Just Finished The Amazing Digital Circus
And I had a good time with it. Overall, it does a lot of very interesting things with its core ideas, characters, and meta narrative. If you haven’t seen the series yet, it’s worth a watch.
However, it has some key pacing, scope, tonal continuity, and focus issues that are common among indie projects like this. This series has been going for years now, so I won’t harp too much on the first eight episodes. Instead I just want to talk a bit about the finale.
Everything in the ninth episode before the Jax flashbacks is rushed as hell. It feels like the screenwriters were going down a bulleted list rather than writing scenes with characters in them and space between them. This is made all the more jarring by Pomni and Ragatha’s thirty seconds of uninterrupted eye contact as they mournfully part before being separated for all of twenty minutes. Jax’s internal scenes drag more than a little, especially his flashbacks surrounding his relationship with Ribbit. Caine’s approach to the brain scan files is painfully drawn out for reasons I’m still unclear on. None of these are fatal flaws by any means. They just make me hesitant to rewatch the episode because even the scenes I w joy will feel like I’m “sitting through” them instead of enjoying them.
I also think certain explanations of the stakes and worldbuilding fall a bit short because of the rush at the start of the episode. Many viewers will still be confused about the significance of the characters merely being brain scans until the “where are they now” montage at the end. The conjuring thing (which should’ve been called instantiating in my opinion, but that’s a separate issue) felt woefully under-explored. I understand that it’s not nearly as important as the actual emotional core of the series, but it would’ve been nice to see even two more minutes of that being explored.
There are entirely too many hanging threads left by this finale. If this season had been written and edited all at once rather than stretched out over this much time, then I imagine certain lines would have been cut from earlier episodes to prevent this issue. As it stands, I’m left wondering whether or not anything can be done about the abstracted folks (for example: can brain scan files be restored?), what C&A is up to now, why other minds were introduced to the system, what will become of the Blue AI, what happens if Caine loses track of other AI, etc, etc, etc.
The Amazing Digital Circus explores really interesting ideas and raises really interesting questions that feel like they could and should result in really engaging explorations and conflicts. Many of those are delivered upon excellently, but others are left hanging, despite special emphasis being put on their introduction. Not to repeat myself too much in an already too-long post, but the death of Gumigoo and Caine’s “who knows what would happen” line feel like they should have led to something. Maybe there’s supposed to be an implication that his worry about other intelligent AI running around is related to an implicit fear of being overtaken and consumed the same way he did to the Blue AI, but if that’s the case, it’s not clear at all. It doesn’t need to be obvious, but it should at least be nodded towards somewhere in the finale.
There are two needle drops in the finale and Pomni gets a voiceover. These don’t occur anywhere else in the entire series. There’s the theme song in episode 1 (repeated in the finale as a callback and really good depiction of how things have changed), and Caine’s number in episode 8, but never before this point has the series had licensed music. They feel very out of place and I can’t really understand why they’re here instead of an original score.
The actual conflict of the series is that a bunch of people are trapped in a digital world that’s run by an insane AI. The conclusion is that the AI becomes a partner to the people so they all can shape the digital world together as peers. Along the way, additional conflict arises in many forms: the humans don’t want to be there and want to escape; the AI desperately wants to be liked by the humans, but he snaps and decides that being feared is okay too; each human has internal conflicts originating both internal and external to the digital world; the humans’ minds are gradually decaying because of the digital world’s bizarre rules and stressors.
Thats a LOT! That’s enough to fill dozens of episodes as dense as these, but the series only has 9 episodes.
It’s not surprising that some characters got more screen time dedicated to their conflicts than others. The main-ish character, Pomni, is given the task of shit-sorter, so it’s not surprising that we never see her internal struggles and instead watch her help everybody else. That said, it still feels like Jax is given disproportionate screen time, backstory detail, and even agency over the emotional state of others.
Is that necessarily a bad thing? Ehhhh probably not. He’s a borderline secondary antagonist, so it makes sense that his issues and hangups created more dire problems for everybody else, naturally resulting in him getting the most attention in the text. Pomni is the audience POV into all the stuff that’s wrong with Jax, and everybody else’s problems are secondary to that (purely in terms of the emotional core of the human scan cast).
Would I, personally, have liked to see Zooble, Gangle, Ragatha, and Kinger get more time to explore their issues? Absolutely. However, they each got a good enough amount of attention that I can confidently outline their characters, conflicts, and motivations. That’s huge! That’s not true of some multi-season shows produced by major networks. I’m glad the writers didn’t try to give every member of the main cast the same amount of care, because it either would have fully killed the pacing, led to another five years of waiting for episodes, or left every character feeling a bit hollow.
What is a problem is that this fixation on Jax happens separate from but simultaneous to the conflict with Caine. There is little to no overlap between Jax’s abstraction plot line and Caine’s rampancy plot line. They just both happen at the same time. In a longer series, Caine would’ve been the final season boss and Jax’s abstraction would’ve been the penultimate season’s finale.
I don’t want to give the impression that I disliked the finale or the show as a whole. I really like this series, and the ending was satisfying and well made. I would never say this was disappointing or bad or a waste of my time or anything like that. These flaws are possible areas of improvement for the next project these folks work on. They’re learning experiences for other creatives (myself included). There a lot that was done right here, and I hope I haven’t given the impression that these few flaws somehow invalidate this amazing achievement by many talented artists and writers.
I’m genuinely excited to see what everybody involved does next.
