Not in like the plotline, or the ending not being what I wanted. But, in that it felt terribly rushed. There were so many plot threads that began and abruptly ended for no reason at all.
Caine's deletion being accidental but nobody acknowledging the fact he just comes back after deletion.
The fact Pomni could access Jax's memories as an abstraction but there was never any attempt at this for any other character.
Everyone's extremely brief despair that they're just copies and stuck forever.
Matt Lobby just appearing on the stage for a brief second?
It felt like there was a scramble to get everything wrapped up, not to actually leave on a good note. It made me feel almost like they were rushed to finish out on 9 episodes but put way too much plot into the first 8.
Caine's return had a lot of jump cuts at the beginning, which made the linearity of what is going on inconsistent. He's just in the void? That's what happens when things are deleted? Like, from a technical standpoint it's kind of a clever reference to the fact nothing really gets "deleted" by using an operating system's default delete function. You'd have to wipe out all the data bytes through external means. But, for a normal situation and those unaware, it feels haphazard and like a deus ex machina. Him appearing to the cast at the end to apologize and show them the truth, fixing Pomni, and rebuilding the circus didn't sit well with me.
While it did well to explain Jax's feelings and really show off the reality of his psyche, the whole memory access felt just as screwy as the last point. Like, did Pomni fuse with abstract Jax? Was the hug somehow able to establish a connection? Nothing about it made sense. If we want to talk technical terms, corrupted data is basically inaccessible without knowing how to rebuild it or having a backup. If the last deus ex was meant to be a technical reference, this just feels like magic.
The amount of time spent with the reality that the cast are just data on a computer, and not actually their human selves, is incredibly short. Especially after the amount of time the show took showing off how much the characters wanted to leave the program. Like yeah, episode 8 had Pomni try to lessen the impact of trying to leave the circus, but to know now there's absolutely zero chance, it felt like they were spending more time showing off their liquid physics rendering than actually making the characters feel like they hit rock bottom.
And for another note, what was with Caine accessing the old human files? Why did he suddenly re-render Lobby, or Scratch if that was him? And after that, what happened to him? Why did we get a second of showing off him respawning in the circus, only to never return to that point? Was it a separate circus he created? If so, why, and what happened with that? It was a strange moment that I didn't really understand.
And on a personal gripe, I HATE that we never got to witness Jax fully abstracting. We never got to witness a single character transforming. We always saw the aftermath. A common story tool I hear a lot is "show, don't tell", when it comes to story beats it's best to showcase it happening rather than just tell the audience it happened. And this is a pivotal situation. Jax is one of the core group we have seen since day one, and the secondary main character. Why did his abstraction feel like an afterthought?
Overall the story beats were short and messy, and felt inconsistent. I wish we were given more time to marinate, maybe two hours instead of one, something to let these loose threads seal up.
Scientific fraud is the most baffling thing ever to me like do they think they're just going to make a huge breakthrough and no one will notice that it's fake by trying to replicate their results
