Telling the world that summer was almost done

With the way that people were talking about the leak, I legit thought that it was gonna be, like, Arcane-level bad, but it really wasn’t. Though not Amazing, I’ve seen wayyyy worse.

I first watched it in theatres and I thought the visuals really lended themselves to the big screen. Lots of beautiful shots and sequences (Ribbit’s room??? wow…)

Like the rest of the series, Last Act suffers from telling instead of showing, which makes the dialogue often come across as stilted and affects the pacing too. 

Of course I’m glad Ragatha got a hug, but the conversation they had beforehand where she exposition dumps Jax’s backstory and Pomni calls her her best friend feels like a slap in the face considering we, as the audience, could already infer the former (plus it gets rehashed when Pomni gets into Jax’s POV anyways???) and the latter is unearned considering that we don’t get any scenes of them actually connecting, they just start sitting and standing next to each other after ep 6 (with Pomni’s attention on Jax 75% of the time) and that’s supposed to make them besties. The show KNOWS that it didn’t put in the work to show how close they’ve gotten so it makes Pomni and Ragatha say it to try to convince the audience that it’s true.

Along the same vein, a lot of the plot feels contrived and you could really see the hand of the author as Goose tries to get the story to be where she wants it to be. The examples that particularly stick out to me were how Caine returns and gets better and how Pomni gets into Jax’s mind palace post-abstraction.

Jax, in general, was a mixed bag. 

I think the gender stuff was handled really well (I believe Jax is some flavor of transfem but I will still use he/him pronouns for him here in line with how Pomni does so when talking about him to the audience in the end). The implications were integrated in a way that felt largely natural and unobtrusive and made sense for the character, though I understand people wanting it to be more overt.

As for everything else about him…

Well, the phrase “everything…about him” sums it up, really. I understand that Goose intended for him to be a cautionary tale about self-destructive people who refuse help and refuse to change, people who don’t want to be saved and choose to wallow in their misery instead. However, she still missed the mark.

First off, we the audience are told and shown how truly awful Jax is with how he treats and views the people around him. Yet, at the same time, no one in the actual show is ever allowed to be angry at him for more than a second. Every time a character dares to express anything about the harm he causes it is always undercut with “oh but haven’t you considered how bad *Jax* feels???”

This is about my thoughts on the finale and not the series as a whole, so I’ll try not to talk too much about the other episodes, but I did watch this in the theatres along with episode 8, and that means the infamous couch scene was pretty fresh in my brain. You know, the one where everyone but Zooble disregards Jax’s actions because sticking together is more important? The one where Zooble is basically told to stand down and join the rest of them in reaching out to him? Well, episode 9 practically rendered that scene unnecessary. Not only are we denied a chance to explore the gravity of his actions through the people he has affected, the sentiment of taking care of each other to fend off abstraction didn’t stick either. “They can’t be mad at him because he might kill himself”, well he ends up doing that anyway so, what. was. the. point.

People argue that Jax “has already suffered the consequences” because he gets sad over his abstracted friends and then abstracts himself, but I feel this feeds into the harmful mindset of prioritizing the punishment of the abuser over providing support for the victims. It still centers the abuser. Even in his final moments, it’s him bemoaning how he’s a horrible person who doesn’t deserve love. He doesn’t even mention the people he has hurt. It’s all focused on *his* self-loathing and how it affects him specifically (It’s like when Bojack says “I’m the one who has suffered the most under the actions of Bojack Horseman”, yet instead of that point being contested like in Bojack, the story gives him a hug and goes “aww, you poor thing”).

As someone who sees their worst destructive tendencies in Jax, I really wanted more ugliness. I wanted more friction. Whenever he does something truly bad, everyone’s either passive about it or actively holding his hand through it. I wanted him to be able to look beyond his self-hatred to actually see the people he has dehumanized because of it, not just the dead ones but the living ones too. It never gets to that point though. It’s like the show is scared that you won’t feel bad for Jax like it wants you to, so it doesn’t let you dwell too much on the things he has done. Jax’s story is all about being more empathetic to Jax without Jax being more empathetic to the others, which sucks because caring about not hurting other people is what incentivized me to be a better person and I wanted that for Jax too, even if the realization would come too late.

Instead, the unsatisfying culmination we get in the lamp post scene is Pomni giving Jax a hug and saying “You should’ve just talked to me, man.” which ??? was already something that Jax has been told several times by Pomni and the others ??? no new thing was said and no big revelation was had but this time it works to soften him up bc this is the finale and he’s dying and we have to close this Jax arc somehow. 

Falling short in this regard wouldn’t have bothered me as much if the narrative’s focus on Jax wasn’t to the detriment of all the other characters.

Pomni and Jax’s main character statuses are often held up as a defense for how the series handles the rest of the core cast, but I don’t think it works. The other arcs don’t have to be “main-character level” to be satisfying, they just have to be done well. Gummigoo, for example, is a thematically-relevant side character with a storyline that was perfectly resolved and I have no complaints. Believe it or not, characters outside of the main ones still introduce ideas to the narrative that the writer is meant to follow through on with a certain level of care and polish. As it stands, we see most of their storylines resolved off-screen or wrapped up with sloppy dialogue (and in Kinger’s case, just dropped) so that there’s more time to hit us over the head with how tragic Jax is.

Which leads me to Ribbit. Going in, I knew she’d be a glorified plot device, but I found even the execution to be lacking. I wish more of their character was organically integrated within the show’s past episodes. As it stands, I don’t think enough thought was given as to how she connects with the rest of the story. When it comes to character deaths that affect one of the core cast, she’s kind of in an awkward middle where we see too much of her for it to work like Queenie does (where the show simply expects you to care about her because Kinger cares about her) and we see too little of her for it to work like Gummigoo does (where we get to see what he’s like outside of his bond with Pomni), and that simply doesn’t do it for me. Unlike the other examples, Ribbit was close to more than one character as well, and that doesn’t really get explored, which adds to the shallowness of it. Not enough is done with them to justify why we needed a whole new character for this instead of combining her with Kaufmo (and maybe Ragatha?).

Ribbit as a character never challenges Jax either. They bend over backwards to accommodate him at every turn at the expense of the good relationships they have with the rest of the cast. I understand that Jax acting cold with her brings back painful memories of leaving the Mormon faith and being excommunicated, but Jax is literally just ONE person out of the three (or four) that she could hang with. It just comes across as them being obsessed with Jax because the story needed them to be (and it makes Kaufmo and Ragatha out to be either stupid or bad friends for allowing all this to happen).

[As an aside, I think it would’ve worked better if Ribbit *did* hesitate when Jax tells them that he knocked his (abusive) mother unconscious and left her for dead instead of being like “Aww, Jax don’t feel bad I’m sure she’s fine because the police didn’t get involved ❤️❤️❤️”. Ribbit would still try to reassure him (not with those words tho lol), but that pause would be enough for Jax’s self-hating ass to question her sincerity and THAT’S what drives a rift between them. The guilt from her (perfectly understandable) hesitation and the lack of closure adds a bit more weight and complexity to Ribbit’s character and gives a better reason as to why they would fixate on the fallout with Jax instead of getting their needed sense of community from Kaufmo and Ragatha (who were established to be her friends first!)]

I think this review has been pretty negative so far despite me giving it a passing score lmao. It really does have great animation moments and it maintains the quality of voice acting it has had for the rest of the series. 

Setting aside the very poor choice to use an “Isn’t She Lovely” cover (reinterpreting a song about Black parenthood to be about a non-Black person’s self-acceptance ends up whitewashing a song for a fandom that has already shown itself to be largely dismissive of Black people at best and hostilely anti-Black at worst; also the non-Black person who does the cover (ORBSMAN VA) consistently platforms a right-wing YouTuber in his podcast — it just feels gross and careless), the rest of the score was pretty good. I’m not much of a music person so all I can say is that I think it enhanced the emotional beats of what was happening on screen and even helped my heart go along with the story when my brain questions the logic and the decisions made.

Even though I’ve said I didn’t like the circumstances of Caine being brought back and him talking himself into character development for the sake of the audience (and he somehow connects to wifi??? if he was that interested in the “macroverse” why didn’t he do that before?), I enjoyed the shape sequence with him breaking down firewalls and I like where his character ends up. If you saw my thoughts on ep 8, I did mention that I expected him to come back because I believed that it was antithetical to the show’s message for him to go out the way he did, so I was happy to be proven right on that front. (I’m a bit mixed on him getting rid of the Blue Dot though. I think it’s intended to be read as him relinquishing his need for power and control to meet the humans where they are, at the same time, there is an unfortunate implication that the Blue Dot was the thing that was “making him evil” so now that it’s gone he’s not evil anymore. People have joked about it as “Caine lobotomizing himself to become neurotypical” and it’s not hard to see where they’re coming from.)

Along a similar vein, I had fun analyzing the Jax mind palace scenarios despite not liking the lead-up and the conclusion. I personally interpreted the abstraction scenarios as representations of Jax’s fear that one of his coping mechanisms will take over and make him lose more of his real self in the process, with the loss of each depicted circus member being an extension of this as well. His gender hang-ups are shown in Zooble’s abstraction scenario where he ridicules their gender non-conformity and harasses Gangle, using the excuse that ‘she likes it’ to feed into this idea of a fuckboy and assert his masculinity with misogyny. Gangle being gone ties into him using the cartoon angle as a means of distancing himself from the harm he causes with his actions. If nothing’s real, then you’re not *actually* hurting other people in any way that matters. Gangle stands in contrast to this by making him reckon with reality, not only in the fast food adventure, but also with the fact that acknowledging this humanity would require him to acknowledge that what he did to her was abuse. Lastly, the concept of Ragatha’s abstraction is associated with the takeover of the part of him that uses cruelty to prevent himself from meaningfully connecting with people and caring enough to get hurt. While the other scenarios depict him as being dismissive about the losses, this version dwells on that hurt and the fear that he’ll continue to hurt other people he cares about, hence the strangling scene. Ragatha being the last one (Kinger doesn’t count) to have known him when he was (relatively) kinder, losing her also signifies the loss of any kindness that Jax had within himself. These abstraction segments gave me something fun to chew on and I enjoyed it for that :]

Wrapping up with my thoughts on other points of contention, I did clock the “digital copy” direction since the pilot days and I feel largely neutral towards it. I thought it would be interesting to explore alternative routes that involved their real-life selves actually being hooked into the machine, so I wanted to be proven wrong, but I can’t be mad that it went this way (a bit sad that Ragatha wasn’t a beautiful mixed Black woman though :P). Also, the slideshow with the narration was cheesy as hell (and honestly, bringing up their irl selves seemed like a tone-deaf thing to do on Caine’s part considering how messed-up they were when they found out, but none of the characters react badly to it so that makes it fine I guess??).

Initially, the fate of the abstractions within the story left a bad taste in my mouth. I thought the fact that Pomni could enter Jax’s abstracted mind without precedent and the fact that all of them end up in an aquarium of sorts muddied its role as a metaphor for suicide. Going back to it with some more thought though, I realize that abstraction isn’t as clear-cut as that. It’s similar to when people interpreted fusion in Steven Universe solely as a metaphor for sex. Yes, it *could* mean that (Goose even connects abstraction and suicide herself in a Twitter post), but it doesn’t *just* mean that (though, obviously, Steven Universe got its point across better). I still retain that the abstraction mind palace thing was an asspull with no build-up, but I’ve since come away with a more charitable reading of the abstraction observatory. I can now see it being a form of hospice where it focuses on managing the pain and distress of the abstractions, giving them space to comfortably roam instead of tucking them away in a cramped basement. Additionally, being able to see the abstractions engage with their environment in a peaceful context serves the themes. Abstractions are “broken” people, and broken people are hidden away from society because the very thought of their existence is discomforting, but in here they are seen and their personhood is acknowledged even if they never become “normal” or get well.

In the end, Gooseworx had a lot of interesting ideas (which is what drew me and other viewers to the series in the first place) that fall short in their execution and, despite it all, I still care for these ideas! I’ve stated multiple times in this post that I can see what Goose intended to convey, yet that doesn’t change my opinion that she didn’t convey (a lot of) it well. Even though it’s disappointing how the show doesn’t add up to anything better than the sum of its parts, I don’t think it’s lesser than the sum of its parts. It’s just… the sum of its parts. And the sum is not very high once you take a look at what parts it actually is comprised of.