Episode 9: THOSE Doors. Observations and theory (HEAVY SPOILERS)

Hello TADC community thank you for taking the time to read my first post here, I have quite a lot on my mind after watching this finale which I need to really digest before I share all my thoughts with you but there is something really eating at me.

TL;DR I have good reason to believe the layout of Jax's mind that we see can be decoded and used to not only confirm that Jax took his own life, but that it demonstrates repression of guilt of the murder of two other people - his mother and Ribbit.

In the confrontation with abstracted Jax we see Pomni enter what appears to be Jax's mind, or something to that effect. I think there may be bigger implications than we might expect to be found in these trippy sequences and their links to abstraction but that is something I will return to in a future post. To put all that into one word - consciousness. We find ourselves in Jax's subconscious, represented by 6 doors.

5 of these doors feature Jax's face but in different colours and the rightmost door is locked up with chains and wooden boards nailed down to keep it shut.

The first door is light cyan blue in colour, behind it we see Jax putting his hand to Ragatha's door with a red X over her to signify her passing/abstraction. Pomni offers help to Jax who begins to choke Pomni in a murderous manner before suddenly stopping and acting funny as usual.

The second door, a slightly darker shade of blue, is opened to reveal the funeral of Zooble being directed by Gangle with the fast food episode mask on, for lack of a better word for it. Jax arrives dressed as a maid and begins to torment and flirt with Gangle, seemingly to mock and spite Zooble in death. I think it's quite important to note they specifically refer to Zooble's passing as death and not abstraction in this scene.

Pomni then tries to open the boarded up door to no avail, and gives up.

The light green door opens to reveal a very Looney Toons inspired segment, with Jax stood infront of Gangle's door with a red X in the same manner as Ragatha before with a smuyg grin. Zooble appears and accused Jax of murdering the only person they ever loved which he denies with very little effort, before dooming Zooble to fall to their doom - albeit in a very Wile E. Coyote fashion. They close it out with an old timey intro in which Jax gets decapitated.

Pomni proceeds into the fourth door, coloured yellow like Jax's eyes. Inside we see four versions of Jax - one is playing a piano he is chained to and the other three are playing poker. Notably one is femboy maid Jax, another is wide eyed and harsh and the third is comical and unserious. Next to the piano is another door with Jax's face, this one being coloured correctly and less crude in detail. On the wall closer to the entrance is another chained up, boarded over door.

After some dialogue Pomni asks where the real Jax is and tries the door by the piano but it's locked. During some more conversation we see those three Jax's act aggressive towards the piano player when he tried to speak, and they scream at the boarded up door to shut up when the chains rattle slightly.

These locked doors are never explained or referenced ever again in the movie and this is what got my train of thought going.

After this scene Pomni proceeds straight into the other door after receiving the key and we get brief glimpses of some real world footage before seeing Jax's first moments in the circus and the story of him and Ribbit unfolding to the bitter end. After all this is that final scene between Pomni and Jax where she consoles him before being saved by the rest of the circus. But enough with all that, DOORS!

Every single door in Jax's mind that we can look behind very blatantly represents the death of one person or another. The tone is serious infront of Ragatha's door and gets more comedic while the implications get darker but less obvious. By the third door we get Jax accused of MURDER and we even witness him "kill" Zooble by dooming them to fall to their demise.
This implication changes what the previous doors showed us...is he gloating at Zooble's funeral when he is infact the killer? Did he kill Ragatha too? It explains why he attacked Pomni so brutally in that very scene.

This is what Gooseworx tells us explicitly, the rest is there for us to decode with the pattern.

Jax's sudden abstraction after walking away is jarring and many people complained it felt rushed and was never explained, but when looking through the lens that each door represents Jax taking someones life we can deduce that Pomni confronts "the real Jax" behind that final door because he took his own life out of guilt.

So what is behind those chained up doors that Jax is so afraid of? The answer lies in the visions we see when Pomni goes through said final door. The turning point in Jax's past with Ribbit was opening up about his tragic life outside the circus, and how he pushed his mother so hard he thinks he killed her but he doesn't know. Jax quickly panics after this and starts to push Ribbit further out of his life for knowing the truth, until they have a confrontation on a snowy mountaintop after which Ribbit is never seen again until they turn up abstracted.

It is my strong opinion that these chained up doors represent the guilt for the deaths of Ribbit and Jax's mother, and if my little theory here is true then it stands to reason that Jax murdered them.

Remember how nauseous Jax felt when he lamented something about "this all actually being real"? That wasn't guilt about his attitude to the circus - that was guilt for his lover.

To close this off, I think the first chained door we see represents his mother. It never moves besides Pomni's doing. Inside that room guarded by the group of Jax's we see them all scream in terror at the slightest movement of the chains on the other door. This seems to closely mirror how he acts about Ribbit being mentioned and seems very fitting that her 'death door' would be kept separate to everyone else and closest to his own. Both dead together.

And at the very end of the episode we see Kinger and Pomni watching three of their abstracted friends swimming happily together in some kind of aquarium above their heads, reminiscent of them looking up at their friends reunited in the afterlife.

I think there are some really huge things people have simply not had the time to notice yet, and that people won't see what Goose really intended this all to be or mean for quite some time, myself included. But I hope that what I've been stewing on tonight will be food for thought for everybody here and that you enjoyed this analysis. I look forward to sharing more with you in the future, until then 😄 That's all folks!