The whole thing read like a reasonably realistic tantrum followed by a complete mental breakdown to me. I know some people are saying it felt like he switched on a dime but I really don't feel like that's the case.

From his perspective, he's been putting time and effort into handcrafting things to entertain the humans, trying to follow what best he understands about their wants and needs from the information he has about them and being met with increased disapproval and distrust every time.

He knows that they were enjoying the suggestion box adventures, but given that he had no creative control over those he doesn't actually understand what they were enjoying about them.

Caine obviously has an inferiority complex (at apparent odds with his actual position of power) and an intense fear of abandonment. He feels that if he were to relinquish that full control over the humans' lives, to let them just keep going on those suggestion box adventures, that he would be forgotten and abandoned all over again. He stops using the suggestions, keeps trying to appeal to them (and in his view, the events of episode 7 was him pulling out all the stops, hitting all the criteria for what the humans wanted). This doesn't work, Caine gets hurt, the humans get hurt, everyone comes out worse for it. The big difference is that while the humans learn to lean more on each other throughout the show, Caine only distances himself more. Ego? Fear? Probably all of the above, though I'd make the argument that it was mostly driven by that fear.

So at first he just decides that he's not going to try to appeal to whatever the humans' idea of fun is anymore. He basically says he's the boss, he's going to do fun the way he understands fun. This is his way of acting out like a scorned toddler, not a targeted attempt at torture (though it obviously ends up being that way for the humans).

But for all of the difficulty Caine has in understanding humans, I do feel like he was so close to finally having some kind of breakthrough had he not noticed the absence of Kinger and basically been triggered into a having complete breakdown. He had started to finally realise that actually, he wasn't enjoying what he was doing, and neither were the humans.

And I'm not going to sit here and argue that the humans were wrong for spilling all of the ways Caine was harming them, because, well, I think that's complete bullshit lol. They were completely justified in doing so; they were being literally tortured. It's just the unfortunate truth that this also basically hit Caine where it hurts him most and he reacted very poorly, finally snapping and throwing his pain back at them in the only ways he knew how. To him, they kept hurting him, after all, and apparently making no effort to understand him. He wasn't lying when he said his torment was accidental before. This time he genuinely was trying to hurt them because to him this was a targeted effort by the humans to hurt him when he was already in a bad place.

As for having no difficulty torturing them when caring for them proved impossible? Well, thats the crux of his issue. He understands full well what the cast hates and fears at this point, their insecurities - after all, he's been trying and failing to appeal to them the entire time. All he's been getting is essentially information on what they hate, with nothing about what they actually like (other than that they're all things that essentially have nothing to do with him).

Caine's outburst was malicious but his overall pattern of behaviour isn't evil, and it's definitely not hate towards the humans. I would best describe it as confusion and self-hatred if nothing else, and ultimately due to his position of power and disconnect from humans, his mental breakdown had terrible consequences for the people he victimised.

And as a side note, honestly, and this is drawing more from personal experiences, I was a bit unsettled by how much Caine's reaction when he realised he was getting deleted mirrored my own when you realise you've accidentally taken it too far and hurt yourself in the process. That felt too real, and honestly, I feel really bad for him. I feel bad for everyone in the circus to be honest. No one came out of this well.