Annotated 49-49
FB: Life (imprisonment) comes at you fast.
With this page, we say our goodbyes to Carol. Like Shanna and the other “Sepia” characters, she’ll actually appear once more after this, in an out-of-continuity rap battle that reinterprets the whole “Sepia” side of Guilded Age…but this is the real end of her story.
Jail and prison are clearly in her future, and HR’s death doesn’t absolve her of what she did in his name (“I’m sorry about your friend”). But there is an important sense in which she’s finally free. That newfound freedom is now more precious to her than anything, and the only way she can maintain it is to live by a new paradigm. She will not hide any of her deeds any more, no matter how dark they’ve been or how crazy the account might make her look. Hiding her part in HR’s schemes was enough deception for several lifetimes.
(Insider trading tip: if you haven’t done so yet, now would be a really good time to dump all your Hurricane stock.)
I half expected Carol to commit suicide which would leave Shanna and Xan as the only living witnesses to this unbelievable tale. Life imprisonment is a grim future and this ordeal probably shook any notion of a God or afterlife.
I don’t see why it would, at least any more than the inverse.
Yeah, I recall I mentioned early in this re-run that it’s so much easier to be a man of faith in a fantasy setting, because Clerics literally channel the power of their gods and manifest in attacks and healings and such. I feel this is along the same lines: It’s undeniable proof that there’s greater and more powerful out there, higher beings. That even the soul exists. Shit, there’s some self-made gods, like HR and Frigg!
I suspect she’s not in a hurry to meet yet another god.
You know, I realize that it’s an impossibly-convoluted legal question, but I would be *really* curious to find out what would actually happen to someone in Carol’s position. If she keeps to her current mindset, she’ll probably plead guilty to whatever they choose to charge her with, but what would they charge her with?
I mean, her involvement in hiring a Hitman who killed two cops and one of their friends is enough to put her away for the rest of her life (and possibly even get the death penalty). Of course, she didn’t actually ask him to do any of that, but I doubt she’d try to argue the technicality of her never giving him any direct orders – she knew what kind of man she was hiring, and she’s going to admit that. With two officers dead, I doubt they’re going to give her any leniency on her involvement.
The rest of her crimes are… weirder, and it’d be interesting to see how the legal system chooses to deal with it.
She shot her boss, and claims that he was in the process of trying to achieve godlike mastery over the multiverse. Video exists that shows *something* really weird going on. I seriously doubt that she’d be able to convince anyone of the actual reality of the situation – so would that be a murder charge as well, or something else? Even if the court doesn’t buy her story about what happened, would it matter if the court believes that *she* believed all of reality was threatened?
Then there’s the killing of the employee, which wasn’t Carol’s doing though she did hide the body. That would probably land her an aiding and abetting charge. But would the fact that HR killed that guy help justify Carol killing HR, or does the law not care about that since the two deaths were so far removed?
And then there’s the five decomposed corpses in the company’s basement. Carol has a similarly-outlandish story about their fates, and she was involved in their deaths. But the goal wasn’t to kill them – that was a complete accident. So is that manslaughter charges? Criminal negligence? Plus additional charges for hiding them for however long they were missing?
As a non-lawyer, my best guess is, since there are dead police involved, they’ll throw the book at her as much as is possible. One count of murder for HR. Five counts of involuntary manslaughter for the Akerra five, plus five counts of aiding and abetting for hiding them. One count of solicitation of murder and conspiracy to commit murder for hiring the mustache dude. Two counts of felony murder for the fact that two police officers were killed by the hitman. One count of aiding and abetting for hiding the body. And probably a host of criminal negligence charges for everything that went on in the basement as well.
I am thinking that the combination of her money, status and insistence to tell the whole truth lands her in psychiatric care. Or possibly being picked up by men in black uniforms who suddenly makes the official case go away. In the that case, it would be because the agency in question believes her and wants to use the information, whether she wants it or not.
Given her insistence on living in truth, court mandated psychiatric treatment is probably the best outcome. Her illusions will be hard to treat though.
That last scenario is a distinct possibility considering you know who was President at the time this was written and would love to get the kind of power HR sought. Maybe he did, but only succeed in conquering the Mushroom Kingdom.
I’d agree with you on your first point if Carol was attempting to avoid punishment, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. But if she is, even if Carol chooses to get legal representation, she’ll resist her lawyers’ attempts to get her to plea insanity. It’s recently been ruled that a lawyer cannot push for an insanity plea against a client’s wishes, and I can only assume that the same applies to Sepia world.
At some point, after you spew all this absolute nonesense story, if your lawyer says “plead insanity” and you say “NO! I MUST BE PUNISHED!” you’re kinda just proving the lawyer’s point to the jury.
“As you can see from her incredible video game magic story and her unsound judgement right now, your honor, my client is whack as fuck. She crazy, bro. I rest my case.”
I like to believe Sepia world’s law are before this last bit you claimed, since the story is from a bit ago. I chose to, to give credence to my point. I rest my case!
Two points:
1) Insanity defense is often a worse outcome than just pleading guilty. Guilty (ruling out death sentence now because this is the US and Carol seems to be rich and/or well connected) is a discrete sentence that can get shortened by a variety of means. Insanity gets you commended to care until you can assist in your own defense (which can in practice work out to being in care until you die), and then start the trial again however long later. Any competent criminal defense lawyer would avoid an insanity plea at all costs, especially with a defendant who is hostile to the idea. Short of getting Carol’s legal autonomy permanently removed (a process which varies state to state but is long and difficult with someone who doesn’t acquiesce) before the trial wraps, she’ll always be able to dismiss her defense team if they start pulling moves she doesn’t approve of.
2) I’m not a lawyer, but legal insanity is a pretty specific thing and I don’t think Carol is it. Carol is lucid, coherent, oriented to place and time, and able to assist in her own defense. She’s not going walk into court and tell them she killed Kennedy, but she is going to claim some level of responsibility for at least HR’s death (and probably Kaye besides. No idea how much Carol thinks she killed the five, or Ferris, but those’re also possibilities)–and after the ME is done getting dental records from the tube-dwellers they have six-ish dead bodies in the basement to explain. Plus, as Mr. Liloquy says, there are dead cops in the mix. Somebody’s going down for that, and Carol can clearly and without needing to say anything nuts-sounding explain what JJ was doing and how she was involved. She’s a slam dunk on that one. Some of the things Carol says are going to sound nuts, but I promise you that judges and lawyers hear from a lot of nuts who are legally sane.
Why do you think they’re decomposed and not exploded, given their tubes are shattered and they were perfectly whole when Carol and the others walked in there?
Because the living humans are not also exploded.
Xan’s video will confirm a lot of the completely crazy things that she claims, which mean that Carol’s statement can’t just be dismissed.
I do see a problem with getting consistent testimonials because if Carol wants to say she had an “attack of conscience” and invited them in, then what’s the gun doing there, and will Carol, Xan and Shanna tell the same story about how Carol supposedly invited them? I think that might compromise some of her believability.
Regarding the Five: The video shows their bodies intact, in the tubes, before shit gets weird, and it shows Carol saying they were alive, and being genuinely surprised when Xan says he thinks the EEGs were fake. So she can make a plausible case that she didn’t know they were dead, and thought that HR had found no safe way to remove them from the game without killing them.
For all I know, that might even be true. Their bodies might have actually been intact all this time, ready for their former occupants to move back in, but got destroyed when the connection to Arkerra was severed.
Either way, Carol did help to keep the Five’s location a secret, and she knew that JJ had been hired before to “discourage certain avenues of investigation”. So there would be a lot more aiding and abetting on the list.
After all those confessions, I have no idea what would happen because there’s all this magic shit going on, too. I don’t think the court could decide to believe all of that without involving some scientists, and then this case might have really crazy consequences for Sepia World as a whole … and at that point, the question of what would happen to Carol might become very separate from the criminal goings-on at Hurricane.
First: Still love this comic, enjoy rereading this and the commentary.
But yeah, this paged bugged me when it first dropped. There are those who thought Gravedust monologued too much on that one page, I though it was really unnatural for Carol to be ‘at peace’ and so talkative considering what just happen. Shanna and Xan had nothing but questions at this point up to this point and was really hopping they would answer the questions I still had as a reader. I was reading the “Sepia” world as a mystery and I was still asking how and why HR went down this path. What made him think using a game to “save the world?” How did a business student learn “magic” when there appeared to be non in the “Sepia” world? And I never got what the Plato analogy was to this story. At the last panel, it just felt like a red herring to me.
I know know this page was meant to be a end of Carol’s story but I honestly didn’t care about her at this point. Carol was guilty, she deserves to go to jail for 5 kidnappings, covering up one murder and hiring a hit man to kill even more. I still don’t really care if Carol is at peace as she really doesn’t deserve it.
It didn’t help that when this page first dropped, allot of comics I followed at the time had been trying the JJ Abram’s Mystery Box writing technique and I had my fill. I didn’t know at the time we would get another chapter providing proper closure so I honestly was worried that the story would abruptly stop here.
All that aside, it’s what comes after this that really matters and what made me forget about the issues I had the first time reading this one page. Again: still love this comic.
Agree that this would have been a good place to provide some answers.
But I also want to hug Carol. Anyone who does something very wrong and decides to stop and face the consequences, although they’d very likely be able to get away with it instead if they wanted to, deserves a lot of respect, at the least.
I hear you. In our minds, the origins of HR’s magic were no more interesting than saying he won the lottery. He had enough resources and leisure time to chase his research interests down unusual paths. But so do a lot of other people, and there was nothing particularly special about him that led him to discover working magic instead of someone else. To imply otherwise would be to buy into his delusions of grandeur. And it’s those same delusions that led him to try and become a god and assume all the world’s problems would be fixed once he did. Sure, we could’ve done a scene of him discovering it in Chapter 31 anyway, but in our minds, magick seems to play better when it’s a little bit mysterious.