The Multiverse Is Leaking

Spoiler Warning!

The latest TADC episode (#6) was the best one yet, with over 30 colorful minutes of crack-up jokes, crack-shots, and character drama (a fandom’s crack cocaine). It looks like the fandom went from betting on Raga’s abstraction to lying firmly in camp “Jax is NOT okay.” Not that I blame them; my man’s having a rough go of it.

But will Jax really be the one to bite the digital dust? We all thought it would be Raga, and now that’s surely not the case. Perhaps nobody will abstract, and they’ll all live happily ever after…

But, assuming (sorry Ming) that there WILL be an Abstraction, who’s on the writer’s chopping block?

It’s Caine. It’s going to be Caine. And I’m gonna tell you why:

1. Caine.exe isn’t just crashing; he’s crashing out.

Ever since the therapy session with Zooble he’s been getting more and more unhinged, and not just with Zooble but the whole gang. They’re always fighting, always complaining, and never giving his adventures the appreciation he feels they deserve. He tried to mitigate it with the trust exercise, but that failed, and we can see after that he just kinda gave up.

2. Caine isn’t what he seems.

He was looking at those pictures of C&A offices. He also built the fake offices from Episode 1. Perhaps he, too, is from the outside. Leading to my next point:

3. Caine is… human?!

He isn’t an AI, he’s another human that got trapped in the Circus a long, long time ago, having long lost his mind. But then how does he control the Circus? We saw Kinger summon a healthpack Butterfly out of thin air, so its possible that its something any human player can do, if they know how (or have sufficiently lost their minds).

4. This is all setup for an edge-of-your-seat finale.

This is kind of cheating, but my writer senses tingling here: Caine abstracting in the series finale will be a massive shakeup of the status quo, an escalation of the stakes, and a character death—the main ingredients to any grand finale. After all, Caine’s the one who puts the abstracted humans into the cellar, so if he’s gone, the remaining cast has to figure something out. Maybe that means discovering how to mod the game like Caine and Kinger. Maybe it’ll be something else—making peace with the abstracted like Kinger with his wife.

It also gives the entire main cast the opportunity to reconcile once the smoke clears, allowing for a bittersweet conclusion that the series may be aiming for.

4a: Addendum.

So who really controls the Circus? Maybe it was Bubble all along. Maybe it was nobody; it was a sandbox game the whole time. Let me know your theories!

4b: Doesn’t the logline call Caine a “wacky AI?”

As per my last theory, I think another reveal will be that they’re all AIs, digital copies of the human minds who tried on the headset, none the wiser. That’s why there’s no way out. See my last TADC theory here:

Call it poor writing or a big oil psyop all you want, but I think the real reason is that anything beyond what Illumination produced would be too risky. Movies are financial investments; a mediocre, well-marketed movie is more likely to be successful than something that takes a risk and fails.

But I still mourn what could have been. Imagine it: The zany Seussian architecture draped in smog, vibrant colors tainted by accumulated pollutants. Characters traversing in bulky respirators, childhood innocence slowly chipped away by a mother's distress at increasing air prices. An open-ended conclusion defined by a singular glimmer of hope.