After multiple episodes foreshadowing it with his deteriorating mental health, Jax abstracts. While Pomni helps comfort everybody when they approach, Jax just walks away when he attempts to say something, clearly having finally given up. An unknown amount of time passes to the next scene, where he has abstracted without further foreshadowing or shock.
Everyone is mourning Jax's abstraction... all except for Gangle. While she didn't want him to abstract, she's simply too hurt from all he's done to her to feel sad that he did. Worst part? It's not out of spite. She wants to feel sad that he's gone so badly, but she physically cannot shed tears for him, something she clearly feels guilty for. Zooble, meanwhile, laments in frustration after their promise to keep an eye on him so he doesn't abstract. They storm out as if Jax did this in a last attempt just to piss them all off.
We finally get to see how Jax's relationship with Ribbit, and by extension Kaufmo, fell apart and it's distressingly realistic. After opening up to her about his past and troubles Jax gets increasingly defensive and prickly. Rather than any one big incident, Jax just keeps stonewalling and shutting out Ribbit no matter how much or how badly she wants to reach out to him. It's clearly a form of self-harm, insulting and embarrassing someone trying to help him - until eventually the relationship breaks down so much that Ribbit feels so broken that she abstracts.
Hell, their last interaction is painful to watch. Ribbit talks to Jax and once again apologizes for prying too deep into his trauma. However, this being Jax, he both shrugs it off and becomes, as mentioned above, very defensive. The interaction devolves into a VERY scary and VERY realistic argument about who was in the wrong. Eventually, Ribbit sadly gets the message and leaves Jax alone. In her final moments shown in Jax’s memories, he is seen singling her out of the group's normal conversations to having hot chocolate in the cafe (something she mentioned she likes) by himself. It's then we go from him hesitating to knock on Ribbit’s door multiple times wanting to apologize, to Jax hiding from an abstracted Ribbit.
Likewise, the breakdown of Jax and Kaufmo's relationship is also quite sad. While they were never quite as close as Jax and Ribbit, they were still clearly good friends - by the time of Kaufmo's abstraction, he says that he and Jax "don't get along". Tellingly, although Jax acts aloof after encountering the abstracted Kaufmo during Episode 1, the very next memory (implied to be after he leaves Pomni and Ragatha, but before he meets up with Kinger and Gangle) shows that he's on the verge of a breakdown from the pain of losing another friend and the knowledge that he had a hand in driving Kaufmo to that point as he had done with Ribbit. Before the fallout, Kaufmo was shown to be chill and quite comfortable with the circus. What could have caused him to suddenly become obsessed with leaving?
Jax and Pomni's final moments together. Jax tearfully, FINALLY lets out all the pain he's been feeling, but still pleads with her to leave him alone and that he doesn't deserve her sympathy or care. When she refuses and hugs him from behind, he returns it desperately and admits how afraid he is of fading out of existence even when he brought it all on himself. At this point, Jax sincerely does want to make up for everything he did to her and the other Circus members, but there's no way he can do that.
And Pomni’s response to Jax saying he doesn’t want to go? To hug him even tighter and plead, “Stay with me.” When his abstracted self begins to panic and writhe, Jax starts hyperventilating and crying even harder into the hug, prompting Pomni to hold him even closer and try to keep talking to him. No matter how complicated things are between them, no matter what their situation-ship entails, she won’t let him feel alone if she can help it.
Jax facing death with despair brings to mind stories of people who survived jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, or similar situations of people surviving suicide attempts, who said that halfway down, they realized all their problems were fixable and they didn't actually want to die. Unlike those people, Jax regretted his decision too late.
Part of the tragedy of Jax’s character is that he was created when his human counterpart Leeroy put the headset on his head at his lowest point of his life (a homeless wreck who maybe killed his own mother), only for the Players to find out that said human, after spending months in the streets finally got help from a friend of his, who gave him a home, and he managed to turn around his life for the better, and got a job as a delivery driver. Which means that if Leeroy had put the headset much later when his life was in a much better place, the resulting Jax would have been a more well-adjusted version of the actual one, and would have also prevent him from abstracting himself.
But even then, Jax still had a chance to get better and be saved. Circus members like Ragatha and Gangle joined the Circus when their real life counterparts were at their lowest point in life and they still managed to find happiness in the Circus and kick unhealthy coping mechanisms and toxic traits to the curb. Had Jax just tried to come to terms with his identity as he reluctantly interacted with everyone, he could have had a support network of his own and been a mentally healthier person. But his home life just made him so stuck in his ways of locking people out that he simply wouldn't allow himself to get that chance. On the other hand, Ragatha and Gangle’s real life counterparts still had flawed but functional social structures and jobs that give them a sense of meaning, while Jax’s human self had no jobs to begin with or a sense of direction for his own future after he ran from his mother.
Saddest of all (though it’s left a little ambiguous since it’s simultaneously sucking her in), Pomni's attempt to pull Jax back from Abstraction seemed to actually be working. Then Jax stumbled into some loose flash-bangs, which startles his Abstracted form back in the Circus. Had those flash-bangs not been present, there’s a possibility Pomni might have managed to pull the real Jax out of his Abstraction, regardless of whether or not it came at the cost of her own digital form.
Jax’s abstraction prevented him from seeing that Leeroy actually managed to sort his life out and find himself a community he could count on. We’ll never know if this knowledge could have saved him from himself. 🌧 🎪
