Recap Japanese Drama "Alice In Borderland season 1" Episode 7

Dec 23, 2022

With 2 hours to find the culprit, episode 7 of Alice In Borderland begins with all the players quickly turning on each other as the kids are forced to reveal what they’ve been up to. An tells the others that Hatter was murdered and brandishes the bullet she found inside him as proof.

When Aguni shows however, the militant forces rally together and exert their authority. They decide to take out the “useless people” and burn them on the fire outside.

As bullets pierce the once-tranquil hallways, the militant soldiers exert their will and start systematically killing people and throwing them on the fire outside. It’s a shocking display of power and one that shows just how far people can be corrupted for a singular cause.

With everyone distracted and fighting for their lives, in the basement a fire breaks out and threatens to engulf the entire hotel. This happens to be a ploy to bring everyone outside where Niragi is up on the rooftop ready to snipe all the innocent bystanders.

He certainly doesn’t feel great about doing this and as we see from flashbacks, he was bullied badly as a student. Chishiya eventually shows and brags about how clear he is, eventually burning him with a makeshift flamethrower. As screams pierce the air, Niragi falls to his doom.

Usagi finds out where Arisu is being held, courtesy of a soldier unable to follow through with these barbaric orders any longer.

Kuina finds An searching around for clues, which comes in the form of super glue to show the finger prints on the knife. This should, in theory, reveal who the real killer is. Only, when they get there the sword-wielding goon called Last Boss stands ready for them.

Kuina does her best to evade his blows, as we cut back in time and see what happened to her. Interestingly, she was a boy before this called Hikari and since then, has become this beautiful and incredibly skilled girl. After her operation, she head back to see her Mother in hospital, who comments how beautiful she is.

By comparison, it’s clear Last Boss has no future and fully embraced this world when he was whisked across into the game. It’ an interesting juxtaposition of fate, one that sees both of them haunted by the ghosts of the past.

Last Boss shatters glass across the floor as a deterrent but it doesn’t work with Kuina. Eventually she bests the man, leaving him a crumpled, bloody heap on the floor.

Usagi continues up to the fourth floor and finds Arisu locked in a room. Handing the phone over to him, Arisu talks about the purpose of this game and how it’s being used to toy with people’s emotions.

Trying to work out who’s pulling the strings, Arisu turns his attention to the game master rather than the witch. It certainly seems like quite the opportunistic time to start this game and theorizes that it could be a deliberate ploy to pick off their number.

An seemingly figures out who’s responsible for killing Momoka but she’s knocked out on the way out the door by one of the soldiers. Arisu suddenly stands and realizes just who the witch is.

The Episode Review

As all hell breaks loose, these past few episodes have really been quite reminisce of those moments in 28 Days Later. The deadly game of hide and seek with the infected while seeing the true ugliness of humanity show up.

If there’s one gripe here though it comes from the idea surrounding the knife fingerprints. Surely you’d need to match up the prints with the individual marks from everyone inside the hotel and in doing so, could prove problematic. Then again it may just be a coo given Arisu seems to have figured out who’s responsible.

The various interspersed flashbacks are a nice touch but in a way it also feels a little meaningless given they’re thrown in just before certain characters make big decisions or die. Kuina, for example, could have benefited from a bit more background in earlier episodes as she’s arguably the most interesting character next to the two leads.

Still, the action was fantastic this episode and the tense few episodes prior to this have definitely been building up to this. Quite how the finale will play out though remains to be seen but one thing’s for sure – this conflict is far from over.