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In addition to testing survival skills, Alice in Borderland Season 3 digs into the hidden and internal wounds of these characters. Especially, Tetsu, an older drug addict who joins Arisu's team, and ends up becoming one of the season's most tragic characters, as a consequence of the said internal wound.
His journey ends during the Possible Futures (Future Sugoroku) game, where his struggle with drugs and his blurred sense of reality lead him to a fatal choice. Pulled by visions of his ex-wife, he steps into the wrong room and his points run out, causing his collar to literally explode.
Tetsu's death here isn't just random and is worth exploring because of the layered meaning it encompasses. Meaning that revolves around addiction, regret, and the thin line between escape and self-destruction.
Addiction, illusion, and the collapse of choice in Borderland
Tetsu's story arc in Alice in Borderland Season 3 feels different from the younger players and survivors around him. While others fight with strategy and sacrifice, his battle is mostly against himself.
His drug addiction in Alice in Borderland Season 3 is much more than just a character backstory mentioned in passing; it shapes the way he approaches and plays the games. He often drifts between calm indifference and sudden irritation, demonstrating how his body and mind are already worn down. Even when we see him tend to others' wounds with care, there's an underlying sense that he's carrying a personal wound that he can't seem to heal.
Future Sugoroku game exposes exactly that. In this challenge, every door opens to a vision, a possible future, i.e, the lives that the players might live. For someone like Tetsu, already haunted by regrets and blurred memories, this game is especially cruel.
He hallucinates about Yukiko, his ex-wife, a person tied to both love and loss. Instead of grounding him, the vision drives him deeper into confusion. Chasing a dream of reunion, he enters a door that drains more points than he has.
The moment his collar detonates feels inevitable, not just because of the mechanics of the game, but because Tetsu's addiction has already eroded his ability to separate desire from reality. His death is as much about a collapsing body as it is about a collapsing will.
Tetsu’s death as a mirror of his addiction in Alice in Borderland Season 3
What makes Tetsu's death in Alice in Borderland Season 3 so striking is that it doesn't play out like a simple elimination. His death feels symbolic, ringing the destructive cycle of addiction. Drugs had already cost him his marriage and his place in society before he ever stepped into Borderland.
Now, in a twisted purgatory that has been built around survival, it is once again his inability to resist the pull of escape that seals his fate.
Future Sugoroku game in Alice in Borderland Season 3 essentially asks every player: "Which version of your life do you choose?" Most struggle with the weight of sacrifice, but for Tetsu, the question is poisoned from the start.
Addiction, after all, is about chasing futures that never arrive with one more hit, one more chance, one more illusion of relief. His hallucination of Yukiko is less about genuine love and more about that familiar craving for a fix, for comfort that cannot last. In stepping into the wrong room, he doesn't just lose the game; he reenacts the same spiral that had first ruined his real life.
His death also highlights the strange humanity of Borderland. Despite his abrasive personality, Tetsu had shown moments of tenderness, like shielding teammates from arrows or tending to wounds.
But addiction undercuts even kindness, pulling him back into isolation. In this way, his end becomes a cautionary tale within the show: Alice in Borderland Season 3 may be about external games, but the deadliest battles are often internal.
Tetsu's fate in Alice in Borderland Season 3 is more than just another casualty of the Joker games. His death ties directly into the theme that is illusion versus reality, where it is his death that shows just how addiction can blur the boundary between reality and illusion until the choices no longer make sense.
By following a hallucination instead of reason, the character perfectly illustrates the way addiction rewrites survival instincts into self-destruction.
His story may have been short-lived, but it acts as one of the most haunting deaths on Alice in Borderland Season 3, and in a way, it also acts as a reminder that not all of our battles are fought with cards or dice, but some are fought within the mind.
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