The Amazing Digital Circus: The Last Act ★★☆☆☆
Fairly cold on this as a finale. To get the minor quibbles out of the way first, going to a showing that starts with an appeal to not post spoilers and a promise that there will be a link to get merchandise at the end of the credits is a bizarre intrusion of kind of ugly online dynamics into the cinema that made me immediately feel a bit uncharitable which was not helped aided by the overly-long recap (though I suppose that was also for parents being dragged along by their kids who would have no idea what was happening otherwise).
Other than Jax everyone’s personal stories seem to get pushed aside after the big Caine torture sequence in the penultimate episode for everyone to become very generically emotionally healthy and cry about sticking together and putting aside any past conflicts, despite no one ever really having done anything seriously bad to each other, just rubbed up against each other poorly while they were all stuck in a horrible situation. Most of what was happening felt kind of perfunctory and obvious, but also stretched out too long and over-elaborated on.
Caine doing a complete turnabout almost immediately after his extremely sharp malicious turn in the episode immediately prior was also fairly unsatisfying and his Facebook slideshow is the only point everyone’s individual problems come back up again, only to kind give a weird, sappy, inspirational epilogue to… not really the characters we’ve actually been watching but some other versions of them that can live out their dreams in the world when they can’t and give them some cheap closure. Clearly learning everyone’s “real” names was meant to be significant but I could not care at all and the only character who this section really gives any more context on is, of course, Jax.
Jax’s part, for being the centre of the finale and considering actually happens, also feels surprisingly clean. It’s the best part of the finale, but also feels like it should have been spread out over more of the run and less neatly. From what we’d previously seen one should expect that abstraction would leave someone psyche in a much less coherent place, but everything is laid out perfectly in order for Pomni and us to see.