Thoughts on the Digital Circus finale?
I really enjoyed it! I do think it has a few weak points, though.
For one thing, I'm not entirely sure how to make sense of its framing of what happened at the end of the previous episode? It had appeared to be Bubble's interference, but Kinger attributed it to Caine himself. Which I guess adds up to Bubble/Abel, within Caine, trying to take down the two of them together? Which didn't fully work because of some sort of backup, except there weren't backups of the others - why?
I think the finale continued a pattern of characters having emotional conversations about something important that involve long gaps between interesting visuals to support them, resulting in the scenes feeling blunted as a result. That kind of presentation can have its benefits, and in fairness some of that was happening within a flashback that was already being visually shown, but it's something I think the show occasionally takes to the point of feeling incomplete.
The thing that felt strangest to me was the episode's key inciting incident being off-screen. Which is, again, something that can have some narrative benefits, and ties into the isolation underlying it, but ultimately it struck me as giving up something visually and emotionally powerful and causing the subsequent events to have less of a narrative and emotional foundation.
That all said, the story ultimately came together really well. Jax's arc in particular is beautifully complicated with all sorts of delicious thematic significance, and I think it's one that people will be talking about for a long time.
What I do see as a small but uncomplicated negative is the note in the credits declaring that the show was made entirely by humans. Of all the places to try to claim that a human doing something is more meaningful than a computer program doing it, this is a particularly absurd one.
