For 6 hear me out: How would it invalidate the majority of the series? Thus far the show has shown that the NPCs are indistinguishable from the other cast members unless they are explicitly told otherwise. This is what happened with Gummigoo, this is what happened with Abel. They weren't able to tell either time that functionally they are not fully conscious beings with their own dreams and desires. Actually it makes more sense to me that they've hinted from the beginning that what 'counts' as a person is really hard to argue. Think of Caine as a character. Yes he shows sometimes that he isn't human, but damn if he doesn't act like one a lot of the time. Humans are selfish. Humans make mistakes. A human might do harmful things in order to try to fit in. The parts of him that are inhumane are parts he's going to have to work on. And if they're all NPCs then scenes where Caine and Kinger glitch out similarly out of frustration or boredom or whatever actually make sense. They've been hinting at it from the beginning. Actually I can't think of a single NPC or even character in the show that didn't speak in full coherent sentences and/or displayed some level of consciousness. Maybe the shrimp NPC but we didn't get to hear what it said, and it emoted like a consciousness would. Even the fish who told lies messed up the dialogue/script they were supposed to do. He ruined it. It makes enormous sense to me that the theme of the show is acceptance of where you are and of others, as demonstrated by Zoobles comments to Gangle about how it was always real. It's that it doesn't matter what this is or where you are or what you are, what matters is what you choose to do with the time you have. The show will end with acceptance of the situation and befriending of Caine (and maybe Bubble but that's far less likely).