I personally liked the TADC finale when I first watched it, but the more I think about it, the more problems I have with it.
When talking about the finale, I feel like you always need to address the rabbit-shaped elephant in the room, so let’s do that.
So not counting the credits, the TADC finale is around 55 minutes long. The Jax segment—starting when Pomni searched for the distraction with her gun and ending when Pomni was pulled away from the abstraction—is around 23 minutes long, which is about 40% of the finale’s runtime. There are a lot of things you can say about that much time being dedicated to one character, but there are two main points that I’d like to share in this post about why I don’t think this worked.
The first reason I have is the fact that it generally doesn’t feel earned. Gooseworx has always said that Jax was one of the main characters of the show, but as someone who believes in the death of the author notion and who didn’t actually follow Gooseworx when first getting into the media, this fact is honestly really unclear from a narrative perspective. Of course, Jax got a lot of consistent attention each episode, but the narrative never really establishes him as a “main character” until episode six, really. Jax got a lot of attention in episode five as well, but from the structure of the show, that was to be expected from everyone in the cast; Zooble and Kinger got the focus in episode three, Gangle got it in episode four, and in episode five, it seemed like Ragatha and Jax got it. Episode six is definitely the episode where Jax gets the most time to feel like a main character, but both episodes seven and eight focused on the entire ensemble. This is why having so much focus on Jax alone in the finale feels so jarring; it was told to us that Jax was supposed to be a main character, but it wasn’t really shown. You can also compare this to Caine, who had around ten minutes (or around 18% of total finale screen time). Caine’s character segment feels much more earned because Caine was the main antagonist of the series and completed a serious character arc that affected the way the rest of the finale played out. That leads me to my second point as well.
Jax’s segment of the movie had straight-up ZERO correlation with the rest ot the finale. Aside from a few minor tweaks, if that segment was cut in its entirety, the story wouldn’t have changed at all. This is by far my main gripe with the finale, as having all of that character explanation does nothing for the rest of the story. The only purpose it served was to explain to the viewers of the show why Jax did what he did. But was that really necessary? We already knew a lot about Jax beforehand; we knew about his problems with opening up and connecting, we knew that Ribbit’s abstraction was likely something he played a role in and negatively affected him, and we knew that he was more than the cartoony persona he put on. Spelling this all out and sharing everything about him in the finale makes it feel like the narrative is trying to excuse Jax’s behavior in the rest of the show. It also kills any impact the hard cut to Jax being abstracted had. I just feel like there were so many better ways to implement the rest of Jax’s arc without taking up nearly half of the final episode of TADC.
