Runaway Train

Episode 3 of Alice in Borderland Season 3 starts with the division within the ranks starting to widen for the Zombie Hunt game. Ikeno seems to be the ringleader for the humans here, forcing different players with a Shotgun to take out the Zombies rather than saving them with vaccine cards.

Unfortunately, the Zombie Cards are spreading like wildfire. Nobu, the kid tasked with taking out one of the Zombies, is soon infected by another player and goes into hiding. Knowing that Ikeno is taking control and wanting to kill them, it’s caused paranoia and distrust to ripple across the entire game like wildfire.

Ikeno believes they can win the round by simply shooting those they’ve kept in containment with the Shotgun cards, thus winning automatically. Arisu though, wants to use the vaccines and he finds Nobu, engaging in a game with him. However, Arisu has a secret.

Meanwhile, Rei and Ikeno play. Rei manipulates Ikeno, pointing out that it would only take three rounds for the Zombie Cards to become the majority and using his tactics has only made things worse. Rei suggests he take her deal and become the Zombie, thus coming out on top. Ikeno refuses though and doesn’t play his Shotgun card, allowing Rei to live. Unfortunately, fellow player Masato is not so lucky and is killed.

Arisu decides to play with Rei next when he catches up and she fully believes the zombies will win this game. They can grow exponentially which makes more sense, while the humans have grown more reckless and become merciless killers. Their plan to execute all the zombies rather than working as a team is not going to work.

Arisu knows she’s not stupid and will play both sides until a clear winner has been decided. The illusion of the trust barricade has become just that- an illusion. When she saw how people were turning, rather than trusting one another, she was going to bide her time before intentionally turn into a zombie.

She doesn’t have to wait long though as Arisu puts a card down and turns her into a Zombie. It turns out he’s been a zombie since the very beginning of the game and has done a great job keeping this under wraps.

The drug addict from the start of the Fortune game, Tetsu, then plays with Arisu, who turns him into a zombie. As for Nobu, he grabs Mr Kazuya and turns him into a zombie too, saving him right at the end of the game during the final round.

When the Zombie Hunt game comes to an end, the totals come in – 32 zombies to 13 humans. The 13 humans are killed, while the survivors celebrate their win. The group also decide that Rei should come with them.

Meanwhile, we catch up with Usagi who’s also inside these games too as we know. Back in the hotel, Ryuji wanted to ask Usagi about her father and she went with him to get some answers. Unfortunately, Ryuji is being manipulated by Banda, who came to him earlier and goaded him into bringing Usagi into the games.

Banda’s condition for sending Ryuji to the Borderlands was bringing Usagi into the games too, drinking a poison to induce her comatose state and thus, ending up in the games. Doing this has also made him Banda’s puppet and he’s manipulating these games to his liking.

After surviving a deadly game with lasers, with Ryuji managing to evade all of this miraculously inside his wheelchair, Ryuji admits to Usagi he’s always wanted to come into the Borderland to see the games for himself. This in-between place linking their world has been a fascination for him for years.

Usagi though is simply consumed by her thoughts for her dad, but doesn’t really want to play these games. However, she doesn’t have much of a choice.

Down in the subway, another game takes place for Usagi and Ryuji’s group. The game is Runaway Train. The train is operated without a driver but if players can successfully move from the starting car to the lead car and stop the train, they’ll clear the game.

When they move into the next car, the door will automatically lock. After 30 seconds, either oxygen or poison gas will be released. They need to proceed through 8 different train cars and poison gas will be released in 4 of them.

Upon entering a new car, they’ll have 30 seconds to decide whether to put on a mask. Each player will receive five canisters in total, which serves as a neutralizing agent for the poison gas. You’re not able to use other players’ canisters though and they can’t return to previous cars so they need to keep moving forward.

In each carriage is a canary in a cage and just like the old adage about a canary in a coal mine, it’s clear these are used as a warning for whether the rooms are filling with oxygen or poison gas. If the bird dies then it’s poison. Unfortunately, they waste a canister at the first carriage but the second is poison.

At the third, the passengers start to trust one another and save a canister. However, they’re not the only ones playing here, as there are other trains on the adjacent tracks too.

This is where things start to get tricky. The group are split over whether to wear a mask or not for the fourth car. One of the passengers believes the gas canisters are at the top of each carriage, determined by where the pantographs are located. It seems like a resolute theory and proves to be correct, as those passengers who don’t wear a mask die a painful, horrific death.

However, in the next carriage he realizes that this particular model of train is different to the one the player thought. Shockingly, it’s all been luck up until this point. With three train cars left and two oxygen canisters, they need to make a decision. Unfortunately, they make the wrong choice and waste an oxygen canister, leaving everything hanging in the balance.

The Episode Review

With two games per episode, Alice in Borderland is not wasting any time with its story as we rocket through a bunch of deadly traps and games. Unfortunately, that could also have a knock-on effect later with the danger of this feeling rushed and not fleshing out many of the characters.

On that same note, lets talk about the Zombie game because surely with this it would have made a lot more sense to turn absolutely everybody into Zombies and then win by default? There doesn’t seem to have been a rule here against that and they could have cheesed it completely.

The focus is now splitting between Ryuji and Usagi along with Arisu’s group, and as a result, we don’t get much time for chilling between games.

While that’s not a dealbreaker, it doesn’t allow us to properly get invested in the new players. These are the moments that really made Alice in Borderland pop in the past, and why things like the massacre inside the hotel in season 1, or the Tag game in season 2 with Kyuma hit so hard.

Outside of that though, the games are still the real driving force of this series and those chosen are well designed and incredibly tense. The ending to this one shows that the game is going right down to the wire. Will this group come out of this in one piece?