The Amazing Digital Circus E4: "Fast Food Masquerade"

This review was commissioned by @skaianDestiny


An uneven episode, compared to the previous three. It focuses almost entirely on characters who haven't previously gotten much attention, which is good in some ways, but feels like it's missing a lot of groundwork and buildup. Some of this would have worked better if it was spread out across at least one or two of the previous episodes.

At the same time, the decision to move away from Pomni and place the main POV elsewhere for a little while was a good one conceptually. This episode provides a lot more context for who these people are, who they might have been before being trapped/copied/whatever into the Amazing Digital Circus, and also challenges some assumptions that the earlier instalments left us with.


The episode starts out with Gangle, the balloon-string-drama-mask person whose role in previous episodes consisted of being sad about missing her comedy mask, being given a new comedy mask by Zooble. Turns out that Zooble found one in the box of spare body parts that Caine gave them, and they figured having it might cheer Gangle up again.

The assertion that Gangle needs to switch out her body parts in order to feel the corresponding emotions is a hard one to accept. Especially since we've been explicitly told that the one thing Caine can't do in this simulation is alter the players' minds. It turns out that this isn't actually what's going on here, though. Rather, Gangle is actually the most psychologically damaged of the gang, and the stupid symbols and rituals of the Digital Circus have taken on a genuine importance for her. Basically, she needs the comedy mask because she thinks she needs the comedy mask. She's been driven even deeper into madness than Kinger (who, we recently learned, is actually fine as long as he works within his agoraphobic and photophobic coping mechanisms).

Anyway, this touching moment is cut short by Caine, as touching moments in the Circus' hubworld most often are. Probably his funniest entrance so far, actually.

CAINE: "Did somebody say 'Adventure?'"

EVERYONE: *exhausted, dead-eyed expressions*

POMNI: "...no?"

Indeed, nobody had.

Anyway, Caine's been on a horror kick lately, it seems. Or else he was just upset that Zooble missed out on the haunted mansion game, and wants to make sure they get the horror experience they're sure to like.

Pomni very vocally objects to having to do another horror scenario, on account of her low tolerance for jumpscares. Which leads to an argument. Which leads to Caine being reminded that he has a suggestion box for player-submitted adventure requests that he's never bothered to check until now despite literal dozens if not hundreds of reminders.

POMNI: "Wait, we have a suggestion box?"

CAINE: "Oh right, I forgot we had that!"

ZOOBLE (to Pomni): "We basically don't."

This one definitely has some of the snappiest dialogue of the series thus far, I'll give it that.

Anyway, after rejecting a bunch of over-the-top sadistic PVP suggestions that most definitely didn't come from Jax, Caine finds one that seems to conform to everyone's pleas for "something normal for once." A restaurant simulator. They play as the crew of a fast food restaurant. They make burgers and serve them to customers. No drama, no conflict, no adventure per se, just normal wage worker boredom.

Since Gangle is the most excited about this one (being as it was her own suggestion), she gets the privilege of being the branch supervisor. And thus, after spending an alarmingly short period of time coming up with the details, Caine gives them a brand new simulation:

The framing had me expecting that some bits of the psycho murderer butcher game were going to be left over, and that the result would end up being a riff on Five Nights at Freddy's or something. But no! That's not the direction this goes in!

In fact, for the first time so far, the main conflict of the episode isn't driven by Caine's incompetence.

...well, not directly driven by it. Obviously, the characters are only in the poor mental health condition that they're in is because of prolonged exposure to the above. But you know what I mean.

In terms of challenging earlier premises: apparently, Gangle remembers having been a restaurant floor manager in a previous life. This in contrast to the pilot's claims that nobody remembers who they were or what they did before arriving in the Circus.

True, this wasn't ever an absolute. Pomni remembered the last few seconds of her realspace life, putting on the headphones in front of the monitor. That's not a lot, but it is technically more than nothing. It leaves the door open for other people happening to have preserved a little bit more. But still, Gangle remembering her old job is surprising.

...

It makes me rethink my inference that Kinger entered the simulation through a different route from the others and thus may have been one of its creators. If other people also remember biographical details along the lines of spouses, education, and careers, then him remembering those things doesn't signify anything. So, I'm much less sure about Kinger's story (and the symbolism that seemed to be in play with him in the previous episode) now.

...

Anyway, this simulation is much less of a shitshow than Caine's previous works. That doesn't mean that it isn't a shitshow, but it's less of one. The restaurant's menu is bizarre, and includes things like a "stupid burger" that include a special, addictive, intelligence-dampening condiment. The customers, probably on account of how little time Caine spent on this program, are virtually all recycled NPC's from previous adventures.

There's actually a nice touch here. Ragatha recognizes some of these characters as figures from previous games, but neither Pomni nor the audience has seen them before. It does a nice bit for the verisimilitude, since the other prisoners have been doing these dumb adventures for a long time before the series' start and Pomni's introduction.

It also serves as a nice setup for one of the episode's sideplots, involving Pomni's attempts at dealing with a familiar face without any familiarity behind it.

Gummygoo and his war boys have the same rural Australian accents as before, and at least many of the same quirks and mannerisms. They don't remember anything about being nomadic candy raiders, though, and they don't remember Pomni at all. It's unclear if Gummygoo even possesses the sentience (or requisite complexity to convincingly imitate it, as the case may have been) that his previous incarnation did, despite Pomni's attempts to coax it out of him.

It's a cold reminder for us, and confirmation for Pomni, that Ragatha's attempts to cheer her up at the end of the Candy Road episode with assurances that Caine often reuses old NPC's were hollow. This isn't the same instance of Gummygoo. Even if it has the same capacity for evolution and self-awareness as the previous one, it's not the same entity. That one was murdered by Caine. So, Pomni has to process the rest of those emotions now.

The other real sideplot involves Jax being his usual self, but Gangle having less tolerance for it than Caine's NPC's do. As the floor manager, Gangle has apparently been granted a measure of reality-warping power over the restaurant and its contents. Which she uses to put Jax in a torturous Ludovico therapy type thing with the trappings of a corporate remedial training program.

On one hand, it's hard to feel any sympathy for Jax. On the other, it shows just how far gone Gangle is, with how seriously she's taking this sim. She almost thinks more like Caine than she does like a human. Having the comedy mask just makes her feel empowered and proactive enough to show more of her damaged self than she does when stuck with the cryingface.

When her obsessive, tyrannical behavior as she gets into character and takes this attempt at reliving some vestige of her old self far too seriously, the others all turn against her. She has a breakdown almost identical to Caine's in episode three, when both of them are told by their respective victims that no one likes their administration or leadership. Less scenery destruction in Gangle's case, on account of her powers being much more limited, but still very clearly mirroring each other. During Gangle's breakdown, we also get some weird zoom-ins on her laughingface turning sad again as darkness closes in and we hear a distorted mechanical sound reminiscent of the abstracted Kaufmo in the pilot.

It's not explicit, but I think the implication is that Gangle was on the brink of abstracting there.

What pulls her back from the brink is a simple low-key social interaction with Pomni. Where the former offers to help close up the restaurant to make things easier for Gangle, and also tries to give her a pep-talk when she sees she's upset.

Pomni has no idea what's really going on with Gangle. Gangle doesn't even talk to her enough or give her enough information to make educated guesses, and the interaction is a brief one. But, it's still enough to pull Gangle back.

And even to remember how to smile even with her tragedy face on, as she displays in a cathartic, dancing run through the simulated nighttime streets outside the restaurant.

Having been reminded what being human feels like is all it took. This is everything she was trying and failing to grasp at by recreating a janky facsimile of her half-remembered old job. Everything she was trying to reclaim by hoarding symbols of it, like smiling masks. Just a moment of earnest, caring attention from a friendly acquaintance did more for her than all of the frantic spectacle-hoarding combined.

On one hand, this is basically a more on-the-nose reiteration of the previous episode's thematic statement. As long as your physical needs are being met, community and friendship are the only really important things. Everything beyond that is just icing on the cake. In this case, the absence of those things is shown to be the cause of the dreaded abstraction. And it fits with the facts of the case we saw with Kaufmo; he abstracted while alone in his room, after pushing the others away in frustration with their resignation to life in the circus, scribbling furious, manic notes about his nonsensical plans for escape.

...

We don't know what the story with Kinger's wife was. Kinger was able to meet up with her again, briefly, before Caine imprisoned her. However, in light of what we're seeing here and in the pilot, I strongly suspect that she was alone when the abstraction actually happened.

...

Gangle's ecstatic, post-conversation-with-Pomni little midnight jog is cut short by a speeding car. Because of course Caine would apply collision physics to the cars that are just meant to be background decorations lol. Anyway, Gangle respawns in the fast food chain's local corporate office, where she gets a performance review from an executive played as ineptly as you'd expect by Caine.

Gangle is saddened when Caine only gives her a B+ grade for her fictional management of a fictional restaurant for badly programmed NPC's. But, it's a controlled level of sadness. She's able to prevent herself from having a panic attack over it like she would have just a few hours earlier, because she's been reminded that keeping ahold of her humanity is about more important things than "what I think I remember my old job being, probably."

Oh, right, there was also one other little subplot about Ragatha accidentally dosing herself with the stupidburger sauce and spending the entire shift in a drugged-out daze.

It gets old before the episode is even halfway over. And also, like, doesn't this break the rules? I thought Caine couldn't directly tamper with their mental states? Wouldn't he have to do that in order to simulate the effects of psychoactive drugs like this?

I guess it's possible that Caine was lying, and this minor-seeming gag is an important hint. But I find it more likely that the creators just came up with a (not all that funny) gag and forgot about their setting's established rules when implementing it. Eh, oh well.

Anyway, the episode ends with another tender moment between Gangle and Zooble. Zooble is showing a lot more personality all around after getting some focus in episode 3. Not sure if that's the writers overcompensating for how little they had some of these characters do in the first couple of eps, or just a matter of getting away from Pomni's POV and seeing the other characters show more of themselves to people who they've known for much longer than her.

Not that those are mutually exclusive, of course.


So, that's an episode. It fleshes out the side characters more, teaches (or at least, implies) some more details about how abstraction works and what causes it, and it casts doubt on my theory about Kinger. Not much progress though, really, aside from Jax having a couple of almost-but-not-quite vulnerable moments in the wake of his Ludovico treatments. The stuff with Gangle would have hit harder if we were given chances to get to know her even just a little bit prior to this episode.

Overall, I'd have to call it the weakest so far. That's not to say it's bad, or that there aren't some important things in it, but episodes 2 and 3 were a really tough act to follow.

One thing that occurred to me while writing the review is that, given the heavyhanded parallels between Gangle's near-breakdown and Caine's near-breakdown, and the way that spending too much time in the circus seems to sort of Cainify you, well...is Caine himself at risk of abstracting?

Is that what almost happened in his therapy session with Zooble, last time, when everything started glitching?

I didn't think an AI would be at risk of that the way simulated humans are. But if he is, then...well, that's a scary prospect if there ever was one.

Hopefully the next TADC episode will do a bit more to advance the plot.