And fucking really, von Karma? That’s the best you can do? How preposterously stupid would Edgeworth have to be to wipe his prints off the gun, and then pick the goddamn thing up again? We’re not talking about fucking Larry, here–Edgeworth is supposedly a prosecuting prodigy. It’s already asking a lot of us to swallow that he’d touch the gun at all, as attractive as its long, hard, gunmetal-gray barrel must have been. But no, he must have been drawn to it like a moth to a phallic flame after he’d already fired it, deliberately wiped it off, and set it down again. Bravo, Manfred.
I have to point out how harebrained von Karma’s explanation is because Phoenix doesn’t bother, which is code for “The writers actually think this is a reasonable theory.” Sigh. Meanwhile, the judge is thinking things over and looks pretty serious, so Phoenix feels the need to object again. Isn’t there a penalty for objecting consecutively, like timeouts in football? Not that Phoenix would care with his man’s freedom on the line. “This witness claims that Edgeworth said ‘I can’t believe he’s dead’… But his word is all we have!” Phoenix points out. “If he were telling a lie…” This is grasping and Phoenix has to know it, because there is no way he can prove this specific statement is a lie. Von Karma asks for evidence, and the game doesn’t even give me the option of presenting anything, which I appreciate, because it would be a waste of time. “It’s no good!” he sobs to Maya. “There’s nothing I can do.” Maya starts praying to her dead sister, just in case this final moment of despair is enough to bring her there. But Mia, of course, doesn’t answer, because getting squeezed into Maya’s skin all the time is probably physically exhausting.
Von Karma tsks them again. “Three minutes was perhaps too high an expectation,” he admits. “However, fifteen minutes isn’t bad! This must be a new record.” Even the judge is unwilling to give Phoenix any more room to maneuver and allows Grandpa to leave the stand. After a black screen in which Grandpa toddles off to read an op-ed about how the younger generation is lazier than his own, the judge announces, “This court sees no reason to further prolong the trial. Nor is there any need for more time to decide the case against the defendant. This case is extremely clear. I see no room for misinterpretation of the facts.” Phoenix is like, “NOOOOOOO,” already flashing forward to Larry asking him to pay for their dinner and movie “just this once.” Von Karma just goes, “Hmph,” like this is exactly what he expected. Which, I’m sure, it is.
And without his dead boss intervening or his assistant going to jail on his behalf, there’s nothing he can do to stop this: “This court finds the defendant, Mr. Miles Edgeworth…GUILTY.” He is to be held by the court “pending trial at a higher court within a month from today’s date,” which actually makes this seem rather anticlimactic. But it doesn’t matter, because right after the judge adjourns the court, someone caterwauls through the courtroom, “W-w-waaaaaaait!” With dramatic percussion and white flashes, the camera flits around the courtroom to find the mystery person. It wasn’t the judge, or Phoenix, or von Karma, or even Maya. “Wh-who was that just now?” the judge asks. “Me!!!” someone announces from the witness stand. Phoenix takes a look and then his irises disappear and he goes, “Waaaaah!” Because, right when he was thinking about him and their horrible, stressful romantic past, he appears: the Butz.
Larry is on the stand, giving Phoenix a shaky thumbs-up while sweat drips down from his face to his pleather jacket. Oh, that is going to stain. Someone get Larry a Shout stick! The judge demands to know what this crazy-eyed, perspiring man is doing in his courtroom. “Listen! Y-you gotta listen to me!” Larry shouts. “I…I was…I was there, in the park, the night of the murder!” Of course he was. There’s no way they spent all that time on the illustrations of his adventures with the Evil Magistrate’s penis if it was just to shatter Lotta’s faith in the almighty Gourdy. “I…I wasn’t sure about it until just yesterday,” Larry says, as he frowns pensively on the stand. Pensively for Larry, I mean. “B-but today I remembered it!” What he remembered, apparently, is hearing a gunshot the last night he was out on the lake. At this, the peanut gallery goes wild. There was another person at a large state park on the night in question? Outrageous!
The rest of us have been sure for much longer, Larry.
It’s amazing von Karma took this long to speak up, but he finally objects to this kangaroo court nonsense. Snapping his fingers in Larry’s general direction–maybe von Karma is Kiyance!–he asks, “What is the meaning of this!? The verdict has been decided! I call for adjournment!” Look, it’s not like I want Edgeworth to go to prison, and dogs know he didn’t actually kill Robert Hammond, but von Karma does have a point. In fact, he doesn’t even need to call for adjournment, because the judge already did. But the judge is too intrigued by Larry’s tale to heed von Karma’s demands, and asks Larry to elaborate on what he heard. “I was sitting here in the audience, listening to the testimony…” he tells the judge. “Then I realized, something he said was different from what I remember! A-anyhow, I can’t just sit here and let you call Edgey a murderer! It’s… It’s just not right!” It’s tempting to focus on how Larry is totally stepping into Phoenix’s territory here, as the white knight defending Edgey’s honor and all. But I’m stuck on how Larry said he wasn’t sure about his role in this until “yesterday.” But that was when Phoenix interviewed him, and he didn’t say shit about hearing a gunshot, not to mention that he lied about when he was on the lake. Had he come forward earlier and not lied, maybe we wouldn’t be subjected to this last-minute Hail Mary testimony.
Of course, Larry wants to officially testify, but that’s a problem when the judge already declared his verdict. “Well, this is the first time something has happened like this in my court,” the judge says. Not that far crazier shit hasn’t happened, particularly in some of the flashback cases we’ll see later, but he’s technically correct. “I’m not quite sure how to proceed…” he goes on, but von Karma is ready with his suggestion that the judge tell Larry to fuck off and send Edgeworth to the pokey. “You’ve already given your decision! The trial is over!” he says, self-servingly but not exactly unreasonably.
Maya needlessly points out that Larry has given them another chance to save Edgeworth. Phoenix agrees, but still whines to himself, “If only it wasn’t Larry… He could make things even worse…” How could things possibly be worse? Maya agrees with me: “Mr. Edgeworth was just declared guilty, Nick! It doesn’t get any worse!” So Phoenix nuts up and demands the opportunity to do one of the things he hates most: get a straight answer out of his ex-boyfriend. “If there is another witness, it is our duty to hear him speak! Right here! Right now!” he proclaims, in full pointy pose glory. He’d look pretty hot and in charge if we didn’t know how gutless he feels on the inside.
Von Karma, naturally, does not think a guilty verdict can or should be overturned, but the judge, after a million ellipses, pounds his gavel and offers his opinion. “In all court proceedings, it is our duty to prevent an inaccurate verdict,” he states. “In order to make sure no mistake has been made, every witness should be heard!” Von Karma is going ballistic because he knows where this is going, and sure enough, the judge finishes, “I withdraw my previous verdict of ‘guilty’!” Hooray! The judge is on a roll today!
Even better, the judge cuts von Karma down a peg and orders him to bring Larry to the stand, “Now!” And without letting von Karma’s “Bitch, WHAT?!” throw him off track, he orders a short recess to give the attorneys and new witness time to prepare, and to allow von Karma to collect his balls from the jar on the judge’s bench.
‘Whatever. YOU’RE the one who can’t sit down this morning.’
Back in the lobby, Phoenix pulls his usual, “Whew, my unbelievable incompetence scared me for a minute! Thank God someone else saved your ass again, Edgeworth.” Edgeworth, for his part, just scowls at him and says, “Hmph. I’ve seen worse.” I’m sure he has, since he’s apparently witnessed hundreds of incompetent defenses in court. But that doesn’t mean Phoenix wasn’t the orchestrator of the world’s biggest shitshow back there. Even Phoenix knows this, blue-fonting, “Yeah, right, Edgeworth. You’re sweating bullets!” Phoenix has a lot of nerve ribbing Edgeworth about a sweating problem.
“I just wonder what Larry plans to say in there,” Phoenix muses. Maya asks, “Larry was at the lake that night?” like she wasn’t there for that entire conversation. Phoenix recounts Larry’s adventures with his slatternly Steel Samurai balloon running away from home with his boyfriend, complete with visual aids, while Edgeworth just stands there in silence with an odd smirk on his face. Finally, Phoenix notices that his man is not really paying attention, and asks somewhat insensitively, “You seem out of it. What’s wrong?” Oh I don’t know, Phoenix–most people are in such a great mood five minutes after they were declared guilty of murder. Edgeworth does not say this, and just non-answers, “It…it’s nothing.” Okay, now it totally is something.
As it happens, Jeanne and I have a theory that explains Edgeworth’s hangdog behavior. I still find it strange that Larry apparently lied to Phoenix yesterday about being at the lake the night of the murder and hearing a gunshot. Jumping ahead a little bit, Phoenix, maybe because he’s so used to Larry’s self-serving, seemingly pointless lies, never asks him about this in cross-examination. And though he could have spoken up long before he did, Larry waited until the last possible minute to reveal what he knew. Now, Phoenix was already suspicious of Edgeworth’s presence at Gourd Lake on the night in question, because he was worried that Edgeworth was there trolling for strange penis. And yet, it’s unlikely he missed Larry’s presence at the park–at the least, they probably walked right past each other as Larry went home and Edgeworth arrived. But Edgeworth, too, has remained silent about the possibility that another person was there that night and could provide testimony. The only explanation? Larry and Edgeworth were together the night of the murder. And by together, I mean screwing in the bushes. And they kept this a secret as long as possible to spare poor Phoenix’s feelings.
More on this later. For now, Maya wants to know something else, not that we’ll get a satisfying answer. “Why are your fingerprints on the murder weapon?” she asks. Edgeworth looks a bit emo about this, probably because the answer is going to make him sound like a buffoon. “Oh. When he fell into the lake, I went into a daze,” he answers. In the accompanying visual, one of the penis-like figures falls out of the boat with a sploosh. “I couldn’t understand what happened. I couldn’t think straight.” After his encounter with Larry? Apparently not. “Then I saw the pistol lying on the floor of the boat in front of me,” he continues as we flash to Edgeworth holding the gun in his right hand with his best “DEEEEERP” face on. “I picked it up without thinking. I didn’t have a reason, really.” Maya just goes, “I see…” and does not voice her concern that Edgeworth might have sustained a concussion from “wrestling” with Larry his struggle in the boat.
The music stops and Edgeworth slips into his serious business frown, so we know Edgeworth is about to say something important. “Wright…” he says. “This might be our chance.” Phoenix Shions back, “Our chance?” Edgeworth ignores this and tells him that von Karma is used to “perfect trials” with no unexpected elements. “Perfectly prepared witnesses, perfectly complete evidence,” Edgeworth rhapsodizes. “That’s the secret to his success.” Again, that does not exactly match up with what we’ve seen from von Karma thus far, but Edgeworth isn’t going to let something like facts get in the way of his prosecutorial boner. But, he says, “This is the first time he’s ever had to deal with something unexpected! He has let someone he hasn’t even talked to testify before the court! And that someone…is Larry!” He leaves it unstated, but understood, that Larry–a spastic, impulsive, pathologically dishonest trainwreck–is probably the physical manifestation of Manfred von Karma’s worst nightmare.
Phoenix, making me want to backhand him, asks, “What are you getting at?” What does he even need to be getting at? Larry’s insistence on testifying, regardless of his motivation or even his truthfulness, is a fucking gift and their only chance, so maybe just let it play out and do your best? Christ, Nick. Edgeworth carefully says that Larry’s testimony “will be full of holes,” so Phoenix doesn’t start thinking about Edgeworth knowing about Larry’s other holes. Maya concludes cheerfully, “That’s right, Nick! No ten minute trial this time! We’ll milk this one for all it’s worth!” The old filibuster defense–they’ll just keep Larry up there, prattling away, until the real murderer snaps and confesses just to get out of the room.
We know, Phoenix. You lasted so long that time. Good for you.
Back to the courtroom. The judge is still coasting on that authority erection he had a few minutes ago, so he barks assertively, “Witness… Please testify to the court about everything that you saw…on the night of December 24th.” Larry goes, “Right…leave it to me!” while still shakily giving everyone the thumbs-up. Phoenix silently begs him not to fuck this up, for the sake of the man they both apparently love. Then he looks over at von Karma, who is keeping it relatively together behind the prosecutor’s bench. “I just hope Edgeworth is right about this being our big break…” Phoenix blue-fonts. Something about the way he says that makes me picture him and Edgeworth sitting uncomfortably on a casting couch, across from a grinning von Karma with cocaine residue on his upper lip.
Larry gets right into his testimony. “That night, I was out on a boat in the lake,” he tells the court. Over the still of him finding the deflated Steel Harlot, he narrates, “I was looking for something, and I, er, found it. So I quietly slipped the boat back in at the rental shop dock.” I get the feeling that Larry never slips anything in quietly. There’s probably a lot of grunting and high-fiving himself. “Then, just as I was thinking about going home, I heard this ‘bang‘!” he goes on. “I looked out over the lake, but I didn’t notice the boat. So after I heard that single gunshot I went home.”
The judge basically tells him, fairly, that that was the shittiest testimony in recorded history, before giving Phoenix the go-ahead to cross-examine. But Phoenix is nervous: “It’s Larry!” he tells Maya. “I have no idea what he’s going to say if I press him. I’m a little scared.” Maya is all, “Fuck it. YOLO, dude.”