borderland. Nowhere is this more apparent than the shows’ respective first episodes. While both are hour-long shows, Squid Game spends at least 30 minutes following the lead character Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae), showing us his background, including familial relationships and gambling addiction, before diving into the “world” the games are set in; the first game begins around the 40-minute mark. But Alice in Borderland spends a mere 12 minutes providing information on lead character Arisu (Kento Yamazaki) and his best friends Chota (Yuki Morinaga) and Karube (Keita Machida) before everyone in their world suddenly disappears; the first game begins at the 30-minute mark.

This creative decision in Alice in Borderland for skipping over “exposition and careful backstory-building” has been praised by some critics, but it’s one that doesn’t work for me. No, Squid Game doesn’t develop all of its characters in the first episode (the first episode is really just dedicated to Gi-hun), but over the course of its nine-episode season we slowly learn more and more about each character. In fact, we get a lot of information on the major characters by episode two, which subverts our narrative expectations by releasing all of the characters back into the real world. There, we get to see each character’s respective backstories, their current living situations, and their reasons for participating in the games. By the third episode of Alice in Borderland, three out of the four major characters we’d been following up until that point (Arisu’s two best friends, and supporting character Shibuki, played by Ayame Misaki) are killed off. By the time we’re just getting to know these characters, they’re already dead. This may have worked as a stunning raising of the stakes for other viewers, but it came off more as a gimmick to me, one meant to invoke shock.

Treatment of Women

Admittedly, Squid Game does have some issues in its depiction of women, but not as blatantly as Alice in Borderland. Halfway into the latter’s first season, Arisu discovers a “utopia” called the Beach. One of the rules at the Beach is everyone must wear bathing suits at all times, which results in dozens of scantily-clad women on screen in almost every shot that takes place at the Beach. In addition, a seemingly random sexual interaction between Shibuki, the hot girl, and Chota, the nerdy virgin, was so out-of-the-blue and laughably bad I had to ask myself, “is this really happening?” It made no narrative sense!

Killing Off Major Characters

No matter which platform you were on social media you couldn’t help but see people talking about Squid Game’s sixth episode, which kills off some of the major characters we’d been following for two-thirds of the show, namely Oh Il-nam (O Yeong-su), the elderly man with a terminal brain tumor, and Abdul Ali (Anupam Tripathi), the undocumented immigrant from Pakistan. These were characters we’ve been following for nearly six hours, so their deaths were emotionally impactful.

Similarly, as I’d mentioned before, Alice in Borderland kills off three of the main characters in just its third episode (out of eight). Because the show sped into the games without properly introducing its characters, their unexpected deaths did nothing for me. For 30 minutes out of the third episode’s 40-minute running time, Karube is against Arisu, as only one of them can survive. But then a sudden flashback to Karube’s lover calling him a “kind” person allows him to change his tune, and now he’s okay with dying for Arisu to live. It fell flat for me. Throughout the first three episodes there are attempts to give depth to the relationship between the three best friends but all of the flashbacks felt too similar to one another, and too inconsequential, that it didn’t help make their sudden deaths at all emotional.

The Games

One of the biggest reasons Squid Game is so accessible is because its games are so simple. They’re all based on children’s games, some specific to Korea, like cutting out specific shapes from dalgona candy, and other games more widely known, like Red Light, Green Light and Tug of War. The simple games allowed the story to focus more on its characters, their relationships to one another, their struggles to survive, and their reasons for participating in the games.

Meanwhile, Alice in Borderland features the overly-complicated games that Squid Game intentionally avoided. And the problem isn’t that Alice in Borderland’s games are too complex, it’s that they’re too complex for no reason. Take the Hide and Seek game at the center of episode 3, in which the four main characters are split into three sheep and one wolf. The expectation is that the sheep would have to hide from the wolf, but the reality is that the wolf has to hide because when anyone makes eye contact with the wolf, they become the new wolf, and whoever ends the game as the wolf is the sole survivor. This subversion of expectations didn’t need to be present and adds little to the show; the characters figure out this “twist” right when the game begins! It would have had the same effect had the rules simply had one sheep running away from three wolves.

Episodes seven and eight of Alice in Borderland, its final two episodes of the season, features a game so convoluted it literally lowered my ranking of the show (from three out of four Kents to just two and a half out of four). The setup is simple enough: someone has killed a girl named Momoka (Kina Yazaki) and the rest of the players at the Beach need to find out who killed her (dubbed, the “witch”) and burn the perpetrator in a bonfire to win, or else they will all die. This could’ve led to a clever game but, alas, it quickly descends into a shoot-out, with the militant figures hunting down everyone else. The surprise reveal in the season finale, in which Arisu figures out the witch, in fact, is Momoka (she stabbed herself) becomes needlessly confusing when it dissolves into a back and forth between Arisu and the new militant leader of the Beach, Aguni Morizono (Sho Aoyagi), with Aguni telling everyone that he is the witch (he’s not), and Arisu saying Aguni just wants everyone, including himself, to die because Aguni lost all will to live after killing his best friend. “You want to kill everyone here because they’re the ones who made your friend crazy,” Arisu tells Aguni. But that’s not even true! How did everyone at the Beach make Aguni’s best friend, Hatter (Nobuaki Kaneko), the former leader of the Beach, go crazy when it was in fact Hatter’s idea to create the Beach and the idea that collecting all of the playing cards (from winning games) would allow them to go back to the real world?

Episode two of Alice in Borderland features a version of the game Tag, in which the players have to avoid a mysterious killer wearing a horse mask and armed with a machine gun. The players also must find the safe zone in order to avoid being blown up when the time runs out. Instead of some clever reveal of the safe zone, Arisu simply figures out that the safe zone is behind a door the horse person was shooting at to prevent an earlier player from entering it. This revelation was fairly anticlimactic.

Lastly, attempts at being clever by Alice in Wonderland end up betraying the portrayal of Arisu’s character. In the first game, in which the players are forced to choose between two rooms (one that leads to death, the other another room with two more doors), Arisu figures out the solution because he memorized a map of the building prior to walking in. This establishes that Arisu is a very smart and observant player, thanks to the nonstop video games he played at home, with perhaps a photographic memory. Similarly, episode four finds Arisu discovering a bus covered in graffiti, and the game has him and other players running as far as they can to reach the “goal.” Later, as he runs back to the bus to save a player who was left behind, he figures out the solution: the bus has the words “goal” spray painted on it—the bus is the goal, and they’ve been running away from it the entire time! But if Arisu was able to memorize a building map in the first game, how did he not notice the word “goal” on the bus before the game began? I would’ve given him the benefit of the doubt that he didn’t see that side of the bus prior to going into the bus before the game began, but actually, upon a rewatch, he does look at that side of the bus before getting on!

Pacing

A lot of my issues with Alice in Wonderland—the character development, the early death of major characters—are ultimately a result of bad pacing. It’s unclear to me how much of the pacing issues with the show are a result of the pacing of the original manga, but regardless, it’s detrimental to the overall story. The deaths of Chota and Karube occur too early into the show to make an impact, and the show is too slow to reveal details of other characters that would make them well-rounded. Certain reveals that are intended to give the characters more depth are given too late; episode 7, aka the penultimate episode of the season, is a flashback bonanza, giving us flashbacks for several supporting characters. Perhaps the effect will be better in the grand scheme of things (the show has been renewed for a season two, and it’s unclear how long the show will run for), but in the season itself, the flashbacks occur too late to matter.

In comparison, Squid Game expertly balances its various storylines and characters—main character Seong Gi-hun; police officer Hwang Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon), who infiltrates the Games as a guard in order to find his missing brother; and the game masters and guards—sharing and withholding information at the opportune times, often resulting in effective suspense, conflicts, and cliffhangers.

Conclusion

It may be unfair to compare Alice in Borderland to Squid Game since their only similarity is the genre, but it’s hard to not make this comparison after so many folks have encouraged Squid Game fans to watch Alice in Borderland, that it’s even better than Squid Game. Alice in Borderland very much feels like a manga or anime, with exaggerated character traits and emotions, and complex plot mechanisms. It leans into its sci-fi aspects (lasers shoot from the sky) and focuses more on action sequences, but also has flat visuals. Squid Game, on the other hand, feels more realistic and has a cinematic quality to its cinematography. I think had I seen Alice in Borderland first I would’ve liked it more than I do now, since I wouldn’t have had the drop in quality from watching Squid Game first. I feel confident in proclaiming that if you liked Alice in Borderland, you’ll like Squid Game. But if you liked Squid Game, you may not necessarily like Alice in Borderland.