Alice in Borderland S2 - Unnecessarily Dragged Out!

I enjoy a good dystopian fiction, and one in particular I enjoyed watching last year in 2021 was Alice in Borderland S1, so I was glad to see S2 go live on Netflix last week - thinking it was going to be one of the best binge watches of the year.

And S2 was O.K. The problem was it was dragged out a lot compared to the faster paced S1 which detracted from the overall enjoyment of the second season.

Alice in Borderland the Gist...

There's a flash in the sky in Tokyo and a bunch of people are transported to an alternative reality where they have to play various games, with life or death stakes.

The type of games and difficulty are determined by playing cards, the lower the card value the easier the game and with the character of game determined by the suit - spades are physical, clubs strategy, diamonds intellectual and hearts the worst as they're emotional.

In S1 the players have to collect all the cards numbered 1-10 to progress to the next round, so you can imagine in an eight part series there's plenty of game-time and very little 'player background' filler time.

By season two various characters have progressed to the 'face card' challenges which are set by other players - and so there's 12 potential games overall.

No one's certain what happens once all the 12 games are won, that's part of the plot which I won't give away, but the problem with S2 is this....

There's relatively little time given to the games, and what coverage there is of the games, it's REALLY dragged out - I think the intention is try and develop tension to get you into the minds of the participants, but it just doesn't work it's basically boring and repetitive.

And there's also a lot more down-time between games where the players are falling in love or just reflecting on their past-lives, which is fine, but there's too much of it.

All of this reaches a peak in episode six which I'm currently on which spends the entire episode on one slow game involving five characters guessing numbers and being killed by acid if they guess wrong a certain number of times.

There's the most tedious dynamic where everyone's trying to anticipate what everyone else is going to guess and it just goes on and on and on.

And at the end of the episode there's a solid five minutes of other characters lying around or looking determined and stating how 'they're not gonna be defeated by the games' and 'get back to their world' with suspenseful music playing the background.

I don't know what Netflix has to gain from this?

What I don't get is why?

I mean I pay my Netflix subscription - what have they got to gain from producing 8 episodes of drama that's too slow rather than say 6 or 7 that are more condensed and frankly better?

It's not as if I'm being advertised to during the shows, there's no attention economy going on as far as I'm aware.

All this is does is make me slightly irritated and wary of watching more shows on Netflix.

I've got two episodes to go now and it's feeling like a chore to get through them rather than something I'm looking forward to.

Nice one Netflix!