Alice in Borderland Season 3 Ending Shocker: You Won’t Believe Who the Watchman Really Is

Three years after season 2 dropped us back in the real world with a thud, Alice in Borderland returns and promptly yanks the floor out again. The games are bigger, bloodier, and weirder, the mythology cracks open in unexpected ways, and yes, Ken Watanabe shows up in a bowler hat to tell us the Joker is just a card. Let’s talk about what season 3 actually does, who the Watchman is, why Ryuji is such a problem, and where this ending leaves the show.

Where we pick up

Time has passed. Arisu and Usagi are together at last. He’s working at a counseling center, trying to help people process trauma; she’s consulting. Arisu’s memories of Borderland are foggy at best, but those Citizens we met last season are not done toying with him.

Quick refresher from season 2: the show fully adapted the manga’s main story and framed Borderland as a massive near-death experience shared by the people around Shibuya Station and the Scramble Crossing when the meteor hit. Season 3 taps that explanation and then pokes at its edges.

The season’s shape: games first, answers later

Classic Alice: early episodes go heavy on spectacle and light on lore. Remember the season 1 lasers-from-the-sky and that "Find the Witch" chaos? Or Mira spinning tales about VR and aliens in season 2? The show loves head games, and season 3 saves the weirdest cards for the end.

The Watchman explained

Ken Watanabe (Inception, The Last Samurai, Batman Begins) pops in for a late-game cameo as a sharply dressed figure in a black bowler hat calling himself the Watchman. He is not the god of Borderland. He is not the Joker either. As he tells Arisu in their final face-off:

"The Joker is just a card."

The Watchman is a psychopomp — basically a guide for souls — who offers Arisu a blunt choice: life or death. His deal is almost pettier and creepier than a god: he does not want to die and find out what comes next, so the games keep him occupied. He wanted to talk to someone like Arisu, a repeat survivor, while hinting that everyone eventually lands at this same crossroads between two worlds. Oh, and he drops a warning: something bigger is coming, something Arisu cannot beat, and it is going to kill a lot of people.

The last stretch gets brutal

Arisu does what Arisu does: he chooses Usagi, even if it buys him only a little more time in the real world. He dives in to pull her out of a very literal death vortex while Ryuji tries to drag her the other way. Arisu saves her — and dies for it — in a hospital bed beside a comatose Usagi.

Usagi finally gets a hard-earned moment with her father, Shiganori. The show has largely steered around her trauma until now, so the scene lands. Death starts to feel less like an abyss and more like a step. And yes, Arisu finally calls her by her first name, Yuzuha, which is a tiny, lovely gut punch.

So... who is Ryuji?

Arisu first meets Ryuji Matsuyama at a university. He is a wheelchair-bound researcher investigating the shared experiences of people who played the games — people like Arisu. Arisu can only articulate it as a journey to a far-off place, which drives Ryuji straight down an obsession spiral.

Backstory time: Ryuji once oversaw an experiment that went sideways and a student he was responsible for died. He could not save her, and that failure sent him into fixation on the world of the dead. That obsession ended in a car accident that left him unable to walk.

Eventually he finds a doorway: an Old Maid card game with some very unsettling men who electrocute anyone who loses. Ryuji wins. We never fully learn who those men are, beyond what season 2 hinted — former visitors who chose to stay behind as Citizens in this abandoned city, running games for newcomers. They are not gods or demons. They just really love games, and Arisu is their best player in years, so they use Ryuji to yank him back.

How season 3 plays the games

• Hikawa Shrine — Hikawa translates to "fire river." Players draw fortunes while arrows rain from above. It is exactly as nasty as it sounds.
• Usagi’s gauntlet — After Ryuji drags her into Borderland, she runs with his group: dodging colorful slicing lasers, then a poison-filled subway car challenge.
• Parallel paths — Usagi later realizes Arisu and his crew are playing the same overall game from the opposite direction. They are closer than they think.
• The futures game — The remaining players — Arisu, Ryuji, and Usagi, who is revealed to be pregnant — are forced to see multiple possible futures. When your points run out, you get a fleeting moment of perfect happiness... then your collar explodes. It’s very Battle Royale and very season 1 episode 3, when Arisu lost Chota and Karube.
• The door and the fake-out — Arisu "wins" by choosing to stay behind, shoving Usagi and the others through a door that supposedly leads back to Shibuya. Then the trap snaps shut: the city implodes into a flooded ruin. While he scrambles to save the others, the Watchman steps in and lays out that life-or-death choice.

NDE or collective delusion?

Ryuji’s fixation powers the whole season. He kidnaps Usagi to bait Arisu, and Ann — yes, the forensic scientist from The Beach in season 1 — helps by dosing Arisu with an overdose that tips him back toward Borderland. Once he is over the edge, the games pull him in all over again.

The show keeps toggling between near-death experience and group hallucination. Season 2 gave us the meteor-strike NDE framework. Season 3 nods to other corners of the franchise too: the sequel manga Alice in Borderland: Retry inspires pieces here, but this is mostly new material. The spin-off Alice on Border Road — set in a Kyoto-flavored Borderland where an accident at Nihonbashi drags 12 people in — feels even more relevant. Two big carryovers show up this season: time moves differently between worlds, and memory is slippery. Ann even clocks how long Arisu has to find Usagi before his body checks out for good. And unless you have a personal trigger — like a specific physical item — memories do not travel cleanly. Ryuji is the only one who seems to retain fragments, though half the time it is hard to tell if he is dissociating or performing.

After the Watchman: what’s next

On the surface, Arisu and Usagi get an ending. Spring arrives, sakura bloom, and they are tossing around baby names. We even get cameos from the extended fam — Kuina and, of course, Chishiya — who pointedly asks Arisu what makes life worth living now. The implication is they all learned something in Borderland and brought it home.

Then the ground literally moves. Earthquakes ripple through Tokyo and beyond. It is a little unnerving given the real-world news lately. The show hard-cuts to an American diner that looks very Los Angeles. We never see the waitress’s face, just her nametag: "Alice." Two customers ask for a table by the window and you brace for a truck to plow through. Nothing happens. But you can feel it: visas are about to be stamped for a new variant of Borderland, possibly with a new lead.

Whether we get that story is down to ratings. Season 3 closes Arisu and Usagi’s arc enough to satisfy, while leaving the door cracked for a fresh protagonist in a new playground.

Where to watch

Alice in Borderland season 3 is streaming on Netflix. Plans start at £5.99 a month. You can also get Netflix through Sky Glass and Virgin Media Stream.