Review: The Amazing Digital Circus “hjsakldfhl”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Demoralized by the fake escape last episode, the group loses hope of ever escaping, but when Caine becomes power mad and begins forcibly putting them through adventures, Pomni taps into Kinger’s repressed memories to learn the truth of Caine’s existence and the key to finally rebelling against him.

OUR TAKE

We have reached the penultimate episode of the series, and with only one more to go, it’s time to start revealing long held secrets and setting up the grand finale. That means the thin veneer of a fun status quo has got to be torn away and the characters gotta get that last big push to finally escape from their situation. And means to which we get there ARE…perfectly okay. Like there’s nothing necessarily wrong with revealing that Caine is an AI built to be intelligent and helpful, only to later go rogue and not know how to do anything other than what he was built for: entertaining people. From his perspective, he’s just been trying to show everyone a good time, and they’ve just been doing things begrudgingly without giving him any praise or credit. At no point has he ever considered that he is keeping these people trapped here until some of them abstract, IE go insane and lose their sense of self, at which point he just tosses them aside. And while I haven’t been actively looking into the discourse about Caine and his mindset, I’m guessing at least a fair bit of of this was probably already guessed by some of the fanbase, so learning these things feels less of a “oh my god, this changes everything!” and more of a “huh, yeah that makes sense. And now that we have those blanks filled in, all that’s left is to get rid of him, I guess.

This has the unfortunate result of feeling less like a natural evolution of the story and more just like shifting to the next gear or moving over to the next segment of the story, because had Caine not suddenly decided to become more of a maniacal tyrant out of insecurity, the despondent players would have probably just carried on with things for awhile longer without much protest. But we’re near the end of the story so Caine has to now act so far out of line that the only reaction the group can have is to start fighting back. Not that this isn’t what they should be doing, since they’re all being held captive here and should be trying to get out at every opportunity, but it feels…somehow less personal or complex as how the past few episodes have been. We do at least see that Pomni is using her kind nature to her advantage to bring out the repressed, more cognizant part of Kinger that can for some reason only come out when his head is in darkness, which then leads to Caine’s rather sudden death (though we’ll see if it sticks in the finale), so the character progression is not lost on me here. Again, none of this is bad, just sort of…fine. And perhaps the ninth and final episode, to be released later this year, will help us finish the story on a more cathartic note.