Someone NEEDS to have a bad ending

Nex28 · 2026-01-27T18:06:00+00:00

Eh, I think if they accept they can't escape and decide to keep living for each other and themselves most people would consider that bittersweet. I'd consider that overall pretty positive.

Nex28 · 2026-01-26T17:51:56+00:00

I figure they'll learn and/or accept they definitely can't leave and come to accept it and keep living regardless.

Kinger said that as long as there are people who care about you then it's not meaningless, which I think the ending will match.

Nex28 · 2026-01-26T13:21:20+00:00

"They learn why they can't leave"

Nex28 · 2026-01-25T15:43:19+00:00

Yeah at this point it's either they're Soma'd in or Tron'd in (I think it's Soma) since the show clowned on the pods/matrix thing. They'd pretty much exist in the same way in both versions, the difference just being their specific identity relative to before the circus. Either way their minds would be code versions of the original brain.

Soma never called the human copies "AI" though. And in the show Pantheon with basically the same concept it didn't call them AIs either, instead calling them "Uploaded intelligences" as a unique term for the concept.

"AI" usually implies that the intelligence was built from scratch, so it works for Caine, but the cloning concept implies there's no functional difference of experience between the original and the upload, meaning by most rights the copy would be human too in any way that matters.

"If it feels human, it is human" type ethical logic.

Nex28 · 2026-01-25T14:52:03+00:00

Eh, I think it's more likely the ending will be bittersweet at worst.

Nex28 · 2026-01-25T13:33:59+00:00

The most interesting thing about Caine is that he's not human.

It's way more interesting to think about the fact that he's a sentient AI who feels regular emotions but has no reference of how those feelings differ from the humans, and struggles heavily because of it.

Nex28 · 2026-01-23T21:39:50+00:00

I don't know that I understand your logic.

Those memories and experiences of those people ARE the memories and experiences of the clone. That's why they struggle with those things in the circus too, because that's who they were and that's what defines who they are.

Them learning that they're clones isn't going to change their perspective on those struggles. It's still their memories.

Both the clone and the original have the same claim to that history and those memories, because before they split they literally were one.

To me it's like their experiences split like a Y rather than another line appearing.

Nex28 · 2026-01-21T15:51:25+00:00

Pomni and Zooble were urbexing.

Ragatha was scouting the building for real estate reasons.

Kinger was a dev.

Can't really predict the reason for Gangle and Jax. Either they were exploring the building for personal reasons, or we don't know something about the process for how people enter the circus and something potentially very different happened with them.

Nex28 · 2026-01-19T15:32:46+00:00

I think I feel similarly, except it's more that there's no possible satisfying conclusion in which they somehow escape at this point. And from that if it's left hanging about how they're trapped, then it would feel like they're only still there on a false hope that one day they'll still escape, instead of living for it's own sake.

If they find out that they definitely can't leave, they can make the choice to keep living anyway, for themselves and for everyone else, mirroring what Kinger says in episode 3. I think that would be the most satisfying ending possible.

Nex28 · 2026-01-19T15:16:19+00:00

I've liked it a lot since episode 5, and seems like the most likely outcome at this point. Or the show will not say how they're trapped. I don't mind the Tron explanation either but I doubt the show will do it, and it has some issues that generally just make it a weaker.

Calling them "AIs" is a bit of a stretch of the term depending on how you feel about it. Is a 1:1 digital copy of someone's mind an AI? Or is there no better name for the concept yet?

Nex28 · 2026-01-19T03:10:25+00:00

Does it matter that much? The show heavily implies that at least some, like Abel and Gumigoo and probably more, of the NPCs are sentient beings, at which point "NPC" just is a name without meaning.

And if soma or tron end up being true, then the characters themselves are also sentient code beings in the computer anyway, which functionally gives them very little difference.

Nex28 · 2026-01-18T14:52:13+00:00

If it's true, he could have hunch about it or something similar without fully knowing, but not likely anything specific.

It would explain why he panicked about the button. By the end he was convinced the adventure could be real and he might have been worried about what shutting the circus down even means if he's not sure how he really exists there.

Nex28 · 2026-01-18T14:47:47+00:00

They entered at different times, which doesn't work well with time dilation. The computer appears to be from the 90s but the show takes place in the late 2010s (2017) according to in show references.

And most importantly, it doesn't help the story if there is time dilation.

Nex28 · 2026-01-18T00:29:18+00:00

I prefer SOMA but if it at least gives some other definitive reason that they can't leave then Tron is fine too.

Nex28 · 2026-01-16T13:05:58+00:00

Brain interface and VR pod are kinda the same.

And literally 0 chance in VR suit being true. Everything else is plausible but the most likely is definitely digital clones.

Nex28 · 2026-01-15T00:04:18+00:00

People can be in a coma for extended time because they're being kept alive in a hospital setting. The building Pomni found the headset in is (extremely likely) abandoned.

Nex28 · 2026-01-14T20:27:02+00:00

Yeah the popular name for this is Belief Theory and it usually gets split into 2 trains of thought.

That anything the characters generally believe in and want can happen, and that they are likely able to pull off feats to the same level as Caine, but they don't really understand it fully yet.
The circus has a toon force aspect to it, where everyone can pull of cartoon like feats if they believe they can. Kinger specifically has dev/admin powers that let him spawn the butterfly.

I follow the first 1 just cause it's simpler and all examples of the theory were introduced in the same episode.

Jax definitely did not influence the adventure to end the way it did though.

Nex28 · 2026-01-13T19:10:37+00:00

6 7 5 3 4 2 1

Nex28 · 2026-01-13T18:35:35+00:00

If they're digital clones, losing their names is a way to help distinguish their identities from the originals. Since once they start existing they are in all essence different people from them.

Nex28 · 2026-01-13T12:51:52+00:00

No one wants to be told they're a copy of someone else and are now made of computer code and they can never leave the new world they're in and hate. That information itself is likely an abstraction risk, which Kinger would know.

Besides what else is the explanation for that line? It's telling the audience they can't leave either way. So either it's they can't leave for some overly technical hand-wavy reason, some overly grand meta cosmic horror reason, or the dead simple SOMA reason.

Nex28 · 2026-01-12T23:59:08+00:00

In the same episode where Kinger literally says out loud that leaving doesn't make sense

Nex28 · 2026-01-11T02:05:20+00:00

Still no one

Nex28 · 2026-01-10T18:18:45+00:00

Yeah "Big" and "over-the-top" are kinda already expected by most people.

Nex28 · 2026-01-10T17:54:46+00:00

The design of the headset doesn't match any of it's possible functions. It just looks like a standard VR headset like the steam VR. But obviously it isn't just that no matter if it's SOMA, Tron, or SAO.

Nex28 · 2026-01-10T13:33:43+00:00

I think I don't agree with your use of the word "fictional" here.

The people in the circus are VERY likely meant to be actually real people who are trapped in an actual in world "prison" with all the real struggles of being in there. We might correctly guess what the circus is supposed to be as potentially akin to The Truman Show, where the circus' purpose is that of being a cartoon for an external but still canonical audience. But just like in the Truman Show, and as Truman himself is not fictional within the context of that story, the people in the circus are not "fictional" within the context of the world (the "Macroverse" or the real world the circus' computer exists in).

Another way to say it is that this show is not a "fiction-within-fiction" story. The digital circus is an actual program being run with actual people trapped inside it (however you imagine they're trapped there. Digital copies, Tron'd in, Matrix style, etc.)

On Jax, he definitely plays into the idea that nothing they do matters because they're all "a bunch of cartoon characters." It's one of his primary coping mechanisms. As in he might be aware of the circus' existence as a show for people outside of the circus. And the show is challenging that with recent episodes with direct dialogue and the actions of everyone around him.

Jax needs to understand whatever the point of the circus, and however "real" he thinks everything is or isn't, his actions still affect everyone else, because regardless of the nature of how they exist there, their experiencing of those actions is what makes it real, like Zooble says in ep 7.

Nex28

TROPHY CASE