After the judge once again bangs his gavel as a Pavlovian signal for Edgeworth to get his shit together, Phoenix summarizes, thankfully very briefly, the events of that evening. He is sure to again note that Neil Marshall received the King of Prosecutors trophy that day, even though it doesn’t seem like it’s relevant, a humongous clue that it’s super fucking relevant. He finishes with, “Prosecutor Marshall chased after him…and was killed by Darke. It is my belief that somewhere in this story…there is a lie.” Why not just say he doesn’t think Darke is the killer? There’s no reason to lie about any of the other details, and even if some of them aren’t true, it would only be relevant if it meant Darke wasn’t the murderer. “Somewhere” my ass, Phoenix. But Ema doesn’t at all like the accusation. “I’m not lying… The man really was holding up a broken knife!” God, how I wish the accuracy of the drawing actually matched her fervor. It’s kind of making me crazy.
Edgeworth takes all this in and comes to, I guess, the true only way to explain this: “If that’s true…then there’s no other way around it. This could not have been the actual murder weapon.” While Phoenix gets a boner (“…!”) from his boyfriend coming to such a sexy, valid conclusion, Edgeworth goes on, “There must have been another broken knife!” I echo the judge, except sarcastically, when he wonders, “What are the chances of there being two broken knives?” Indeed. It is left to Phoenix to asspull whether or not this is the correct conclusion, and since the only other possibility is that Ema is a less than gifted arteeste liar, he goes along with it.
Since the knife just had to be broken already thanks to this exacting crime scene illustration, and since Phoenix now has THE HEART THAT BELIEVES in Ema, he thinks over the available evidence and does the only thing he can. “Take a look at this,” he tells the court. “Here’s the real murder weapon!” And he presents the picture of Neil Marshall with the King of Prosecutors and Defense Attorneys Having Symbolic Buttsex trophy. “The answer lies in the past…” Phoenix says melodramatically. “Two years in the past. Right here inside this picture!” Edgeworth sees what Phoenix means right away and clenches his asscheeks at the idea of one of his possessions once again, even tenuously, being linked to a murder. But Phoenix explains for the judge: “Notice the award Prosecutor Marshall is holding.” Ema finishes, “That’s…a broken knife!” Phoenix alleges that “in all likelihood” this was the true murder weapon. Well, I think in all likelihood the murder weapon was a metal ruler Gant used to “discipline” his detectives. Prove me wrong, Phoenix!
Oh, someone thinks he’s a botany expert now?
Phoenix starts recapping again, to my irritation, speculating that since Marshall received the award that day and since prosecutors don’t carry guns, “When he chased after Joe Darke, he pulled out this knife.” Furthermore, Phoenix carries on in his flight of fancy, “This broken knife was the only weapon he had in this dangerous situation.” Um, if the only weapon within reach is a knife stuck to a trophy, maybe let the cops with guns chase after the serial killer. Or borrow Gumshoe’s metal detector to bash him over the head. Something. Also, he pulled out the knife? So this thing was in a scabbard and not just welded on? What could possibly justify designing a trophy with a usable weapon? Jesus Christ.
“But that… That can’t be!” Edgeworth responds. Phoenix is sure he’s stumbled upon the iron-clad perfect truth now, so he huffily asks, “Oh? And why not, Mr. Edgeworth?” He wants to be the winning attorney in their roleplay tonight and nothing is going to ruin it. But Edgeworth reasons, “Because if the King of Prosecutors award knife was the murder weapon…then the murderer and the victim would be reversed!” That is, the man with the rectangle in his hand would have been Marshall, not Darke. Yeah, it’s impossible that in their non-erotic tussle, one or both of them dropped their weapons and Darke ended up with the other man’s knife. But I guess I can buy that Neil Marshall hung onto that ceremonial buttsex knife with all his might. Phoenix has none of these thoughts, and just goes, “Oh…OOOOOOOHHHH!!!” I’d wonder if someone just stuck a finger up his butt, but Edgeworth is too far away.
The judge points out the other problem with going down this rabbit hole, though: Marshall is the one who died. And Ema saw the exact moment of the murder, so the person with that knife must be the murderer! There is no other way! SIGH. Edgeworth sasses Phoenix about jumping to conclusions too eagerly, but out of nowhere, someone goes, “HOLD IT!” Of course, it’s Ema. One of these days it’s going to be the judge. I can dream. “Wait!” Ema cries. “I…I remember now…I remember everything!” God dammit, Ema, I don’t want to hear anymore fucking exposition! Ema asks Edgeworth to let her see the evidence list again, and she says, “I knew it… This picture…I’m the one who drew it.” OH, WORD? I expect Phoenix to be like, “No shit,” but he and Edgeworth are both all shocked about this. Specifically, Ema has just realized she drew the Blue Badger head. Which means I just realized that back when that half of the drawing was revealed, everyone genuinely thought it was drawn by the Chief/Head Detective, and had nothing to do with this case. Oops. So: revelation! Ema drew the fucking Blue Badger head! I’m great at recapping!
Ema amps up the melodrama over the Blue Badger Theme of Lazy Shitty Chiptunes by saying, “All this time I’ve been trying so hard to forget…I must have locked this part away deep inside me…” The Blue Badger was deep inside Ema! That is not okay. The judge, worried that the court might soon hear testimony about mascot sexual assault, asks Ema to provide a new testimony about it, complete with exhaustive trigger warnings.
I thought Ema’s testimony could not get any more ludicrous, but this case so long ago entered the Tyson Zone that I don’t know why I’m surprised. Ema testifies, “When I saw that man raise his knife…I panicked, and rushed toward both of them. I think I…I knocked away the man with the knife. Just then there was another flash of lightning, and that’s when I saw…the Blue Badger! He wasn’t in the room, but I’m sure I saw his shadow!” Edgeworth basically objects as soon as she’s finished talking, because seriously, what in the fuck. And I don’t even mean the stuff about the Blue Badger–how does Ema go from being ABSOLUTELY SURE she watched all this helplessly to ABSOLUTELY SURE she threw herself into the fray? This is stretching the idea of traumatic selective amnesia to its breaking point. And this was only two years ago!
But also, the Blue Badger. You guys. “The Head Detective of Criminal Affairs didn’t even design him until this year!” Edgeworth feels the need to point out. Well, the Blue Badger’s batteries must have been hit with a bolt of lightning, zapping him with 1.21 gigawatts of electricity and sending him back in time. The now-sentient BB then had to navigate the wacky world of two years ago, arrange for his own birth by getting C/HD and Gumshoe to kiss at the Enchantment Under the Sea policemen’s ball, and then wait for the famous Joe Darke lightning storm to send himself back to the present. I’ve solved the puzzle!
The judge gives Phoenix the green light to cross-examine this hot mess, but another “HOLD IT!” rings out in the courtroom. This time, it’s Lana, and her icy demeanor has finally been broken by three days of unbelievably stupid testimony, causing her to slam her palm down on the witness stand and use a real facial expression. “Stop! Please!” she cries. “Don’t pursue this any further!” The judge and Phoenix are both perplexed as to why examining this exact thread of the story is such a problem, but apparently it is. “I’ve already confessed to the crime! Why can’t you just leave it at that!?” she begs, but Edgeworth tells her they are through the looking glass on this shit. Indeed they are. The judge even asks the bailiff to detain Lana so she won’t jump over the defense bench and strangle Phoenix before he can object to things. Phoenix is encouraged by Lana’s deranged behavior, since “It seems we’re finally getting to the core of the matter.” They’ll dig down deeper and deeper until the truth comes spurting out!
‘He was pinned down and groaning! He must have been in pain!’
Most of the pressing here just reveals that Ema gets less sure of what actually happened the more she talks about it, something Edgeworth chides Phoenix for picking at, since he attributes her memory problems to trauma-related “disorientation.” Convenient that Edgeworth is all too happy to pile on himself over every single inconsistency, but we know he just likes arguing with Phoenix. Gives their relationship that spice. Anyway, after Ema has paid off her earlier musing that she recognized the Blue Badger from somewhere else, Phoenix can press on her final statement about seeing his shadow. This leads Phoenix to ask her, and I can’t even believe he’s making me type this, “So you mean, you didn’t actually see his face, with its winning smile and all?” Oh my God, Phoenix. Shut up. Ema points out its “three creepy horns,” though. So it’s possible what she saw was Edgeworth, Phoenix, and Larry, naked and tangled up with their penises sticking out.
Edgeworth says again that the thing she saw could not have been the Blue Badger–Jesus, Miles, we get it–but this leads Phoenix to attempt his usual “outside-the-box” thinking and wonder what she could have seen resembled the Blue Badger. Edgeworth asks him, disdainfully, “Oh? And I suppose you have an explanation? If so, then by all means…please tell us what this ‘shadow’ really was!” I’m still thinking it was wiener shadow puppets, but Phoenix declares, after blue-fonting the obvious to himself for a fucking hour, “Ladies and gentlemen… It is the defense’s belief that on that fateful day two years ago…there indeed was something that looked similar to the Blue Badger… Something that is now sitting in this very room!” The judge asks him to put up or shut up, and he presents–ugh–THE JAR.
The first order of business is to explain to the poor judge that this thing is, per Phoenix, “just a plain jar,” and not some Satanic relic stolen from the set of American Horror Story. The second order of business is to demonstrate to everyone how this could have been the Blue Badger stand-in, which is a simple matter of rotating it around until its horns look like the Badger’s crown. I say “simple,” but even my first moment in this THE JAR-shaped crucible is a trying ordeal, both because I am forced to endure the Blue Badger Theme of Lazy Shitty Chiptunes while I do so, and because it actually takes some doing. The trick to it is that the three points of BB’s crown are not actually the three horns, since one of them is shorter than the others and they wouldn’t line up right anyway; the middle point is actually the bottom of THE JAR. I have played through this case many times and every time I forget this. It’s probably trauma-related selective amnesia. I’m Ema!
Shut up, Phoenix.
Once I’ve fucked around with the angles to my liking, Phoenix shows off his handiwork. As the Blue Badger is superimposed on the (for some reason, blood-red) silhouette of THE JAR, he gloats, “No one can possibly deny this jar’s resemblance to the Blue Badger!” Oh, how desperately I want Edgeworth to respond, “That doesn’t look like it at all.” But he doesn’t–instead, he and the judge concede that Phoenix’s claim miraculously turned out to not be bullshit. Edgeworth does, however, ask, “Although we all enjoyed Mr. Wright’s dramatic performance, one question remains… What’s your point!?” Hee! Edgeworth is going to rope Phoenix into roleplaying Hamlet and Horatio later. Hilarious and arousing. Anyway, Edgeworth’s point is a valid one: so the fuck what if the Blue Badger was THE JAR? What does that even mean? Phoenix is actually prepared with an answer, though I am forced to select it from multiple choice: this fact could change the location of the murder, the murder weapon, or the murderer. Any of the three is actually a valid response, but to make the most linear narrative sense of this–right, like that ship didn’t sail ages ago–I have Phoenix choose “the location.” He says, “Allow me to take these in turn. At the moment of the murder, the witness saw this jar.” Edgeworth adds that she saw it “from a very specific angle.” The how of that is another kettle of fish, and I am drinking a lot in preparation for dealing with it. But the immediate point Phoenix is making is that, thanks to the photo of Gant, Marshall, and Lana, we know THE JAR resided on Gant’s side of the office, and not Lana’s, where Marshall’s body was found, meaning that’s where the Darke/Marshall wrestling match actually took place.
“Are you implying the murderer moved the victim’s body?” Edgeworth asks. “From Damon Gant’s office to Lana Skye’s office?” He acts like this would have been way more complicated than dragging a body across a room, but his larger point is, “Why would he do that!? There’s no reason!” The rather circular logic Phoenix uses to answer this is, “Exactly. If there wasn’t a ‘reason’…he wouldn’t have gone through the trouble. The only logical conclusion…is that there was a ‘reason.'” There’s no reason to do something like this, but it was done, so there had to be one. Brilliant.