Haunted House Resident

I haven't seen anyone talking about this and just wanted to make a quick post on here.

Akihiro Miwa recently passed away peacefully june 20th, and was not only a drag queen and a queer icon, but also the japanese voice of Arceus in the movie Arceus and the jewel of life, as well as the witch from Howl's moving castle and Moro from Princess Mononke.

yeah that looks normal… yeah these are all— um. hold on. hang on.

IT’S STILL YOU.

SO. THAT NEW EPISODE, HUH?

I was wondering why this line, more than any other insult, seemed to break Caine and send him into a full meltdown.

But the way the two were positioned reminded me of this scene, earlier in the episode. This is the only time we see Scratch, who we now know helped program/create Caine.

Go back and watch closely when Scratch speaks.

Because I swear that right here, he says,

"Don't you know who I am?"

And then,

"Hey, are you listening, Caine?!"

His tone of voice here... we've never heard it from Jax before. It was a little softer, higher-pitched. Younger. It felt like we were seeing through his snarky facade.

Him hearing Kinger talk about his past, about programming Caine... that seems to have convinced him that the circus is "real". I think he believed, before this, that it was all a hallucination or dream or something on his part. That it was all in his head, and that all the other people were just figments of his imagination. It'd certainly explain his cruelty to others in the past.

I can't even fault him for that assumption, it's no crazier than reality, and it's a whole lot simpler.

The visual representation of Caine’s origins and also linking back to the origins of the red/blue symbolism that perpetuated this show:

AI 1 (Caine) was made and fed information about the outside world, allowing it to generate and create things in the program.

Kinger later in this episode: “Caine was our first semi-successful attempt at that […] Caine was a little rough around the edges though, I wasn’t quite at Scratch’s level of thinking outside the box, but it was good groundwork for something the rest of the team could wrap their heads around.”

Caine was a first attempt, but not perfect. Science is a lot of trial and error and Caine showed Kinger what worked/didn’t work, which they could apply to future attempts.

So Caine either was put to the side, or was restricted by his own coding (what Kinger hadn’t figured out yet), with the box here representing either imprisonment by the developers, or imprisonment by his own restrictions in code.

AI 2 was made, this time presumably with the rest of the team building on Caine. There was the same process of development and whatnot, and this AI may have been seen as the “superior” version, something Caine in the internalized based on Bubble’s later line about him being the worser of the two.

Caine was able to escape the limits in place, possibly advancing on his own in the time away, and ended up connecting with AI 2. They merged and their competing minds fought for dominance, Caine eventually winning out (maybe because even though AI 2 had a superior base code, Caine had longer to develop/grow.)

Then Caine made the circus.

The red/blue stuff, especially Caine’s eyes, are possibly a side effect of the two AIs merging. And we see the red/blue when he’s upset and feeling inferior/not enough (possibly the feeling that resulting in AI 2’s death to begin with), and maybe Caine’s instability is a result of the other AI being consumed.

When we see the two AI near, we can see the difference in scale, showing again that idea that Caine was seen as a first draft/inferior AI.

Kinger says in Untitled that blue is his favorite color, it being closer to black, which could be a throw away line, or COULD be a nod at the idea that AI 2 was favored over Caine.

Additionally, the red/blue buttons: red is the option for “stay” (the “win” option and what Caine wanted.)

All the usage of red and blue in the circus (outside of them being primary and common colors) could be Caine internalizing his past.