wait i have more on tadc ep 7 (Jax thoughts) and the very end of it, with LUCIDS ep3, so spoilers for both
also as just text post under cut bc idk how to get the scenes edited together so you'll just have to trust me (silly) on this fgryu
OKAY SO LUCIDS by Nicholas Podany first.
In this episode, Oliver is having an existential crisis while Mrs Hills is continuing to work with Benjamin to get her son. Oliver's part of this episode is the important one. You guys know that "do you blame yourself?" "what?" "the accident" audio that was going around a while back? Yeah, that. THAT'S the scene I want to talk about right now.
Oliver is revealed to not be from the same reality as Benjamin and Mrs Hills - he's in a dream, he's a dream, and it's implied to be because of a car accident he was in where his younger brother got severely hurt (implied coma here). Oliver finds himself talking to his therapist, which is where the audio comes from. The therapist goes on to say that it's normal to create a scapegoat of the situation, something [Oliver] can control when in reality it was nothing about it he could control. It's not his fault. There's more too, so I recommend watching the episode on youtube (it's like 10min long).
Keep this in mind now, as we move on to the tadc part of this
So, they are all told by Abel to go to Caine's office and find the way out of the Circus. I want to discuss when they have entered the supposedly way out.
Jax has been kinda freaking out for a while, even before this episode, and as Pomni is talking he freaks out more and sees these pictures of the real world. A building and a road, seemingly from a car. After this he in a panic hits the red button, and so dooms everyone to stay. Caine then shows up and says he KNEW they would pick the 'right' choice; to stay. To my understanding, it's here implied the things Jax saw is also not real and probably not even his memories, not fully. Also Zoogle says to Gangle that what they have in the Circus is real, that all of it has always been real. It's all real. (plz correct me on the name if i got it wrong again)
But what if it is?
WHICH IS NOW we get to the point i actually want to make here!!
To me, Jax is like Oliver. A dream, an avatar, somewhere where they're not 'real'. And someone who's trying to find anything to cling to, a scapegoat to blame for the hurt they unintentionally caused while in the Real World™. Jax and Oliver definitely go about it different ways, but just like the escape turned out to be fake, so is anything about Oliver. It is all a game. It is all a dream. And doesn't that tie it in so nicely with one of Pomni's very first lines? Is this all a dream? It's all a dream, nothing is real. So why does it feel that way? Why doesn't it feel like a dream, like a game? It's all so real. It's all so fake. AND!! just like how Zoogle said to Gangle, Mrs Hills tells Oliver that dreams are memories and memories are dreams, it's all real.
My theory, if those pictures are real, (for this reason) is that Jax had some kind of car accident before showing up to the Circus. Maybe even because of it. And now, he copes with it similarly to Oliver, though i think the situations will always be different.
Idk I think there's a really nice parallel between these two scenes and characters aaaa
