The Amazing Digital Circus E2: "Candy Carrier Chaos!"

This review was commissioned by @skaianDestiny


Welcome back, boys, girls, and [all-inclusive nonbinary identities category], to the AMAAAAAAAAZING digital circus! In our last exciting episode, which was also our first exciting episode, an unknown individual who can't remember her name but who we're all calling Pomni now was either absorbed orrrrrrrrrr personality-copied into a virtual reality video game seemingly meant for very young children, but inhabited by the imprisoned consciousnesses of an increasingly sanity-deprived gaggle of...well, nobody knows who any of them used to be! There's no leaving the so-called AMAAAAAAAAZING digital circus, and the artificial intelligence overseeing it can't seem to comprehend what they're even asking for when they beg it to release them. How KU-raaaazy is that?

...

Okay, I'm sorry, I'll stop. Caine's voice is just incredibly fun and surprisingly easy to write in.

Also, speaking of him, I thought he was named "Cane" on account of the cane he's always holding, but the creator has apparently explained that it's actually Creative Artificially Intelligent Networking Entity. So, it's spelled like the biblical Caine.

Anyway, episode 2, "Candy Carrier Chaos," is an all-around improvement on the pilot. Which is pretty encouraging, because the pilot was already good. While the bleakness of the comedy continues to verge on overbearing, it's mitigated by both some moments of genuine, sincere hope and warmth, and by hints that this story is actually going somewhere. There are more complex themes being set up, and plot details laid out toward some kind of eventual payoff. The series has some kind of Thing it wants to do, not just trippy black comedy.

The episode gives Pomni a little self-contained arc that opens and closes in the first and last scenes. An arc that's mostly about her overcoming the despair and trauma of her new environment, but also, I suspect, implies some things about who she was before being trapped in the game. It starts with her suffering a nightmare.

On one hand, I'm a little disappointed that we're still in the same animation style, when this would be a good opportunity to remind the audience that "Pomni" comes from a live action (or at least much more realistic-looking) world and the N64 aesthetic isn't natural for her. On the other, we know that she can't remember her name, so it's likely she doesn't remember any faces either, which would mean nothing to have a realistic-looking dream with. So, I get it. Anyway!

Pomni's dream has her spontaneously transforming into a glitch monster, and Caine and the other humans being smugly dismissive of her as she's tossed into the pit with all the others.

This might be sort of in-character for Jax the rabbit-guy. He's the one who copes by being unpleasant and hostile to everyone around him at every opportunity (though even he wouldn't be bro-ing it up with Caine like this, I don't think). It's absolutely not in character for Ragatha or any of the others. And, notably, while the broad sense of "not belonging" would naturally be haunting Pomni during her first virtual night, the specific focus on social rejection and failure to perform as expected is not at all an intuitive leap from her situation.

We're getting a look at something she brought with her from the real world, with the faces of her new peers standing in for the ones she can't recall.

...

Also? Very trans. Like, textbook trans. Even moreso than the trans-analogous stuff in the previous episode.

...

The next morning, with Pomni still reeling from the everything both dreamed and otherwise, Caine inflicts a new minigame on the group. He excitedly boasts that this is his most immersive, most actualized virtual scenario to date. Most of the episode's runtime is spent in this new simulation of Caine's, and I feel like this has to be a send-up of AI art.

The scenario is that the Candy Kingdom has had its capital city raided by bandits, who made off with an enormous armored truck full of precious maple syrup. The Princess of Candyland - an anthropomorphic cookie with hideously uneven facial features - welcomes these "brave knights" into her kingdom before sending them after the bandits. In a war rig. Which she refers to by name as a "war rig." It actually looks like the one from Mad Max: Fury Road, only made of frosting and gingerbread.

Also? The common citizens of the Candy Kingdom aren't candy people like you'd expect. They're featureless wireframe mannequins.

The bandits, meanwhile, are a band of thuggish anthropomorphic crocodiles with roughneck Australian accents, to go with the Mad Max influence.

My favorite part of this is that you can totally see the logic chains that a generative AI might follow to result in this clusterfuck. Like, what's the most generic fantasy RPG sidequest ever? Go get stuff back from bandits. This is a family-friendly adventure, though, so...fantasy...kingdom...candy kingdom! We have a match! As for the bandits now, well, we're chasing them on a road. Road chase with bandits. Mad Max: Fury Road. Australia. Crocodiles. Yup, these pieces definitely all belong together, the associations check out!

...heh. This has me thinking about Super Mario Odyssey. Odyssey's aesthetics and art styles were just about as schizophrenic as this, but it worked despite that due to them having tonal continuity. Everything still acts like it's part of a Mario game, even if it doesn't look or sound like it. Hence, the disparate aesthetics come across as a joke that the game is telling you, rather than a joke at the game's expense. As we'll see in a moment, Caine is unable to grasp these kinds of nuances.

On top of that, the unimportant background NPC's being undecorated wire frames suggests things about Caine. In the pilot, he said that he doesn't like people to see his unfinished work. In this episode, he's really excited to throw them into this new minigame he claims to have just finished. The obvious implication here is that he can't always actually distinguish between his unfinished work and his finished work.

...

...hmm. I'm beginning to have a theory about Caine. The way that he bluescreens and glitches over some of his dialogue, even in situations where it should all be pre-scripted. The way his manifestation looks like free-floating bodyparts hovering around an empty suit. The way he doesn't seem able to comprehend some things that a game master AI definitely should be able to, and how he's had to make inelegant workarounds for those things.

Caine isn't just malfunctioning. He's incomplete. This VR game and its overseer AI were cancelled mid-development, but somehow ended up running in this half-built state on a server somewhere, and somehow people are getting trapped/copied into it.

He's also glitched the fuck out even on top of that, though. Perhaps as a result of trying to do his job while lacking all of the software he needs to do it. Essentially driving himself insane laboring at his impossible task. For instance, there's no way in hell that having the candy people decorate their palace with a stained glass depiction of "God" could have ever belonged in the algorithm.

Princess Cookie's word, not mine.

...

The gang goes chasing the bandits, and their vehicles clash in a series of candy-themed reprises of setpieces from Fury Road. It works for me in the way that this kind of "allegedly parody something just by doing a thing from it" comedy often doesn't, and the lampshading that the characters do doesn't seem like insincere ass-covering. The reason being that the obvious intended joke here isn't that we're doing a Mad Max thing, it's Caine's creative bankruptcy.

Anyway. The altercation results in both vehicles offroading each other, with Pomni on the bandits' vehicle. The gang's war rig falls into a lake of molten fudge where they need to talk down a chocolatey expie of the shit monster from Conker's Bad Furday.

This subplot is the lighter one of the episode, and an opportunity for the show to flesh out the other prisoners some more. Mostly via the personality conflict between Ragatha the sweet ragdoll lady and Jax the asshole rabbit, with the others kinda being collateral damage. Notably, the barely-sane old-timer King has a few moments where he seems to know more about the Digital Circus than he lets on, and quickly changes the subject before anyone can ask about it. Hmm. There's a story there. Curious.

Meanwhile, the bandits' rig, which Pomni had just boarded, goes flying off at a weird angle that catches it in a weird crook of the rocks, where it promptly glitches through the floor.

It's able to blink itself back rightside up on the ground a moment later. But Pomni and the bandit leader have already fallen off into a secret world below.

Wandering around a little bit, the two of them independently find their way to the Gary's Mod templates for this game. Which means the bandit finds himself staring at an inanimate version of himself and his cronies.

When Caine said that this was his most immersive and detailed creation to date, he meant that the (named, non-wireframe) characters all have richly detailed backstories, dynamic personalities, and the ability to change and develop in response to player input. And, remember when I said that Caine doesn't quite get the concept of tone beyond the level of "keep it family friendly?" Well. These dorky crocodile-men come from a semi-nomadic village fallen on hard times, and they've turned to banditry out of desperation. In particular, the leader is desperate to provide medical treatment for his dying mother who raised him by herself after losing her husband during his early childhood, and the maple syrup they took (either it has medicinal properties, or it can be traded for such) was his last desperate hope of doing so.

Now, the bandit realizes that he can't picture his mother's face. The village that he thinks he comes from is off the map. It never actually existed. He was created with juuust enough memories of it to feel convincing during his potential dialogue with the players.

His situation isn't exactly like Pomni's, but it's easily close enough for her to relate. Unable to remember his loved ones, or even really himself. Set on an utterly futile succession of tasks that never had any stakes or consequences, despite being made to feel like they do. It isn't stated in as many words, but a few of Pomni's reactions suggest that she's thinking of the obvious existential horror angle as well: does she actually know that she's a digitized human consciousness herself? She remembers putting on the headset that sent her here, but is that memory genuine? Is she an NPC herself, with Caine having simply lost track of which is which?

The bandit might not actually be sentient. His reactions to learning what he and his world really are might just be Chat GPT stuff. But, he seems awfully convincing. If he isn't a p-zombie, then that means that Caine's NPC creations can in fact be self-aware. In which case, it is entirely possible that Pomni is an NPC. "I think, therefore I am" might not be an applicable metric.

And really. If the Circus can absorb or copy human minds, why couldn't it create human-equivalent ones from scratch? The ability to do one all but necessitates the ability to do the other.

Pomni seems to be thinking along these lines herself when she does her best to comfort the bandit. And also, by proxie, herself.

If his life is a lie and he doesn't actually exist, well...at least he's not alone in that. They can be here for each other. And really, isn't that what life is all about? Togetherness? The relationships you cultivate? If they're capable of having friendships, of caring about each other, then isn't that the better part of "reality" and "meaning?"

Also, his name is Gummygoo. Pomni's reaction ("Yeah, that's just about as stupid as mine.") is one of the better one-liners of the episode.

He agrees to come back to the Circus hubworld with her and the others, if Caine will allow it. He'll join the humans (if they really are humans). They manage to glitch themselves back onto the map with a replica of the stolen syrup truck, and regroup with the others who have just captured the other bandits.

The other crocomen are sent off to their nonexistent village with the replica truck, while Gummygoo returns the original one to Candytown to complete the quest.

It's not at all surprising when Caine wordlessly deletes Gummygoo upon them bringing him back to the hub. Expected, but that doesn't make it hurt less. Caine's explanation for his action here, though, is interesting. He says that if he lets NPC's persist too long inside of the hub, he might start to mix up which are which. And, just for a moment, he looks and sounds genuinely haunted.

It's the most humanlike show of emotion from Caine thus far.

...

On one hand, this makes it more likely that Pomni and the others are in fact human, or copied from humans.

On the other hand, it seems like Caine did make this mixup once before. And that the trauma of realizing what he'd done might have done even more damage to the developing AI. His inhumanity and incomprehension may be at least partly self-inflicted.

I wonder. Did Caine ever an Abel?

...

After Caine fucks off to do whatever he does when not visible to the humans, Ragatha - the most compassionate of the other prisoners - invites Pomni to the funeral service they're holding for the recently abstracted Kaughmo. He's technically still alive, in horrible suffering glitchmonster form, but they still have a tradition of doing memorials for people when this happens to them.

Seeing everyone laugh and cry as they recount their memories of Kaughmo, and thinking about her brief experience getting to know and help Gummygoo, Pomni has her first genuine smile of the series. It's weak, but it's genuine.

Even if they're trapped forever in kiddy sugarbowl hell, even if any of them could be killed or rendered worse than dead at any time, they have the thing that makes life worth living in each other. Pomni's nightmare in the beginning, of not being missed, of not passing muster, has had two antidotes applied to it. Gummygoo had his failure to perform as he was "meant to," with his existential breakdown, but she still found value in him. She sees the way the others mourn Kaughmo, and she knows that they care about each other as well; if she could have empathy for Gummygoo, then surely she herself can be accepted and valued by the others.

And hey, Gummygoo might not even be dead. According to Ragatha, Caine does like to reuse NPC's sometimes.

Jax is the only prisoner who doesn't attend the memorial. But, we have a brief moment with him that suggests that - much like Caine - he has reasons for avoiding attachment.

Maybe there's hope for him as well, much as he tries to quench it.


A poignant episode, with an uplifting throughline despite the continuing darkness and hopelessness. Whatever one suffers, just not being alone is what makes it endurable. It's perhaps the only thing in life, regardless of what kind of life, that really, really matters, ultimately. In that way, perhaps Pomni is actually better off here than she was in her human life. Or better off than her human original self currently is, as the case may be.

Not that there isn't serious room for improvement, of course. But still.

On a lighter note, I'm amused by the conjunction of "Nintendo Gnostic" with the commentary on AI art. A flawed creation, empty, lifeless, and unspiritual, made by a flawed creator to blind humanity to the truth. It works pretty damned well. Especially with Caine leaning toward the more sympathetic interpretations of the gnostic demiurge. A pathetic figure, broken and trying his best even though doing so just breaks himself even more. Isn't that the state of what passes for "AI" development these days?