The Professor Case - The Truth Must Come Out
Looking at the Professor case, there come to mind two characters whose lives were entirely destroyed as collateral damage in the convoluted cover-up. They are, of course, Enoch Drebber and Daley Vigil. Both of them were ruined as a consequence of the lies told to enable the predominant narrative to remain: however, their relationships to truth are almost diametrically opposite. Between them they map out the far extremes of the effects of truth: the truth-teller of a suppressed truth, and the scapegoat for a lie.
Enoch Drebber is introduced as a fraud, a sham, and a trickster. Both the science and magic community see him as some shifty second-hand dealer with his fingers in shadowy pies and no integrity to speak of. His very involvement casts further doubt on Harebrayne’s (admittedly doubtful) experiment. A sly, slippery man, our first encounter with him comes after an extended segment of investigation with the purpose of seeking him out – unusual for the game, where usually the prosecution magically appears whichever witness is needed on short notice. He is, from our first impression, a man who cannot be pinned down, a man who lies with ease.
Yet. As he takes the witness stand from the first time, we get this from the gallery:
See that black monocle?
Yes, why do I feel as though I've seen it somewhere before...?
Oh! You, too? I had exactly the same feeling myself.
Hm...
This is obviously in reference to the famous newspaper articles that immortalised Enoch Drebber’s face in the minds of Londoners in the graveyard incident immediately following the Professor’s supposed execution. It’s this singular truth which is wedged in Enoch Drebber, something he quite literally cannot escape. This is the sole point on which he is pinned, and the hinge on which the rest of his life has turned inexorably, moving circular across the finite span afforded him in the ruinous aftermath. Telling the truth ten years ago is the only stain to have stuck on this otherwise slick man – and what a stain it proved to be for him.
It's ironic, as we go further into the mire of the Professor case, that Enoch Drebber is in fact, the only person to have told the complete truth, whether knowingly or unknowingly, that was involved. It was Enoch who said it exactly as he saw it: the Professor, alive in his coffin. Every single other character was either involved in the conspiracy (the list here is genuinely too long) or unknowingly upholding it (Barok, multiple other characters to various extents though curiously, not Genshin). He’s our beacon of truth, shining down from ten years ago – and this truth, this singular truth, has ruined his life. In this sense, he’s very much the hanged man – trapped, unable to move forward from that moment of blazing sincerity, unable to disavow it or delete it or somehow make it less important even as he spins flimsy lie after flimsy lie that fall apart just as fast.
Fitting, then, that our pursuit of Enoch on the witness stand is a pursuit through a web of lies. Enoch lies, lies again, lies to protect himself, lies to deflect blame, lies to hide – but all of those lies stem from the foundational truth that he once proclaimed and now cannot escape. It becomes clear throughout the trial that what haunts him right to the present day isn’t only the fallout from the newspaper that associated his real name, but also that he wasn’t believed.
Drebber:
What an interesting twist.
Drebber:
When at the time, not one person would take me seriously. Yet now here we are, ten years later, and suddenly my story matters. And in a court of law, too. Very well, then. If everyone so wishes. Let's be frank. I'll tell you the truth of what happened that night...for what it's worth.
It’s clearly still a smarting wound, to have lost everything and be branded a liar on top of his loss. The truth, to this bitter, jaded Enoch, has lost almost all value – he regrets knowing it and saying it even as he cannot help the flattened hope that he might be believed. But what would it do for him now, ten years on? Vindicate him? Absolve him? Fix, somehow, the span of everything that has gone wrong? It’s here where we see deception used as a protective carapace, especially as Enoch lies again and again on the matter of talent. He claims to have believed in Harebrayne’s hypothesis, but even more egregiously, he denounces his own. The self-justifying narrative he spins for us onstage has a slick self-denigration to it, as he disguises the magnitude of his hurt by flattening the very reality of his self. It’s like he’s cut himself in half so when he trips he’s closer to the ground.
However, in the same way that Enoch can’t bring himself to fully disavow/be unaffected by the truth of the Professor case, neither can he outrun the reality of both his talent and what his talent meant to him. The physical evidence of his trophy, which he can neither take pride in nor throw away, appears once more in court to haunt him: the truth of what he was and the truth of what he saw are bound up indelibly, and are stifled together. So the two together, then, dog Enoch’s footsteps, unwilling valued and forcibly made valueless, impotent, stifled, hidden, wasted in the long ten years – but still, at the end of it all, painfully precious to him.
It's here we turn to Daley Vigil, who is in almost the exact opposite situation. Enoch Drebber cannot outrun his own reputation, whereas we first meet Daley Vigil in an almost perfect disguise as the street vendor Gossip. Enoch is immediately marked out by his distinguishing white hair and monocle, whereas Daley is stated to have ‘no distinguishing features’. Enoch can’t forget or get the world to forget about the truth he once proclaimed, whereas every person in Daley’s vicinity conspired to scapegoat him in a deception, and he’s managed to stifle the truth of events even to himself. Whereas Enoch is marked by a painful internal clarity that we, as the audience, struggle to get him to admit, our pursuit of Daley pivots on the fact that there is some truth which he has obscured even to himself.
Yet, the elements of their characters stand not in opposition, but in close similarity. Like with Enoch, we pursue Daley through his lies – though these, at least, are unwitting for the most part. Shame, social and personal, and the deeply felt effect thereof, dog both characters and what they are willing to testify to. Of course, the biggest similarity is in the overall trajectory itself: their lives as a living consequence to the events that happened.
Daley Vigil’s character is built around deception, both of the self and just plain being lied to. The lie of Gossip disguises the deeper lie, even as Gossip cannot exist without that lie being a lie. It’s an articulation of the hopeless, directionless wrongness of a world that has somehow fallen apart for seemingly no reason, and the two-faced shame of being deceived: of having to live as bearing out the deception. It’s striking that our first introduction to Daley Vigil is through his wife, that we are given to know he has two, young children. Social shame and personal pride are deeply woven threads into the lie that cannot be admitted as a lie, so much that Daley has made it true. This lie is a like a bone healed wrong – but is it better, somehow, to break that bone again?
What follows is one of the most disturbing sequences in the game, as Kazuma’s single-minded pursuit narrows down into a hypnotic question-answer sequence. Daley spirals deeper and deeper into the morass of his own suppressed knowledge, accompanied by a low, repeating refrain in the music track. It is then, pushed to breaking, that we re-enact Daley’s attempted suicide from ten years ago in a first-person point of view. The window shatters to reveal Daley’s anguished, haunted face, before he promptly collapses. The next time we see him, he is in hospital, defeatedly resigned to taking on once more the lion’s share of the punishment for a crime he was only ever incidental to. With his loving wife and two young children, we have put the final nail in this man’s financial prospects, destroyed his social reputation, and sent him to jail.
It's here that the game explores some of its own hardest questions about truth – what is it worth, and is it always a boon to know it? It’s a self-recrimination Ryuunosuke mulls over with Barok, but Barok ultimately dismisses. Truth, they agree, has an inherent value regardless of how bitter it is to swallow.
Ryunosuke:
But, but I... I exposed the most unpalatable truth you could ever have imagined in court today. I feel as though I've robbed you of something you held so dear...
Van Zieks:
......... What was it he said? 'To fight those who dwell in the darkness requires at least some of us to occupy the darkness ourselves.'
Van Zieks:
But that... That was just the feeble excuse of a coward. Only those with a steadfast eye for the truth have what it takes to fight the dark forces of crime. You made fine work of establishing that fact in court today.
Certainly we can agree that Barok may think so, or Kazuma, or even Gina. After all, they have excised their ghosts, and laid their dead to rest. The truth will let them continue with their lives, confident that no skeletons still rattle in the closet. But is it still true for characters such as Enoch Drebber and Daley Vigil? What comfort does the truth bring to them, so incidental to the happenings, and so destroyed by what happened? Can it ever really amount to something other than too little, too late? For all Enoch and Daley diverge in their characters, they reconvene once more in the shared ashes of the long ten years. Enoch Drebber reacts to the sudden, belated surge of interest in his story with only the bitterest of irony; the truth lands Daley Vigil in hospital, then in jail. We can only imagine them hearing of the proceedings from their respective places and thinking, where were you ten years ago, when I needed you?
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