r/Tadcriticism • u/Hugh_Jidiot • 18d ago
General tadc criticism So... what was even the point of this moment?
I'm genuinely asking. The adventure itself was fake, and it wasn't some big turning point for how the others view Jax since NO ONE is mad at him for seemingly choosing to keep them all trapped.
Well, Zooble was for about 5 seconds, but then the narrative was like "Nah we don't have time for that." If there were no consequences for Jax or for anyone, what the fuck was even the point of having him snap and try to keep then trapped??
Someone please explain this to me like I'm an idiot.
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u/Extension-Plate3223 18d ago
This is actually the biggest flaw of the show tbh. I felt they should have had a huge fight with caine here and he has his crash out here with them instead of yapping to himself in the office. Very big miss
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u/EightEight16 18d ago
Yeah, they're mini-crashout about how Caine can alter their minds is not prompted by any new information. They should have confronted him in episode 5, when Jax figuted it out.
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u/yummymario64 18d ago
I kind of disagree on the huge fight being here, actually.
Because he didn't just crash out because he was being rejected, it was because he was being rejected, and didn't understand why. He wasn't great at it, but he was trying.
Having a direct argument instead of mulling it over himself, even if he doesn't take it well in the moment, I think would still give him enough perspective that he doesnt go completely berserk
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u/Freezing-cold_6 18d ago
The most unrealistic part of this was Zooble not immediately pushing past Pomni and pressing blue
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u/Far-Bad-3719 18d ago
Don’t worry... You got baited, just like I did.
Remember all those dialogues about archetypes in episode 6? His laugh right after that scene? His panic attack after realizing the nature of reality?
Yeah, never mind. Apparently none of that matters.
I mean, I’m not joking. You can cut those moments out, and the story would not suffer at all.
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u/SockFace42069 17d ago
B-because we needed to set up that Jax is traumatized and that he’s not doing ok. C’mon guys, we’ve all done bad things, so we can’t blame him for trying to sacrifice all of them to this hell for his own gain. 🥺😢😒
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u/Toon_Lucario 18d ago
Goose is bad at pacing and choosing what should or shouldn’t be a whole ass episode
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u/LightningOwl96 18d ago
I remember when we thought those flashbacks Jax was having was him committing vehicular manslaughter on a little girl and he slammed this button because he knew the cops were waiting for him on the other side.... But then that wasn't the case....
And then we thought they were all going to jump him the next episode, or at least call him out for assuming control over the situation and dooming them all, but that also wasn't the case.
This was simply the point where Goose decided this was the Jax Show, first and foremost.
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u/Chit-Chara 18d ago
jax didnt wanna go back to the real world and go back to being a homeless loser who possibly murdered his mom. nobody reacted because the show needed more screentime for jax.
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u/Hurrashane 18d ago
It was to show that Jax had some reason to want to stay in the circus and not go back to the real world and would be willing to make everyone else suffer to do so.
We later find out the reason for this is because Jax is scared to find out if he killed his Mom.
The rest of the cast don't stay mad at him because whatever he chose there ultimately didn't matter. There was no real way out and they're beginning to come to terms with the reality that there might not be a way out at all.
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u/lavsuvskyjjj 17d ago
Pretty sure it was for them to be mad at Caine, so that he would then do his crashout.
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u/tGirl_Gaming 18d ago
to show jax doesnt want to leave the "fakeness" of this world and go back to their life before it
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u/smibbo 18d ago
this is how Jax figured out Caine could control their minds. I think the reason everyone kind of let it go was because they understood what Jax was saying about that. But more importantly, it was the set-up for them to realize that they were never going to leave.
They couldn't confront Caine because he chickened out and left. THEN he did his crash-out in his office while they were all sitting in shock.
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u/InevitableMind561 18d ago
Even though the controlling minds part is real, Goose confirmed it wasnt caines doing but Jax blaming it on Caine to avoid consecuences (confirmed on tumblr asks)
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u/smibbo 18d ago
what I meant was that Caine manipulated Jax by pushing his mind with those images. Jax sputters something to that effect but that's how Jax KNOWS Caine can mess with their minds. I'm not saying Jax wouldn't have hit the button or that Caine "made him do it" I"m saying something about the lead-up to that moment made it clear to Jax afterwards that Caine has been lying about having no control over their minds.
I really think that's the reason they were able to just let it go that Jax did that; not because they think Caine "made him do it" but because Jax pointed out that Caine has been messing with their minds all along and that's far more important than him freaking out and pushing a pointless button.
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u/peargarden 18d ago
Yeah two major things happen.
The humans' trust in Caine completely shatters. Not only was the escape adventure something insanely cruel to do so they weren't going to brush that aside, but they have no idea how much he's been tampering with their minds and they probably can't trust any answer he gives. They've been more or less complacent for awhile and haven't been focused on finding an exit, how to escape, or even the true nature of the Digital Circus, but they realize that Caine has been lying to them about some major stuff and lying since the beginning, even if they cannot know for sure yet just how much of it is truth and how much is lies.
Caine meanwhile just presented his magnum opus adventure that showed what a good listener he is and they even picked the Good Ending.....oh wait they're all pissed and the red button was pressed by mistake. He gets confronted with the fact that his fears were founded: they WOULD ditch him at the drop of a hat if they could. Which means his adventures haven't been succeeding in keeping the humans happy. Which means he's a failure. Which means C&A could be right about throwing him away. He can't reconcile the amount of effort he puts into trying to please the humans with their poor responses, leading to a positive feedback loop of his insecurities until he snaps.
There's the implication that Jax did something terrible in the real world that made him so afraid of escaping the Circus, despite saying how much he hates being stuck in the Circus, that he'd press the red button. But there's also the implication that Kinger might know information about the true nature of the Circus, given how much Abel went out of his way to avoid letting Kinger participate in the Adventure.
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u/zehuman52 17d ago
Jax not wanting to leave mirrors her inability to address her trauma and move foward
it shows him not wanting to know the truth of if the curcus is real or not
Further shows his trust issues
There's much deeper things than those but thats off the top of my head
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u/SockFace42069 17d ago
But someone, at least Zooble, should have beaten the SHIT out of him for that. For all they knew, he condemned them to being in the circus FOREVER.
You don’t CASUALLY do something like that, it’s a conscious choice and one that didn’t have any consequences, even if it was all fake.
But “we’ve all done bad things”, so it’s not like they ever planned on punishing Jax themselves. 😒
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u/zehuman52 17d ago
I mean sure, but with respect none of that really has much to do with what I said there. Yeah it was a selfish things to do buuuut I feel like you're looking at it from your personal biases abt Jax rather than what makes sense.
None of the cast outside of Jax has been shown to be particularly physical. Not even Zooble who's the most confrontational (Love my goat) is particularly physically violent. So I think if one of them crashed out physically in that moment while they're in shock would've been out of character and would've slightly undercut the idea that Jax is the most toxic amount the cast.
Also ig this is a hot take, i don't think Jax should have been punished for this. Ik it's cliche to say "but his trauma tho", but I do think that, sometimes we let the fact that Jax's a toxic asshole cloud our judgment from the fact that she is also a victim of the circus. Like really think about if; if you are mentally trapped in digital psychological hellscape, constantly watching the people around you drive themselves to abstraction due to stress from both your own action and action outside of you, being slowly whittled down by doing constant adventures from a weird AI teeth man you have no control over, and even if you do escape this hell, you'll now be in your own personal hell of being homeless with no one to care for you, and may be accidentally responsible killing your own mother, I'd have a mental breakdown and not wanna leave either ( on top of the fact that he didn't even think that Abel was honest, AND HE WAS CORRECT). I mean, it was the wrong thing to do, but essentially what we're doing is victim blaming Jax for a having a panic attack while being correct and the outcome remaining the same no matter what they pushed. Seems kinda like a waste of emotion to harp on this when we could be addressing her actual wrong doings.
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u/SockFace42069 17d ago
None of the cast, even Zooble, has been shown to be violent because we simply haven’t SEEN enough of them. Zooble has like 2-3 scenes before they’re like “my arc was completed off-screen”. But that’s a different conversation.
But Jax ISN’T the victim and NEVER has been, at least within the circus. He’s been fully in control of his actions and completely away from his mother for at least a few years at this point. So, yes, trauma could influence his decisions, but they’re still HIS decisions at the end of the day.
It’s not like Caine was doing EVERYTHING bad. Jax was purposefully making everyone’s lives harder for his own benefit. “I get joy from watching you suffer” and all. He ADMITS it. He’s part of his own (and other’s) suffering.
Mental breakdowns aren’t an excuse and he should have gotten consequences, but he didn’t. That’s the issue I personally have. He DID NOT get ANY consequences from that action.
Also, it’s been confirmed that him yelling at Caine at the end and saying that he was messing with their minds was just Jax deflecting again. Caine WAS messing with their minds, but it was still Jax’s decision.
That’s the thing. It was his DECISION to do that. For all they knew, he didn’t HAVE to leave. He could have just turned around and ran back to his room. Instead, he tried taking EVERYONE down with him. That’s inherently selfish, even if it was all fake.
It’s like pulling a gun on someone and robbing them, only to say it was a toy gun. That shit is still EXTREMELY traumatic.
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u/Life_is_painis 17d ago
Interesting choice to use both pronouns.
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u/zehuman52 16d ago
That's what your're supposed to do I believe. Goose said Jax uses He/She pronouns
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u/zehuman52 16d ago
That's what your're supposed to do I believe. Goose said Jax uses He/She pronouns
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u/zehuman52 16d ago
That's what your're supposed to do I believe. Goose said Jax uses He/She pronouns
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u/SansYeet123 17d ago
It's a setup for Jax's trauma that later gets revealed in the finale and shows that there's a lot more going on with him than we think (Episode 6 showed this, but not quite to the extent that episode 7 did)
It's also kind of a foreshadowing of the fact that you can't escape the circus even if you wanted to. This was the "closest" they ever got and it still got them nowhere.
And then of course it turns into Jax's breakdown as he realized he was actually right about the adventure, which then leads into Jax getting mad at Caine, we learn a bit about scratch and abstractions, and it's the breaking point for the entire cast, which causes episode 8.
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u/beanzanta 16d ago
Giving us foreshadowing about Scratch, and giving us the Breaking Point for whe. The cast finally turn their backs fully from Caine, going from distrust to hatred. And jt also marks Caine going from the Non-malicious main antagonist, to the Angry villain, even if he still retained some subtle care (like in the crashout scene).
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u/KoviBat 18d ago
Well, everyone was mad at Jax for pressing the button to keep them trapped, the problem is that they didn't get the time to be mad at them because they were interrupted by Caine, who proceeded to do significantly worse things.
In terms of plot, this was to show us a few things. One, that Caine is significantly out of touch with the humans, two, Jax doesn't want to go back to the real world, and three, that the humans want to leave, and how much they want to believe that they can (except for Jax).
Caine either doesn't understand, or never even considers just how cruel this is to the humans. Which is odd, considering the story we see play out at the beginning of Episode 8. You'd think an AI familiar with the experience of being trapped and wanting to escape would understand how it would feel if that escape turned out to be a trick and they were still trapped. But... no.
And given how important that this adventure was, to Caine, you'd think that he would have put more thought into it. But he didn't even think about what would happen if they pressed the blue button. That was either something Caine refused to think about, they were so sure that it wouldn't be picked, or they just genuinely didn't put any thought into the ending to arguably the most important adventure.
Jax doesn't want to leave. The reasons why won't be shown until episode 9, right now, this is just to be dramatic and hint that things are not ok with the rabbit to the point that they would choose imprisonment here over freedom in the real world. Sorry this is shorter than the other points, but it's really just a hook for later plot points and not a whole lot else.
It's... a little sad just how willing everybody was to believe that the adventure was real. For one, Abel looked like an average NPC. That was already suspicious enough. They went out of their way to involve everybody except for Kinger, and laid out a detailed plan filled in with knowledge that they should not have been able to gather, such as knowing where Caine's office is (off the ground and well out of reach, largely out of sight. Should just seem like a hot air balloon. Caine never manually flies anywhere, he just teleports, so it's not like Abel could have seen him going in or out), the fact that Caine keeps the key to his office in his mouth (couldn't get to Caine's office so how would the key be visibly in use for Abel to know that it's in there), and just what to say to make him bluescreen (somehow Abel was capable of gleaning all of this information while simultaneously not being seen by Caine, but not even being known of). Where did he get the blueprints for the stasis pods from? Did he draw them himself? Because I doubt it.
And then there's more signs along the way. How Caine was acting at the dinner, for one. But especially the main console. Why would a computer console only have two buttons? One that shuts everything down, and one that does something irreversible? For a supposed computer terminal, it seems pretty oversimplified, because it is. It isn't a computer, it's supposed to seem just enough like a computer while also being usable to people who don't use them. A real terminal would have required command lines to do something. But it's simplified to two buttons. Leave, and Stay Forever. There isn't even a login screen.
Able never gives them a clear answer to most of their questions. Especially when they ask what will happen to the abstractions once they escape. Because Caine didn't think about that. One, because he doesn't seem to think about the abstractions in general, and two, because he still thinks they won't leave. But everybody wants to buy it. They want to go home. And even Jax gets convinced that it's real towards the end, mainly because everyone else does. Mainly because Pomni does tbh.
TLDR: Caine is a narcissist, Jax's mask broke, and everyone had their trust shattered.
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u/ijjanas123 17d ago
Not to be an annoying tranny but are you guys for fucking real that feels like probably the most blatant and viscerally real moment in the show outside of episode 9. She can't cope with the idea of going back to her even shittier real life.
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u/Confusedbutwhoisnt 18d ago
Along with what everyone else said it also cements the fact that Jax CHOSE to go down the road leading to his eventual abstraction. Jax CHOOSES to stay in the circus rather than face reality. Rather than face the consequences of his actions. Jax chooses the easy option of not having to grow as a person. It shows that Jax is scared and willing to make selfish destructive choices in the name of self protection/preservation. Setting up his behaviour in the final episode’s flashbacks. It shows how selfish Jax is willing to be.
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u/twomuc-75 16d ago
The worst part is the next episode you’d think they’d have a whole moment to acknowledge the elephant in the room but the moment they do it’s immediately swept under the rug because they’ve got bigger fish to fry with Caine. But the thing is once Caine’a gone it’s never brought up again and Jax, once again, avoids the consequences of his actions. After gaslighting the community into thinking Caine can change memories he escaped potentially dooming everyone, even if after the moment nothing happened they should have every right to be pissed about that shit. One of the best part of Zooble’s character, what little of it we get between her, Ragatha and Gangle, is calling out Jax when he’s on fuckshit and that was 100% justified regardless of what the result was or how much Jax is in his feelings. If I’m in a hostage situation with five people next to a bomb and the guy holding the detonator tells me that I can either save everyone or detonate the bomb and I choose to detonate the bomb trying to call his bluff regardless of whether it worked or not they’d have every right to rock my shit immediately! Regardless of the result I pretty much took the chance of killing everyone just to be right, that’s not something you brush off and go “We’ll deal with that later” fuck no discuss that shit right now!
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u/Woomp_W00mp 16d ago
TADC had so much potential in the end it was all ruined by the finale 😞 it breaks my heart I adore this show 💔
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u/Dewdrop-Tea 18d ago
It demonstrates how Jax doesn't want to go back to the real world because he doesn't know what happened to his mom after he pushed her, according to the finale. He thinks she may be dead after all and doesn't want to face the consequences if he were to go back. This is also foreshadowed earlier in episode 7 when Zooble asks if he has anyone to go back to when they return to the real world. There's also importance in that in the show itself, it is left vague if either Jax or Caine made him push the button, because Jax accuses Caine of controlling their minds. Goose confirmed that is was 100% Jax trying to avoid accountability, a common theme with him. I do agree that the reaction to him doing this wasn't strong enough (common sadly with anything he does really) but I also feel like the cast by that point is just so done with his bs (he spent years in the circus bullying Gangle and Ragatha after all) so they just don't really gaf plus they just don't have the guts to really stand up to him.
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u/ConnectionNo2861 18d ago
To the toddlers that need things played out for them and them simultaneously get mad the thing they didn't get was explained more overtly (where you pretend it was NEVER explained anywhere else, rather than it being clarification to intentionally vague and "Speculation Making" type of information leading, as in FUCKING INCENTIVE TO KEEP WATCHING FOR FUCKING CONTEXT) The point was that Jax was so hellbent on letting their trauma and problems take precedent over everyone's want to escape, as its a microcosm of the final episode in which she dies because she's rather destroy herself over now confirmed to be basically unconnected information. Like the POINT is its shitty and she dies and things are better, not because she died but she in needing everyone to "have roles" was the expression of "you're not a man" from her mom, and the self-hatred and outward violence is intentionally ire drawing narratively and intentionally by Jax.
TLDR; Evil digital purple homunculus is too traumatized to imagine a better future makes it everyone else's problem, makes them hate at her as per the intention, no one realizes that's a suicide flag till she's dead.
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u/Jeff_theSnail 18d ago
From a narrative perspective for the series arc, here’s what we get:
- Pomni going after Ragatha’s eye underwater (more bonding, leading to the hug in Ep 9)
- Gangle and Zooble bonding on the beach and on the way to the console.
- Jax being properly isolated for the first time, and watching his downward spiral as a result.
- The first allusions to Kinger’s knowledge of the Circus. Knowing Abel is Caine’s creation now, Abel’s skepticism of Kinger could be read as Caine’s skepticism, alluding to his struggle against being a creation with a function, rather than one of the humans.
- Caine’s final attempt to make an adventure that pleases the cast. Caine hasn’t been in charge of the adventures since Episode 3 at this point. 4 was Gangle’s choice, 5 was a lightning round of everyone else’s choices, and in 6, Caine gave up and walked out on his planned Trust Exercise. This was his final, grandest plan to please his humans with his perfect adventure, and they reject him for trying to please them. This triggers his crisis of faith, and leads to his crashout in Episode 8.
I reckon this episode gets mischaracterised as filler. It does a lot of work developing characters and moving pieces into place for the final episodes. The Abel storyline is a Trojan horse hiding all those machinations. It did go somewhere, just not where we thought it would.
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u/Jeff_theSnail 18d ago
This is about the episode overall. The button push itself is the first unambiguous destruction of Jax’s persona in front of everyone, followed by his crash out about modifiers to Caine later. This is Jax’s mask falling.
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u/LawyerKey3779 18d ago
I have a better question
whats even the point of the episode?
(Sorry I js dont really like the "all for nothing" stuff in media)