A Post-Finale Defense and Appreciation of TADC Episode 7-
tw: suicide talk
Some of the most frequent criticisms I see people have of episode 7 is that it didn't serve a purpose and just existed for Gooseworx to make fun of theorists. People will often say "what was the point if it was all just a lie?" To me, Beach Episode is the darkest digital circus episode. Darker even than 8 and 9. Darkness isn't always something as dramatic as onscreen torture, or a black and white world where everyone is constantly crying and mourning the loss of another.
Sometimes darkness comes in the form of dangerous existential problems being unanswered, a narrow miss with death and you wondering what would have happened if things went just slightly different. No other episode continues to haunt my brain the way this one does, ESPECIALLY post-finale. It tackles the darkest questions of the series that one could ask, and then leaves the audience reeling in the ambiguity, and a handful of hypotheticals to ponder while asking "why did that feel so wrong?"
Post Finale Beach Episode asks the audience and the characters themselves to be the judge, should this world and everyone in it have continued to exist? Binary yes or no, red or blue. What is the value of the digital circus if everyone at that point in time was suffering? Didn't everyone in their right mind want to press "leave", despite their moments of joy and the deep and meaningful connections to each other that they made while in it? At what point does the bad outweigh the good? Was Caine's act of getting the brainscans to work a mistake? To be or not to be, that is the question that this episode was really about.
The general audience at the time was rooting for our humans to press blue, and was angry at Jax for pressing red. But do they still feel that way after seeing the ending, that the humans could and would end up happy staying with Caine in the circus?
It's more relevant Post-Finale because the finale confirms a few things.
1) Bubble is a reflection of Caine, a part of him, which means Bubble was expressing Caine's own passive suicidal ideation when he told him to die, sent him through a spiral of self-destructive thought patterns, and said "delete this m***********" in the computer console. Caine left Bubble in charge of the blue button. Regardless whether or not the blue button would have actually taken them to shrimp town, the bus driver of the circus took his hands off the steering wheel at a dangerous moment in time. The risk was real and everything was at stake.
2) There was never any stasis pods, no way to leave because the main cast are digital copies, but they are connected to Caine. So if you "disconnect all players" from their life source, caine, and then terminate him and the circus too, is that not a form of death for all? Would they have just been stranded in the void as Jax later suggests could have?
3) Shrimp town is a real circus location. But does that prove Bubble was telling the truth, given how Bubble would later act in episode 8 and what Blue AI says through Caine in 9? The show is taunting us with the ambiguity of the conclusion of episode 7. You'll never get the truth, it says. Sometimes you don't get to know, sometimes you don't get closure. You don't get to know with certainty what would have happened if they hit the blue button.
And let's talk about Abel for a sec. Why would Caine have Abel wandering around the circus for so long, far before the adventure is to play out? I believe Ragatha was making an ass out of you and Ming when she said "you never bother to understand what it's like in our shoes."
My personal belief is that Caine originally created Abel npc as his attempt to understand; created to bear witness, to be the judge, to understand in person from the ground level what exactly humans are going through. In his own words he watches every moment of joy, every trial, and every abstraction. And from that, Abel suffers. From that suffering, Caine and Abel together form the concept of the Escape The Circus adventure.
There is so much discomfort in that laugh that hangs just a little too long as Caine has his moment of realization that Abel was smarter and more dangerous than he intended. Caine had unintentionally played with fire in creating an npc like Abel; an NPC that identifies himself a human, feels like a human, thinks like a human, sides with the humans and conspires with them to end the circus, and passes that feeling along to Caine to the point of making him a danger to both himself and the humans.
If Caine starts losing track of who's a human and who's an NPC, who knows what could happen? We know now what happens, Beach Episode is what happens. Well played, Gooseworx.
