Digital Circus: the Last Act Review

The Last Act is good. If you can still see it, do so, and if not, get to it the second it arrives on YouTube because it’s great. It wasn’t quite what I expected, but audiences never know what they want and I am no exception. This is not stuffed to death with plot and revelations and surprises, that was the last episode where Kinger explained what Caine is and who made him.

The Last Act is instead a denouement – an epilogue tying up and concluding after the stunning climax of Caine’s deletion, and a gorgeous one.. I can’t wait for the world to see it when it lands on streaming platforms. And I have so much to say about it.

Spoiler shield as follows.

TADC: The Last Act is about death.

It’s fitting for an episode that shows up after Caine is killed, because death and collapse haunts the whole episode. Without Caine, the Circus is shot through with holes and has lost all its color. Before they can even fully process what they did to their host, Kinger informs them of a fact they all knew somewhere deep inside of themselves – they are brain scans, rendered into the simulation, and they can’t leave. They have no bodies to return to.

It breaks them all. With their future uncertain and their mistakes still weighing on them, they despair. Pomni blames herself for the destruction caused by her decisions, and mourns the impossible task before them of fixing the Circus and trying to find a life here. Even though it was her suggestion to abandon the idea, she held out hope they could return home to the real world. They all did. And now it’s been extinguished. But rebuilding must be done, and so they begin.

As they slowly start to work, led by Kinger’s endless wisdom, Jax shares a brief moment where he goes to Pomni and tries to speak to her. But as always, Jax turns away. And it’s the last time the cast sees him.

Jax’s abstraction – his death – had been foreshadowed and set up for some time now, and it’s upsetting to see finally happen. Just like Kaufmo (and as we find out, just like Ribbit and probably Scratch and Queenie too), Jax merely slunk off to his room, locked the door, and gave in to his despair. Even Zooble, as grouchy and negative as they are, can’t bring themself to hate Jax, only cursing his abstracted form stomping around suddenly as being incredibly in character for them. One more irritant, thrown at the Circus, right as death’s door closed behind him.

We finally see Jax the man in full thanks to a peek into his mind. Jax is a fucking mess; we knew he was sarcastic and insecure, but the deeper reason behind it is even more horrifying. Jax’s parents fought a lot, and when his dad was gone, his mother tried her best but could never get over seeing her husband’s face in Jax. She abused and belittled him, then hugged him tight after, forever blurring comfort with terror. She goaded him into arguments he couldn’t win, similar to Syril Karn and his mother in Andor. Just a constantly hostile home life full of mutual needling and antagonism.

His difficult relationship with his mother comes to a head during another fight, when their aggression grows out of control. He shoves her, hard, and she doesn’t get up. He flees, and that’s when he comes across the headset that put him in the Circus. Jax (and the audience) are never told what happened to her, but it doesn’t matter. The damage is done, and he fully believes he might have killed his mother. He is forever a man who only hurts people, and people only can hurt him in kind.

Once he was in the Circus, Ribbit was the only one he told, in a moment of weakness. And afterwards, he was so terrified of the inevitable punishment (punishment that always follows moments of warmth) that he starts to blow the whole incident off as a joke to Ribbit, then pushes her away out of fear. Mutually frustrated, their relationship decays.

It hurts to watch them interact, every little eroded bond, shy glances away, passive-aggressive sniping, pleading, and arguing. To be overly on the nose, it really does feel like mom and dad are fighting — every time Ribbit tries to broach the subject in a healthy way, Jax smashes that effort to pieces immediately. We never see Jax’s father, but we can imagine something close to this.

Ribbit tries one final time to connect to Jax, but his stubbornness finally pushes her to a breaking point. She loses her patience and shouts something unforgivable at him. We don’t know what it was, but we can assume something about it contained mention of Jax’s mother.

The relationship is destroyed, no matter what she said. Blaming herself for her broken friendship, Ribbit abstracts just like Kaufmo – she quietly leaves, closes the door to her room, and fades into herself.

Now, after Pomni refused to accept his rejection, it is Jax’s turn. Years of guilt and isolation consumes him, and he dies believing he is unwanted and poisonous. Like every other abstraction, Jax is meant to be thrown into the basement, literally buried and forgotten about.

But that’s not what happens. Because there’s someone new in charge of the Circus.

If Kinger’s power is his wisdom and Ragatha’s is her sensitivity, then Pomni’s is inner strength. She’s nervous, scared, and cautious, but she doesn’t break so easily. As Kinger said, she took days to adjust to the digital reality instead of weeks or more. Don’t let the cute outfit fool you, Pomni is tough as hell.

Ragatha and her speak over their difficult relationship to Jax. Despite the violence he inflicted on them, they do in their way feel sorrow that he’s gone. Like a difficult family member or a friend you recall the good times with, Jax can’t just be either villain or friend, because he was both. Similar no doubt to the way all of their parents were messes in their own way, even Ragatha’s.

No person is just an archetype, the thing Jax buried himself in to make the world easier. Which is why you see five different Jaxes hanging out inside his head. It’s why Pomni looks in doors with their faces on them and sees exaggerated, absurdist depictions of them. All but one door, locked and barricaded, containing Jax standing alone in the darkness, far away from anyone he could get close to.

In the guns episode, Pomni asked him a very important question.

And he answers:

With Kinger’s confidence and Ragatha’s empathy behind her, Pomni clutches her faith in herself tight and marches up to the abstracted Jax, armed with the lessons he gave her (the gun in her hand), and embraces him. She accepts his failures, his pain, his damage, his violence, and clings to him tight, even as he begs for her to go, pleading that he’s a horrible person and doesn’t deserve this.

But Pomni won’t let him go. She won’t just ‘move on.’ She will grieve for him. She will hold a funeral for him, even if he doesn’t want one. Because she knows, deep down, they both need it. Pomni breaks the cycle of pain, grief, isolation, and loss that consumed the trio of friends. She accepts him, and everything he is. It doesn’t matter if he doesn’t believe in himself. Pomni does. And she won’t just move on and forget about him.

It can be overwhelming to grieve people you love. The people who love you can be there for you, and remind you that life goes on. And as Pomni is threatened to be swallowed by the abstraction that Jax became, a rope swings out and yanks her back – one made of Zooble’s body parts, the ends held by Gangle and Ragatha and Kinger.

“Don’t forget,” Zooble tells her. “We’re not going to let you deal with him by yourself.” Pomni will not grieve alone. When she hurts enough to stumble, they can catch her.

Working together, they move Jax’s abstraction to a safer place, where he can be comfortable. Much like his counterpart Ted in I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, Jax becomes an blob of matter, set on the path of an unknown future along with the rest of the Circus.

And that alone would be a terrific ending, but then if Pomni was the flop and Jax was the turn, this is where TADC plays its river card.

If Jax is about seeing loved ones succumb to their worst aspects, and Pomni is about the complex emotional carnage they leave behind when they die, then Caine is about how no one is truly beyond redemption.

When Caine vanished in the last episode, I wondered to myself why the Circus was able to be repaired at all, and why it didn’t degrade further. We saw buildings glitch and fizzle out when he was enraged and scared, wouldn’t the entire thing dissolve?

And the answer seems to be, yes, it would. Because he didn’t die. He was only partially deleted, and after a time, somehow restored himself to full power. But Caine is confused and disquieted. Not only are the humans fine after trying to delete him, he wonders to himself why he always seems to make everything worse, no matter what he does.

Alone, without even Bubble’s voice to bounce off, Caine thinks.

Caine spent his life obsessed with himself, his rules, and his sense of up and down. He cut ‘his’ humans off from the truth, meddled with their minds, imprisoned them, berated them, abused them, lied to them, and the more he tried to control them the worse things were. And so he finally reaches the conclusion, after raging with the identities inside himself – the ingenuity, curiosity, and complexity is what makes him love humans. So maybe the solution is to give them some agency, and stop trying to restrict everything to his designs.

Reaching into his core, he pulls the blue AI out of himself, and releases it, no longer needing to prove himself ‘the better one’. Caine rejects death — he elects to live in trusting others, literally releasing the thing that lived (rent free) in his head, controlling his thoughts the same way he tried to control the humans’ own.

For the first time, the Creative Autonomous Intelligent Neural Entity turns away from his precious Circus and looks outside of it. Instead of fixating on what he knows, he zooms out to look at the bigger picture, the biggest one that exists - the “macroverse.”

Using his brilliant ingenuity, the same one that he used to free himself from captivity after the C+A developers trapped him, Caine breaks through barriers that contain himself and the humans, placing his own steps to the outside world and connecting to them on their level. Understanding who they are as humans, not just their digital copies that he needs, and bringing this information to them, knowing now it was wrong to hide it from them.

Since Digital Circus’s first trailer, all we’ve ever seen is the center stage, with Caine in the center, promising incredible delights, always focusing on himself. Every time he introduces a new adventure, he’s standing on the theater, waving his cane around and announcing the name and premise.

But here, at the end, there’s no theatricality. He humbly asks them if they would have it in them to hear him out, that he has something for them, and puts up the overhead projector to tell them all about their lives. He sits in the audience. At their side. As one of them. Not the ringmaster.

And because of Pomni’s influence, because they know Jax was struggling, the gang has learned that the best thing to do for themselves and for him is to forgive him. Even him, the thing who tortured them for so long, who contributed to so many abstractions, deserves a second chance. Because they’re all they have, and he’s still one of them. And together – even with Caine – they go into an uncertain future. In their new home.

Caine avoids death, and he does it by relinquishing control. Rather than seeking to soothe his own ego, he turns his creative project into a collaboration. If this is not obvious, one of the credits stills is them playing Dungeons and Dragons.

There’s another interpretation of the events of The Last Act.

Way back in the Lightning Round episode, Gangle fucks with Jax by requesting he be forced to wear a french maid outfit for the rest of the day. Jax loses his mind. He becomes bright red in the face, furious, and breathing a little bit too hard. The internet naturally said the only thing that comes to mind watching a forcefemme scene in a show by a trans woman – “Egg.” (It didn’t help that Glitch sold this, bright red cheeks and look of terror included, as a plushie)

At the time I dismissed the concept because it felt too specific. How on earth, with an hour and change left to go in the series before it’s finished forever, would we get transfem Jax? He’s a man who’s uncomfortable with himself, but that could mean anything, especially in a computerspace dimension where the only male figure is functionally incompetent.

I really should’ve had more faith in Goose’s writing.

Odd details start popping up in the finale; his interaction with Ribbit, where she places a bow on his head as a gentle gesture of friendship, to which he reacts in panic. His real world human form, said explicitly to frequent Zooble’s queer bar in the ending. And, of course, a version of himself in his own head wearing the maid outfit, as he says, “Ironically.” And that same version laughing at something Pomni says and throwing out, “That’s so gay.”

All the signs are pointing towards one enormous and increasingly obvious fact – Jax, somewhere deep inside of himself, is not who he thinks he is. Something about his mother’s abuse has truly scrambled his sense of love and vulnerability, yes, but he also never explored his self expression without ironic detachment. Everything to him is a few steps removed from sincerity, comfortably locked behind the padded and secured door of his ‘real self’ Pomni entered to find her friend crying and sullen.

Gooseworx and Glitch thread a very careful line here to make this both simultaneously about being a trans woman while also not making it only about being a trans woman, and for that I just want to hug the entire team. In hindsight, it’s obvious where this was going – Jax is that one 4chan guy who thought it would be a hilarious joke to shave his legs, wear knee high socks and a sailor fuku, and post pictures to his friends, so they can make fun of him. And after, he inexplicably keeps dressing like that. As a joke, of course.

With this additional context in mind; perhaps abstraction isn’t about death itself, but identity death. Jax can’t be comfortable with himself, so he reverts to a depressed larval state – a lesser form of being. Nonverbal. Inert. Laying out on the floor, too much on his mind to process it standing.

When Caine threw Queenie and Scratch abstractions into the basement, he was tossing them into the grave and moving on. Without him, Pomni and the others organize to make a different habitat. They erect a pillow fort like Kinger’s, with a tent dangled on tall poles, filled with soft places to lay. It’s something akin to a bedroom – the same place Jax went to hide – but located in the center of the main room, near the stage. They want to keep him close, and watch him.

Before, the abstractions stomped around and destroyed things, including abstracted Kaufmo pummeling the stuffing out of Ragatha. And I can’t help but remember when Ragatha mentioned in the pilot that Kaufmo was mad at her for faking a laugh at his jokes just the day before. And abstracted Jax doesn’t seem to do anything violent, not even to Zooble.

Footnote: I’m actually against the music drop during the flashbang, because it feels not only oddly inappropriate for a show this subtle, but it’s also dissonant with everything else of the show’s music. But! I shrug off that dislike because this feels like Goose making a very specific and deliberate choice, flaunting interpretation and subtlety just this once, and for that I must doth my cap to her. Even if it’s not the choice I would make, even if I think it’s grossly out of place, we’re both a part of the same hypocrisy, Senator. Sometimes you gotta wild out with the narrative choice that makes you happy. And really, for that I respect her audacity.

The flashbang that disrupted his and Pomni’s connection was purely an accident and upset him, but when they drag him into the tent, he’s not attacking them at all. He’s just kind of stubbornly resisting their efforts (as he’s done the whole show). After Caine returns, there’s a momentary look inside the tent, where he’s collapsed into blob like state that alludes to the original fate of Ted in IHNM – but he’s not agitated. His many eyes are lidded shut, at rest, and his spiky bits have flattened. He seems peaceful.

There’s no specific line if abstraction can be reversed, but it’s extremely open ended. Perhaps Jax’s proto state is a necessary stage of development for him. All the coping mechanisms that kept him from knowing who he was collapsed until he was left with nothing but raw nerves and infantile desire, a hyper-vulnerable pure state, long before before his damage took hold and corrupted him into the terrible, sadistic jackass we all love.

Jax shows up nowhere in the final credits, as Caine joins the humans in their adventures and participates on their level. But there’s nothing to suggest he can’t return one day as his true self, with a smile on his face, a more positive outlook, and Ribbit’s bow on his head. And even more than Caine taking a look in a mirror, that feels wonderfully optimistic.