After watching:

• Called it! I misplaced the music cue from the preview, but I'm giving myself a pat on the back for putting Pomni abstracting as just a dream/nightmare used to open the episode
• A little surprised there was no opening theme here though, I was looking forward to seeing how the original was going to be revised to replace Kaufmo with Pomni
• Interesting that Bubble (and by extension probably also Caine and all the other NPCs/AIs) can swear normally; only the human characters have that diegetic filter
• I take it Gangle is destined to immediately have her comedy mask broken at the start of every episode, and for Ragatha to be injured in some way?
  • And Jax throws an aside glance to the camera and Pomni gets separated from the others in the climax
  • And apparently the theme will be remixed for the final emotional moment of the episode
• Wow Jax is just an absolute asshole this episode! I wonder if this was meant to counter all the Jax love from Episode 1?
  • Though we do see at the end of the episode he was sad for Kaufmo for just a split second before catching himself and acting annoyed again -- it's clear this whole thing was just supposed to be a distraction for him and it obviously wasn't distracting enough.
• On that note: overall a much different tone to the pilot here, really putting the "psychological dark" in "psychological dark comedy" here
• Really nice how Pomni got some character development here, being able to open up more with Gummigoo and seeing from the funeral that the other cast members actually care about each other and revising the abstraction nightmare to have them all reach out and grab her
• RIP Gummigoo 😭
  • So Caine absolutely confused a human for an NPC at one point and brutally murdered them in such a terrible way that even he feels remorse ... such emotion with so little face...
• Almost no Zooble at all this episode! We could guess from the teasers that they were skipping the adventure again, but I expected at least a B plot with them "hanging out" with Caine in the circus
• I will say there were a few times where the voice acting felt just a little off, but overall it was still very good, especially in the more emotional scenes

In the end: looking forward to episode 3! (and rewatching this plenty more times along the way)