Just Finished The Amazing Digital Circus
And I had a good time with it. Overall, it does a lot of very interesting things with its core ideas, characters, and meta narrative. If you havenāt seen the series yet, itās worth a watch.
However, it has some key pacing, scope, tonal continuity, and focus issues that are common among indie projects like this. This series has been going for years now, so I wonāt harp too much on the first eight episodes. Instead I just want to talk a bit about the finale.
Everything in the ninth episode before the Jax flashbacks is rushed as hell. It feels like the screenwriters were going down a bulleted list rather than writing scenes with characters in them and space between them. This is made all the more jarring by Pomni and Ragathaās thirty seconds of uninterrupted eye contact as they mournfully part before being separated for all of twenty minutes. Jaxās internal scenes drag more than a little, especially his flashbacks surrounding his relationship with Ribbit. Caineās approach to the brain scan files is painfully drawn out for reasons Iām still unclear on. None of these are fatal flaws by any means. They just make me hesitant to rewatch the episode because even the scenes I w joy will feel like Iām āsitting throughā them instead of enjoying them.
I also think certain explanations of the stakes and worldbuilding fall a bit short because of the rush at the start of the episode. Many viewers will still be confused about the significance of the characters merely being brain scans until the āwhere are they nowā montage at the end. The conjuring thing (which shouldāve been called instantiating in my opinion, but thatās a separate issue) felt woefully under-explored. I understand that itās not nearly as important as the actual emotional core of the series, but it wouldāve been nice to see even two more minutes of that being explored.
There are entirely too many hanging threads left by this finale. If this season had been written and edited all at once rather than stretched out over this much time, then I imagine certain lines would have been cut from earlier episodes to prevent this issue. As it stands, Iām left wondering whether or not anything can be done about the abstracted folks (for example: can brain scan files be restored?), what C&A is up to now, why other minds were introduced to the system, what will become of the Blue AI, what happens if Caine loses track of other AI, etc, etc, etc.
The Amazing Digital Circus explores really interesting ideas and raises really interesting questions that feel like they could and should result in really engaging explorations and conflicts. Many of those are delivered upon excellently, but others are left hanging, despite special emphasis being put on their introduction. Not to repeat myself too much in an already too-long post, but the death of Gumigoo and Caineās āwho knows what would happenā line feel like they should have led to something. Maybe thereās supposed to be an implication that his worry about other intelligent AI running around is related to an implicit fear of being overtaken and consumed the same way he did to the Blue AI, but if thatās the case, itās not clear at all. It doesnāt need to be obvious, but it should at least be nodded towards somewhere in the finale.
There are two needle drops in the finale and Pomni gets a voiceover. These donāt occur anywhere else in the entire series. Thereās the theme song in episode 1 (repeated in the finale as a callback and really good depiction of how things have changed), and Caineās number in episode 8, but never before this point has the series had licensed music. They feel very out of place and I canāt really understand why theyāre here instead of an original score.
The actual conflict of the series is that a bunch of people are trapped in a digital world thatās run by an insane AI. The conclusion is that the AI becomes a partner to the people so they all can shape the digital world together as peers. Along the way, additional conflict arises in many forms: the humans donāt want to be there and want to escape; the AI desperately wants to be liked by the humans, but he snaps and decides that being feared is okay too; each human has internal conflicts originating both internal and external to the digital world; the humansā minds are gradually decaying because of the digital worldās bizarre rules and stressors.
Thats a LOT! Thatās enough to fill dozens of episodes as dense as these, but the series only has 9 episodes.
Itās not surprising that some characters got more screen time dedicated to their conflicts than others. The main-ish character, Pomni, is given the task of shit-sorter, so itās not surprising that we never see her internal struggles and instead watch her help everybody else. That said, it still feels like Jax is given disproportionate screen time, backstory detail, and even agency over the emotional state of others.
Is that necessarily a bad thing? Ehhhh probably not. Heās a borderline secondary antagonist, so it makes sense that his issues and hangups created more dire problems for everybody else, naturally resulting in him getting the most attention in the text. Pomni is the audience POV into all the stuff thatās wrong with Jax, and everybody elseās problems are secondary to that (purely in terms of the emotional core of the human scan cast).
Would I, personally, have liked to see Zooble, Gangle, Ragatha, and Kinger get more time to explore their issues? Absolutely. However, they each got a good enough amount of attention that I can confidently outline their characters, conflicts, and motivations. Thatās huge! Thatās not true of some multi-season shows produced by major networks. Iām glad the writers didnāt try to give every member of the main cast the same amount of care, because it either would have fully killed the pacing, led to another five years of waiting for episodes, or left every character feeling a bit hollow.
What is a problem is that this fixation on Jax happens separate from but simultaneous to the conflict with Caine. There is little to no overlap between Jaxās abstraction plot line and Caineās rampancy plot line. They just both happen at the same time. In a longer series, Caine wouldāve been the final season boss and Jaxās abstraction wouldāve been the penultimate seasonās finale.
I donāt want to give the impression that I disliked the finale or the show as a whole. I really like this series, and the ending was satisfying and well made. I would never say this was disappointing or bad or a waste of my time or anything like that. These flaws are possible areas of improvement for the next project these folks work on. Theyāre learning experiences for other creatives (myself included). There a lot that was done right here, and I hope I havenāt given the impression that these few flaws somehow invalidate this amazing achievement by many talented artists and writers.
Iām genuinely excited to see what everybody involved does next.
