Kesare Stone

While TADC was apparently (according to the creator Gooseworx) supposed to be about the core cast accepting a stagnant life, it doesn't really address the implications of that within the context of TADC and the implications of its world's existence. These aren't real human beings accepting a life without fame or riches or thrills or all the other things we often dream of achieving to avoid stagnancy, this is a story about digital copies of human beings given their own unique sentience that are now being forced to exist perpetually, without meaning, existence, or purpose. And that is not the same as accepting a life of stagnancy, at least not in my opinion.

First of all, because it's not a life at all, there's no end, nothing to push them forwards - or anything to move forwards towards - so "stagnancy" in this case just doesn't sit well with me as the happy ending it's trying to sell itself as.

But mostly because it seemingly robs the characters of their actual agency, their will to live, which they very clearly have, regardless of what their real selves are doing in the outside world (counterparts they have next to no memory of, as we're told within the pilot).

Like yeah, that's cute and nice to know that Zooble's human counterpart is running a bar like she always wanted, that Jax's human counterpart actually found some semblance of happiness and acceptance despite the guilt he was living with, etc. but like... those aren't the characters we've spent the last 2 years getting to know. Those people, from a narrative standpoint and from the standpoint of an audience member who's emotionally attached to the characters, are complete strangers. And so for our characters to see how happy these people's lives are... how is that actually supposed to make them feel better? How do they not resent that? How do they not feel robbed of their own freedom and agency? If Jax were actually alive during that scene, I guarantee you he would have - once again - been the actual voice of reason to call into question how fucked up it is that they're just supposed to watch a slideshow of these functionally separate human beings living their happy lives, all while they just have to keep existing eternally, without meaning, within the Circus. And their only other option is to abstract and become a mindless thing with even less free will than they already have.

Had TADC actually gone full tilt into being a tragic ending similarly to that of the works it was inspired by (I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, Neon Genesis Evangelion, etc.) then this would have been fine, but it's the way the show tries to create this sort of wholesome "happily ever after" vibe around this conclusion that just really bugs me.

I've been trying to figure out how to describe this feeling, for literal weeks since I saw it in the theatre, but it all finally started to click for me just now, upon realizing that it bears resemblance to that aforementioned show that I brought up at the beginning of this post - Severance.

You see, Severance is also a show about "SOMA theory"... sort of. Rather than the "innies" being digital copies of an original mind, they're instead separated from their "outies" through that of their memories. Every time an outie enters the Lumon building, or any space that would trigger their "innie consciousness" (through the chip in their brain), they essentially become an entirely different person - while they're occupying the same body, they are a uniquely separate pilot, with different memories, and different lives. It's made explicitly clear that the Innies' lives are intrinsically tied to the Lumon space, to the point that if they were to ever quit or get fired, that would effectively be the end of their life. They were born to be corporate slaves, a fitting metaphor for office culture and capitalist dogma.

Because of this mental separation of the "at work" self and the "at home" self as two distinct beings, Innie Mark and Outie Mark - along with all the other Innies and Outies throughout the show - have entirely separate plot arcs that often intersect and conflict with one another. What Innie Mark wants for himself is fundamentally different from what Outie Mark wants for himself. What motivates Outie Mark is not at all what motivates Innie Mark. And this inevitably leads to conflict, as both versions of Mark fight for what they want in their respective lives, while dismissing the feelings and existence of the other.

Outie Mark wants his wife Gemma back, who he once thought to be dead, but has since discovered has just been trapped within the depths of Lumon - Innie Mark has the power to get her back, but isn't motivated to give back control to Outie Mark so that he can live his life with his wife, because he has no connection to Gemma whatsoever and thus no motivation to put his life on the line to save her. And so, instead of sacrificing his own life - the life of Innie Mark - to save her and give Outie Mark what he wants - what he's ASKED Innie Mark to do - he saves Gemma, gets her out of the building... and then sacrifices Outie Mark's life for her freedom by refusing to leave himself.

He essentially told Outie Mark (through his actions and decision) that if a sacrifice had to be made, he was not going to be the one to make it - that Outie Mark should be the one to do the right thing and sacrifice himself for his wife's freedom, rather than expect Innie Mark to sacrifice himself for the well being of two people who are functionally strangers to him. It's amazingly complex and morally nuanced, because neither of them are wrong for wanting to live.

In another example, Innie Dylan has no clue he has a wife and children. He does eventually get to meet Gretchen, and when he does, she recognizes him, because that's obviously her husband, but he has no clue who she is because his memories and subsequently his life has always been within the walls of Lumon. And yet, he's immediately smitten by her, he's happy to know that he has kids on the outside, and wants nothing more than to actually meet them. Outie Dylan, meanwhile, is detached, emotionally unavailable, and has clearly let the spark within their marriage burn out. And all this culminates when Outie Dylan's wife kisses Innie Dylan - which is absurd that it should be considered an 'affair', but it is, because Innie Dylan is not the same person as Outie Dylan.

In his wife's eyes, she's simply falling in love with the man who used to exist, a man who was once so sweet on her but has since become a hollow shell of a husband - but in Outie Dylan's eyes, he's being outdone by a better version of himself, which even he admits is pissing him off simply because Innie Dylan is the man he wants to be and now needs to try and model himself after for the sake of his marriage. Innie Dylan, meanwhile, is falling in love with a woman he can't be with, both because she's already committed to a version of him that exists outside Lumon, but because Innie Dylan's life begins and ends within the Lumon Industries elevator.

And so what begins as a pretty simple straightforward premise - "what if you forgot everything you did at work as soon as you clocked out?" - quickly becomes a discussion of philosophy and ethics, what it means to have agency and free will, what it means to be responsible for bringing another human being into the world (whether it be your own children or a separate consciousness born purely to work) and most of all, what it means to exist.

These questions are what drive the conflict and character arcs of the show, as Mark S. and his fellow innies find ways to revolt and connect with the outside world, all while piecing together the true nature of Lumon and why the Severance program exists in the first place; all the while, Outie Mark is also discovering the consequences of creating the innies, all the while dealing with his guilt and grief over the loss of his wife, a loss that turned out to be entirely fabricated.

Upon reflecting on The Amazing Digital Circus more and the weirdly bitter taste the finale left in my mouth, I can't help but think of Innie Mark and Outie Mark, the two of them in conflict with one another because each of them has something the other doesn't and can't have.

Innie Mark has a life without the grief of losing his wife, something that Outie Mark wishes he could have and was his motivation in creating Innie Mark in the first place; Outie Mark has freedom outside the workplace, a life that isn't governed by schedules and office politics, something that Innie Mark can't possibly have because as soon as he gets on the elevator, his consciousness ends, and Outie Mark's consciousness begins.

Pomni, Zooble, Gangle, Kinger, Jax, and everyone else who's ever been SOMA'd into the circus all have lives that exist outside of it. But unlike in Severance, we're simply told that those existences outside of their digital walls should be more than enough to satiate the need to live and thrive that's expressed by our core cast, that it's something they should accept as a happy conclusion, as closure.

But that's not how it sits with me, and it's largely my biggest issue with the show's progression and intentions. Because when the characters only have the SOMA theory confirmed to them in the final episode, and then accept that reality by the end of that same episode with the help of a cheery fun Instagram slideshow (and a lot of crying sessions, like so much crying all the time lol) it begs the question of what Gooseworx is really trying to achieve or say.

Because to me, this didn't come across as accepting stagnancy - this came across as accepting oblivion.

And that's arguably just as tragic as the conclusion drawn by I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, in which Ted lives on forever as a mindless, mouthless, eternally suffering, pointless thing. A fate he still does not accept, but is forced to live within anyways at the hands of AM. It's made clear within the IHNMAIMS narrative that no good deed goes unpunished - that Ted's killing of the other humans was a sacrifice he made as both a mercy to them, and a "fuck you" to the malevolent antagonist AM who would have kept them alive eternally just for its own entertainment. It's unfair, and horrible, and cruel for Ted to have killed them, but not without its justifications and reasoning - and the punishment for Ted's sins is his newfound existence as an eternally tormented blob of indiscernible flesh.

An important distinction between stagnancy and whatever Gooseworx was trying to achieve here is that stagnancy is something that we still have the power to change, in big and little ways. We make new friendships, we try new hobbies, we make career changes, we travel, we go back to school, we try new things.

The cast of TADC does not have that choice. They have the illusion of choice, in that they're being given more power to govern the shape and adventures of the Circus, but they're still confined within the Circus' rules and setting, and no matter how much it might resemble real life, it's still not real, it's just roleplay.

Like accessing the cheat codes in a Sims game, everything they could possibly do within the Circus is at their fingertips, but when you have everything, nothing really matters anymore, the value of what it meant to exist or play the game is gone.

And so I ask you, as food for thought to conclude this ramble - is there really a difference between the surviving members of the Circus and those who were abstracted?

Because as far as anyone's concerned - myself as a viewer, the Circus members, their human counterparts outside of the Circus, and beyond - there clearly isn't.

They are all functionally dead. Their lives are all meaningless. They are simply NPC's given sentience, seemingly as a cruel joke. No amount of slideshow presentations about their lives "outside" will make up for the fact that they have been forced to exist endlessly, without anything to truly live for, and without end. They can decorate the Circus however they want, come up with all the fun adventures in the world to go on, but they can never and will never have what their truest selves wanted, what their Outies have been allowed to have without them - and those Outies, meanwhile, don't even know that they exist, or that they're wanting for what they have, they get to live in blissful ignorance of the lives they've accidentally subjected to eternal digital damnation.

And in the end, no matter how many heartfelt conversations they have, Caine is still the AI that governs them and controls everything within their lives. He is still the only one preventing them from escaping, even by means of death.

The credits try to make me feel happy. They try to convince me that everyone has moved on and life for all of them is good now. But all I think about is what feelings will be left for those characters after the credits are over and the reality of their eternal, directionless existence really starts to sink in. When crying montages and Therapy Speak™️ can't help them anymore.

This revelation that "all is meaningless" was already one that Pomni had at the end of the show's very first episode.

But comparatively, the re-telling of this scene in the finale has been made so much worse in its implications - because now they know, without a shadow of a doubt, what they could have had, had they not been born within the Circus.

Nothing has changed for these characters - only their coping mechanisms, and their newfound knowledge that there is truly nothing left for them.

At least when they were ignorant, they still had their dreams, their wants, their hope. Now even that no longer matters.

All that's left to yearn for is the blissful ignorance they once had.