frickin loser lol

anyway, in the episode it is HEAVILY implied that Jax was genuinely friends with someone who abstracted. It's reasonable to assume it was Kaufmo, since Jax is seen looking sad for the first time when his funeral is brought up (and, also, Kaufmo is the only abstracted person we know anything about aside from Queenie) but I offer a different answer:

WOW Glitch's new show is coming out swinging. They have a bonkers amount of stuff packed into that 25 minute timeframe. Here's some of the smaller stuff I noticed from the opening chase

Just wanna say I love how the traffic in the background is at an 80 degree angle

The first impact frame of the chase has a lil amogus

The third impact frame has lil doodles of the cast, except they're genderswapped... maybe?? (either way, Mel isn't rocking the eyelashes and luscious lips the rest of'em have)

The Smiling Dead's car's headlights have expressive lil eyelids.

Okay this one admittedly isn't a small thing, it's very in-your-face, but I LOVE how cartoonish Mud's scope is in this shot. The fact that the eye is fully visible, that it's rendered in 2D, that it's grotesquely bloodshot, and that it bounces around with faint pinball sound effects before landing in the center. I am feral for this shot.

When the gun actually fires, we get a frame of Mud's winning smile (though it doesn't correspond to where he actually is in-frame), and what look to be spirits in place of a muzzle flash.

There's also some of the Gaslight Glyphs, but I'll save that for a different part where I attempt to translate every single glyph message in the pilot.

also some here

When Jack gets the JFK treatment, there's a frame where you can see a lil fly in his hair piece

some more glyphs when Mud gets his block knocked off, but there are also some in his head that I don't recognize...

Jack has a lil dashboard decoration of The Whale Belly Butchershop

okay so the wacky watch is currently the official Spudsy's website, very neat.

But! when you go to their menu page, you're met with these four items:

pretty fun, pretty silly, but WAIT A MINUTE! ZOOM AND ENHANCE!

IT'S HIM!

So a pretty big theme in TADC is despair/insanity. None of the humans are doing particularly well and they all have their ways of coping. Another big theme is purpose, both episode two and three had large chunks dedicated to talking about the purpose of life in the circus, and even episode one had Ragatha verbally spiral about what the point of anything was. So, to my point: in all three episodes so far, Jax has made some comment and/or look to the "audience"

And, in the first and third instances, another character calls attention to the fact that he's not actually addressing anyone in particular

only for him to come in from the opposite direction