Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Virginia.
The crime genre is about the conflict between secrecy and truth, and it treats truth as a virtue. In crime dramas, we find that suspects, informants, victims, and even the protagonist themselves can keep secrets. The genre celebrates the idea of every tiny piece of evidence being rationally analysed to banish those secrets, illuminate the shadowy corners of the case, and uncover reality for what it is, no matter how grim it may be. This is done both so that justice can be served and so that characters can be revealed for who they are. Through the eyes of crime writers, what matters most is not that the ending is happy but that it makes it so the characters and events can all be seen transparently, without any smoke and mirrors. Virginia’s Anne Tarver is one such protagonist scratching away the mystery to get the truth, and she has both haunting secrets in her past and many rocks to turn over in her future. The investigation and introspection she undertakes is exhaustive, and so you’d think that the game must have exhaustive dialogue to let us experience it with her, but none of the characters speak a single word over the course of Virginia.
Virginia is a silent, story-driven adventure game and that silence forces its creators to squeeze the most out of its non-verbal communication. Playing Virginia feels about 80% similar to watching a film: You may need to click an object or walk through a location to advance a scene, but the events are otherwise pre-scripted. With no spoken words to realise its script, the creators instead turn to film editing techniques, symbolism, and the occasional written word to impart information. This makes it so that players are likely to find the plot incomprehensible the first time through. In a genre that is about showing the audience truth, this approach may seem counter-intuitive, but by obscuring the facts in its story and dropping all of these symbolic and filmic clues, Virginia turns us into investigators. We can’t be passive observers while someone else divines the facts, we have to hold a magnifying glass up to every little possession a character owns, every action they take, and every little tick they exhibit in conversation to draw our own conclusions about what's happening in Virginia. In this article, we’re going to analyse the game scene-by-scene, using a fine-toothed comb to go over the metaphor and background behind every beat. Don’t be alarmed if the plot points don’t make sense straight away. I'm going to recount the literal text and set-up of each one first and then analyse the subtext or payoff afterwards.
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In the opening scene, we see the hand of our protagonist, Anne Tarver, turning a key in the lock on a red box. There is then a quick cut to a first-person shot of her in front of a mirror. She applies red lipstick, walks up through the wing of a stage that's bathed in red light, and accepts a position as an FBI agent from her new boss, Cord McCarran. On the wall to the right of McCarran, we can see a red exit sign. The crowd disappears, and Tarver approaches a reel-to-reel tape player, while the sound of a muffled heartbeat can be heard in the background. She then returns to her apartment where she sees another version of herself sleeping in her bed opposite an open door. From behind the door, we can see a red glow; it then slams shut in front of her. Unsurprisingly, this was a dream sequence.
The colour red is going to be a recurring disturbance in Tarver's life, and it will become clear why later on. All you need to know for now is that red represents the secrets that entice Tarver and her will to uncover them. We can also explain the door in that, in fiction, doors are a symbol of a person's potential to move from one place in their life to another. Closed doors symbolise something else; often that something the characters desperately want is out of their reach. Tarver's inaccessible red door speaks to her fear of being unable to grasp the secrets she longs to and her inability to move onto the next stage in her life. Of course, the red door can only haunt her in her dream sequences, so the game introduces an object with the same meaning that she can carry around when she's awake. Again and again, we can see Tarver grasping or sitting near the handle of a key, the teeth apparently having broken off. This object suggests a maddening promise of Tarver being able to access something in her life that can never be fulfilled, and her repeated return to the key handle shows us that whatever the key might be able to unlock is important to her. In general, we should read it as another indicator of an anxiety that she will not be able to discover the truth.
On Tarver's first day as an FBI Agent, she throws away her red lipstick and McCarran gives her her first case. She is to work alongside Agent Maria Halperin and report any suspicious activity on Halperin’s part. This monitoring, along with the situation of Halperin's office in the basement of the building, shows that the FBI doesn't think highly of Halperin and doesn't trust her. Why this is, we don't know yet. Halperin is also withdrawn from Tarver upon meeting her, barely acknowledging that she's in the same room, but she does introduce Tarver to the investigation they'll be carrying out together: Finding a missing boy called Lucas Fairfax in the town of Kingdom, Virginia. The two stop at a diner where Halperin walks out, rudely leaving Tarver to pay the bill.
The agents visit the Fairfax residence where Tarver finds a secret darkroom behind Lucas’s bedroom. The space is bathed in red light, suggesting that Tarver is inside the red room from her dream and that her dreams may have a prophetic quality. She takes a journal Lucas was keeping into her possession and the two leave. Driving away from the Fairfaxes’, Halperin almost hits a bison crossing the road and later stops at a service station, during which time we spy a car full of young people, possibly teenagers, and discover evidence in Halperin's glovebox of a former identity: "Maria Ortega". We now have starting points for both the Fairfax and Halperin cases which our protagonist can pursue. On the ride away from the petrol station, Tarver's file on Halperin falls out of her handbag, creating some fear that Tarver's target might discover that she is spying on her. She manages to secrete it in her bag once again without Halperin finding it.
At home, Tarver sits with the key handle on the pillow next to her, like it's familiar enough to be a partner. She does this as she looks over Lucas's journal which contains pictures of extraterrestrial activity and a cave, as well as a leaflet for an observatory. Exhausted, Tarver falls asleep and into another dream. This time, she's in the Fairfax house where a waitress from the diner, the local police, and the teens from the gas stop can all be found, as though they're all connected somehow. Our protagonist sees Lucas's father boarding up the boy’s room as though he's trying to hide a secret in there, probably the darkroom, and then she enters a red door at the end of the corridor. The fact that Tarver can pass through a red door this time, instead of having it shut on her, suggests she’s making progress towards uncovering secrets, but still, the fact that we see nothing beyond it tells us that she’s got a fair way to go yet.
In the next scene, Tarver is riding in the car with McCarran, and the car hits Halperin. This tells us McCarran has damaged or could damage Halperin in the future. In the final scene of the dream, the bison Halperin nearly collided with stands on one side of her bedroom, while the red door appears in the other. We’ve already been introduced to the imagery of the door, but at this point, we're forced to consider the bison as also being personally important to Tarver. We can see the bison is literally the roadblock in front of Tarver, a symbol of a stubborn opposition blocking her path to the truth. It carries similar symbolism to the broken key but suggests a more personified entity in her way. This is where the dream ends, although the game cuts with little seam into the next scene.
At the FBI HQ the next day, we see a well-decorated man in military uniform force his way into the elevator Tarver is using. His introduction right after the images of the bison suggest he represents our roadblock in some way. In Halperin's office, Tarver finds a locket containing a photo of a character we haven't met yet. Halperin snatches it away from her and shows her out. This is a sign not just of Halperin's continued coldness towards Tarver, but also of how possessive she is of the locket. It clearly means something to her, probably because of the person inside.
The two travel to the cave that Lucas drew in his journal and find a secret hideout there. From a cage at the back of the cave, they pluck a northern cardinal, a small bird with distinct red plumage that serves as the state bird of Virginia. In art, birds symbolise freedom, and so we can assume that applies to our cardinal. The fact that it’s red also suggests some association between secrets and freedom, likely that secrets will set Tarver free in some way. Tarver holds the bird and then hands it to Halperin, but Halperin cannot take the bird without encountering consequence. An overhead beam collapses onto her. This suggests that Halperin has failed to attain freedom which would make sense in that the FBI is keeping her in the basement office under close surveillance, but it also suggests that she can’t take possession of secrets safely. Bear in mind that while I’ve said upfront that red represents secrets, anyone playing through the game for the first time isn’t going to know that, and so at this point, what the red represents is as much the mystery of Virginia as what happened to Lucas Fairfax.
After the collapse, Tarver visits the bird in the FBI morgue, followed there by the decorated higher-up from earlier. While the bird at first appears dead, it then gets up and flies out the window, signalling that freedom is still possible and that Tarver’s search for secrets remains alive. The senior man walks out of the room looking dissatisfied as though the perseverance of the truth irritates him. Tarver and Halperin return to the cave at night, where the young people from the evening before are now loitering. One of them knocks Tarver down, grabs Halperin's locket, and throws it over a nearby fence. Knowing that Halperin is protective of her locket, this is a moment of loss we share with her. Halperin arrests the boy, and while Tarver moves most of his possessions into evidence, she keeps one item for herself: A small tab with an emblem of a bird on it. She places this into a red envelope, with the combined symbolism again telling us it will provide freedom and that it is connected to the pursuit of secrets. This small act of rebellion will kickstart a journey that sends Tarver on a very different path than the one she started on.
Another night and Tarver has another dream. She holds a police officer’s cap as she hears the sound of a heart monitor. She then approaches a furnace that stands in the middle of the road just like the bison did. Inside is the cardinal, and it appears dead. Tarver goes to grab it, but it disappears in her hand. We don't know what the furnace means, but we know that whatever it represents, that something is a roadblock to Tarver because it appears the same way that the bison, our other roadblock does. The furnace is also linked with the theme of discovery and freedom being elusive to Tarver which we see in the cardinal disappearing. In the next scene, after Tarver has awoken, she watches McCarran look over Halperin's file. There is an insert of the moment she opened Halperin's locket and saw the face inside, suggesting a link between that person in the locket and McCarran's investigation of Halperin.
Tarver tries to look up Halperin in the FBI database but finds no useful information appended to either her current name or her former name of "Ortega". However, Tarver does turn up “Judith Ortega”, a presumable relative and most likely mother of Maria. Files on Judith Ortega (who we’ll refer to as just “Ortega” from hereon in) indicate she was welcomed into the FBI, initially very warmly, but got into hot water after entertaining conspiracy theories and using unethical and unconventional methods in her research. Eventually, co-operating with more senior figures in the FBI, Cord McCarran produced a damning report on Ortega, suspending her and sending her to a tribunal. McCarran accused her of, among other things, inappropriately using controlled substances in her work. The relevant files on Ortega are stored on a tape in the FBI archives, indicating not just their old age but also suggesting an active attempt to push this information underground.
The Ortega files explain why Halperin is kept in the basement of the FBI HQ, with McCarran effectively spying on her work. The FBI and McCarran don't trust her after the renegade streak of her mother. The files also explain why Halperin was immediately cold towards Tarver, despite never having met her before. Halperin is distrustful of other FBI agents after the FBI turned on someone she loved. We can also now recognise that the picture in Halperin's locket is of Ortega, although later events suggest that Tarver hasn’t noticed that by this point. It's why Halperin is so possessive of the locket and why she took Tarver looking at it so badly. She saw an agent of the institution that had already excommunicated her mother prying into her business and staring down at an image of that woman. In retrospect, Halperin showed incredible restraint in calmly arresting the boy who threw her locket over the fence. Lastly, this is why Halperin changed her name, to distance herself from Ortega's stigma.
Tarver subsequently meets up with Halperin at the diner, and this time Halperin leaves money for the bill, indicating at least a small uptick in respect for her. A campaigning local politician also leaves them one of his buttons. Tarver looks over a leaflet for a construction company that she confiscated from the teen earlier and visits the town observatory, presumably because the construction company have one of their signs planted outside. Inside the observatory, we can hear the sound of birds, invoking the symbolism of the cardinal again: the promise of truth. Tarver walks through a gate in the observatory, another possible allusion to passing through the door that has hounded her, and she and Halperin hide on the balcony level. Together they witness Lucas Fairfax's father, a priest, grabbing the arm of one of the young people from earlier and her slapping him. There is the implication here that the priest and the girl are romantically involved, making this an affair.
To get to the bottom of this, Tarver and Halperin head back to the Fairfax household. Halperin picks the lock which hints that she's adopted some of those unconventional methods her mother may have used. This is also relevant to the symbolism that is attached to Tarver. Tarver has a door between her and the secrets she wants to uncover and a broken key that infuriatingly can't open the locks to the truth. But in this caper, Halperin can open those locks for her. Inside the Fairfax home, Tarver enters the door at the end of the corridor, the same door that was backed by red light in her second dream. Predictably, she does stumble across a secret in here: A box containing a roll of film.
After this visit, Halperin takes Tarver to a local bar. She removes her ring and gives it to Tarver, allowing Halperin to approach a man at the bar, and letting Tarver use the prop to pretend she's married when a man starts drunkenly flirting with her. This act of protection is the kindest that Halperin has been to Tarver so far; the two are closer than ever. While drinking, Tarver has a vision of the inside of the box from the Fairfax house, with a dead cardinal in it next to the roll of film. This hints that the celluloid carries some kind of truth that someone tried to kill. The screen fades to red. Halperin dances and drinks in front of Tarver; she is finally relaxed around her. The two even share a cooler of beers at the top of a water tower.
The trust between the agents is further cemented in Halperin letting Tarver stay the night at her home and cooking her breakfast. This is the first night that Tarver doesn't have a troubling dream, suggesting that the bond between the two has calmed her mind. As Tarver heads down in the morning, she passes rooms in Halperin's home which each reveal a little something about her. There's no sign of Ortega or a partner, so we know that Halperin probably lives a lonely existence, going back and forth between an empty house and a basement office. There's a locked room on the top floor (I probably don't need to explain the symbolism by this point), and there's a room with boxes upon boxes of files suggesting a lot of hard investigation work by Halperin and/or Ortega outside of the bureau. There's also a bedroom with a hospital bed and a stair lift suggesting that Halperin cared for Ortega here and for whatever reason Tarver may linger on the bed, running her hand across it. Finally, there's Halperin's bathroom which they make into an ad-hoc darkroom to develop the priest's film.
Tarver directs Halperin's attention to a photograph of a statue, but Halperin chooses a more provocative lead: a picture of Lucas's father liaising with the girl from the observatory. This confirms the suspicion that he is having an affair and that affair could be a factor in Lucas's disappearance. We know Lucas probably developed the same film and saw the same photographs because of the development fluid and hanging pictures in his secret darkroom. This would also explain why the priest was boarding up Lucas's room in Tarver's dream; this was the secret he was trying to hide. Tarver and Halperin take Lucas's father and the girl into custody and question them, but this fails to provide them with a lead, and so they return to Tarver's original photo, the one of the statue. This sets them on a much more productive path.
This confusion with the photos mirrors an earlier moment in the story. Here, they take two images found in the Fairfax home, attempt to pursue the clues from one and discover that the other will actually give them more information to investigate with. The same thing happened when Tarver was studying Lucas's journal, which was also a series of images taken from the Fairfax home. She flips past a picture of the observatory to investigate the cave she sees in the next image, but it was really the observatory that was the stronger lead. In both cases, their clue takes them back to the observatory, this time because the statue in the photograph can be found outside the building. With the photos and the earlier clues all pointing to the observatory, we know it must hide some relevant secrets.
While casing the road leading up to the observatory, Tarver peruses Halperin's file again and has to hurriedly shove it into her bag when Halperin returns with coffee and food. It's easy to miss, but this scene paints Tarver in a nasty light when you think about it. Tarver is spending her time looking over her notes from spying on Halperin for the organisation that ruined her mother while Halperin is performing the generous gesture of getting something to eat and drink for both of them. There's a subtle look that Halperin gives Tarver which may be disapproving suspicion. Staring out at the road, our agents see two inconspicuous trucks, likely from the construction company, headed towards the building. The trucks are followed a while after by the local politician's van. Tarver and Halperin tail him, beckoned on by a red sunset. When they reach the observatory, a man in a suit and sunglasses denies them entry, despite Halperin showing her FBI badge. From this meeting at the observatory, we can speculate some kind of collusion is happening there and one that must be backed by some authority, considering that even an FBI agent couldn't get beyond the gates.
On the way home, Halperin and Tarver stop at the service station again. In the car park, Halperin gives Tarver the gift of a stuffed toy bison and we know she must have gone to some effort to do this as we see can see the bisons come from a claw machine nearby. This may seem like an inappropriate gift given that the bison symbolises something negative for Tarver, but the bison is also what unites Tarver and Halperin. The second in which Halperin almost hit the animal was the first time Tarver saw some emotion from her other than dismissal and Tarver and Halperin are facing and overcoming the roadblocks that the bison represents together. We can also take the plush bison as a sign of the aid that Halperin lends to Tarver. She takes the fierce, imposing barriers in front of Tarver, and makes them non-threatening and manageable. Virginia then pushes us from the greatest moment of unity between Halperin and Tarver yet to the greatest possible division. Tarver’s report on Halperin, which has twice threatened to reveal itself up to this point, falls out of Tarver's bag and Halperin discovers it. Disgusted, she drives off, leaving Tarver alone in the car park.
During the night, Tarver returns to her pattern of disquieting dreams; it's likely that the absence of Halperin has brought them back. She stumbles back into her original appointment ceremony and relives sitting on the other side of the desk from McCarran, receiving the assignment to spy on Halperin. This time McCarran is flanked by other ethically dubious town members who all, at some point, prevent Tarver from investigating the truth. There's Lucas's father, a local police officer, the FBI higher-up, and the local politician. The dream prophecises and comments, probably correctly, that all these people are working together and all opposed to Halperin. At this point, we're almost forced into confronting the demography of the game's cast as the game shows us this wall of white men looming over a lone black woman, asking her to undermine another black woman. Let's explore that.
Tarver, Halperin, and Ortega are three black women who've tried to do their job as part of the FBI, but they're intruded upon and hindered by white men in authority as a rule. Ortega and Halperin are not trusted by the organisation, and the only reason Tarver is as trusted as she is is because she perpetuates their overbearing monitoring of Halperin. From a moral standpoint, Virginia suggests that an organisation making a diversity hire or two isn't even slightly comparable to them creating an equal workplace and that it can actually be a form of exploitation. When the bureau brings Ortega onboard, there is a big public announcement about it, and when they bring Tarver on it’s on a big stage in front of flashing cameras. But as soon as he's behind closed doors, McCarran turns against black women within the organisation or pits them against each other, while the white men, like those gathering at the observatory, are immune to the same investigative scrutiny.
The writers are not only depicting gender and race-based power imbalance but more specifically making a statement about who in society receives undue scrutiny and who is elevated above justice. If white men are the status quo, white men are running the investigatory bodies, and white men are the ones being investigated, they're liable to stand together against outside challenges to their power. This shot of Tarver looking across the desk at these people speaks to a collusion of governmental bodies, the church, politicians, the military, and the police being something fated because they're all societal institutions controlled by white men. As the Virginia state motto says "Sic semper tyrannis", "Thus always to tyrants".
We've already seen faint nods in the story to this idea of black women challenging the institutions of white men. That bar Halperin took Tarver to was named the “Sojourner’s Truth”. Sojourner Truth was a 19th-century black woman who worked to secure black people’s and women’s rights and was no stranger to standing up to white men or the U.S. government. In Halperin's bedroom, we could find posters for various activist and feminist movements which have challenged authority, including male authority. For example, she has posters for The International Wages for Housework Campaign and Women Strike for Peace. Of particular relevance to Virginia is her poster of a black woman with the text "Save Our Sister" across the top. This picture is modelled on a real 1972 poster referring to black feminist activist Angela Davis who was hunted down and imprisoned by the FBI under the charge of conspiracy, then tried by an all-white jury before eventually winning release. All this will only become better reflected in Virginia's plot as we go.
In the final stage of the dream, Tarver is in the car park, being faced down by the bison. The bison taking the position that the authority figures did in the previous shot suggests that they are the roadblock this animal represents; they are what stands in Tarver's way. It also seems that now Halperin has left Tarver, the bison has turned back from a harmless toy she can literally handle into a stubborn, powerful beast. This is emphasised by this part of the dream taking place in the same location that Tarver and Halperin parted ways. On the ground, in front of the bison, is another dead cardinal, suggesting these authority figures have killed the truth. However, when Tarver reaches to grasp the cardinal, she ends up holding Halperin's locket in her hand, suggesting that Ortega, whose portrait is in the locket, holds some dead truth with her. The dream also correctly predicts that Tarver will get the locket and instructs her that it is the next piece of evidence that she must seek.
Awake again, Tarver sits in the diner. The game has taken us to this restaurant enough times by now that we're used to seeing Halperin across the table from us and when we don't it feels uncomfortably solitary. Next to Tarver, in her booth, is the broken key, the Halperin report, and the stuffed bison, collectively sending a strong message. Pursuing the Halperin case has left Tarver without the friend who helped her overcome her adversaries and without any more power to unlock the secrets that trouble her. With nothing left for her in Kingdom, Tarver takes a taxi out of town but then remembers the locket, her one connection to Halperin and to the conspiracy she is trying to investigate. After all, Ortega was also accused of having conspiracist leanings.
Tarver goes back to that fence near the cave and aping the less conventional style of Ortega and the more confident style of Halperin, Tarver climbs a fallen tree over a long drop to get the locket back. A piece of red foliage in the distance guides her on, and she subsequently heads through an old tunnel, guided by a red light. She finds the locket and heads back to the Sojourner's Truth. Again, this is a location where Halperin was critical in the last scene that occurred here, making her absence painfully noticeable. Tarver opens the locket, and the slow zoom on the photo of Ortega inside and Tarver's subsequent actions suggest that, for the first time, she realises it's Ortega's picture in there. The zoom also makes it so that if the audience hasn't picked up on this face before, we are more likely to now.
Showing even greater internalisation of Ortega and Halperin's renegade methods and an overcoming of her issues symbolised by the broken key, Tarver breaks into Halperin's home and then breaches that one locked door we saw on the last visit, using Halperin's pick gun to do so. The locked room turns out to be the former office of Judith Ortega. It is well-organised and full of technical equipment, suggesting that she is professional, neat, and educated in her work, and not a crackpot conspiracy theorist. We may also spy the reel-to-reel tape player in the office, arguably foreshadowed by the reel-to-reel player Tarver found in her first dream. A corkboard on the wall marked with scattered lines connects various papers to a young Cord McCarran, telling us that Ortega believed he is at the centre of something sinister. Tarver takes files from Ortega’s office, returns to the FBI HQ holding Halperin’s case file, and sits in a waiting room outside an office. The next scene is, again, of her heading out of Kingdom in a taxi. In my opinion, it's slightly ambiguous what these scenes are conveying, but it's possible that either Tarver tried to go to the FBI with Ortega's findings, to no success, or that after finding whatever it was that Ortega's reports say, she resigned from the FBI. More likely the latter than the former.
Tarver rides a taxi towards a red sunset, signalling not just her approach towards certain secrets but also the sunsetting of her time with the FBI. Perhaps the earlier sunset outside the observatory prompted us for a similar end to her time with Halperin. In the car, Tarver looks down at Halperin's old locket and places it inside the handbag that holds Halperin's case file. Our protagonist is thinking about Maria in this moment, and this action may represent her reconciling her friendly, more personal relationship to Halperin with the intrusive, formal relationship the FBI created. She meets Halperin on the water tower and makes a show of throwing the case file into the air. Given that the FBI's investigations and formalities have been mostly represented through their documentation, we can see how the discarding of one of their documents represents the discarding of the FBI as an institution in Tarver's life, as well as the more specific abandonment of Halperin’s case. There is no great reconciliation here, but Halperin seems to recognise that after denouncing the bureau, Tarver is ready for the means to discover the ultimate truth that the FBI has been hiding. Halperin gives Tarver the red envelope containing the tab she had confiscated from the teen but didn't enter into evidence. The scene groups two of her biggest acts of rebellion with each other.
The game cuts to a shot of Tarver sleeping in bed, clutching her broken key; she's as obsessed with it as ever. McCarran sits at the end of her bed and throws her FBI badge back at her in what looks to be disappointment. This is probably a dream, and it predicts what happens next. The following morning the police show up at Tarver's door and arrest her. Perhaps for one of her legitimate crimes such as the destruction of FBI evidence or breaking into Halperin's apartment, but maybe because she has just gotten too close to the truth. It's likely the second option, given that they've arrested Halperin as well. As the door to Tarver's cell is slammed shut by the sheriff, we can see McCarran backed by the influential men in the town, just as predicted by Tarver's earlier dream. There is the hint here that Tarver's imprisonment is the result of the collusion of these men and this is the moment where Halperin's Angela Davis poster achieves its full relevance. McCarran gives Tarver the same look of disappointment as in the last scene.
Our protagonist stares across the width of her cell at a sleeping Halperin, emphasising the distance and lack of communication between the two, despite Tarver's continued fixation on her. Tarver also looks down at her broken key, an item that taunts her with her own inability to escape her imprisonment. Once Tarver has served her time, she returns to work at the FBI, handing her report on Halperin into McCarran. This starts the first of the two third act montages. This montage is made up of a few sequences that all follow the same script: Tarver befriends another FBI agent, McCarran tells Tarver to investigate them, that employee gets fired, and then Tarver receives a promotion on the back of it. Her ruthless backstabbing is intercut with shots of her steeling herself in her bathroom mirror, showing she doesn't enjoy the process. It's likely that McCarran is issuing these investigations because these individuals are getting too close to a revelation that the FBI wants kept under wraps, just like Ortega did, and it's also likely that it's their proximity to Tarver that brings them too close to that revelation. As was the case with Tarver, Ortega, and Halperin, McCarran's targets primarily continue to be from racial minorities. A shot of a barely attended presentation at the FBI suggests that McCarran's paranoia has severely thinned the numbers at the office.
At the end of the montage, Tarver adjusts her FBI badge, reasserting herself as part of the organisation, and she then takes McCarran's job, giving another minority woman recruit an FBI badge and a case on a co-worker. Tarver looks over at a red folder on her desk next to her broken key; it is the folder that contains the case of Lucas Fairfax. The key and the colour of the folder reference the enticement of this case and the unsolved secrets in Kingdom. She returns to Maria's old office, now a dark and empty basement, and looks down at her locket. This is not a happy existence for Tarver. She went straight back to the people that threw her in jail, ground her way to the top, used other employees as rungs on the ladder of promotion, and has become the exact kind of person who made her job hell, to begin with. At the end of it, she still has no more insight into the case that intrigued her in the first place, and she's without the one person who stood by her in the organisation.
The game dissolves back to Tarver in the jail cell. The sequence of her ascending through the FBI's hierarchy didn't happen; it was all Tarver imagining what would happen if she returned to the organisation that got her into this mess. The way the game mingles the visuals of the cell with Tarver’s desk suggests that being a career agent is a life path that would only leave Tarver trapped. Realising that more time climbing through the bureau will not bring her a better life, she decides to take the opposite tact, retrieving the red envelope and placing the red tab in it onto her tongue. What follows is a hallucinogenic montage which runs for almost fifteen minutes.
If we're going for a literalist interpretation, the tab is a hallucinogenic drug, likely LSD, harkening back to the real U.S. government’s use of the drug during the secret MKULTRA program. In this way, it could be seen as Tarver turning the government's tool back against them. We can also remember that Ortega used control substances and got close to the FBI's secrets by doing so, so this act can be viewed as Tarver following in her footsteps. However, more important than whether Tarver is literally taking a drug is that the game is using a visual shorthand for Tarver becoming more open-minded so that she may crack the case. Similarly, whether or not the subsequent hallucinations are actually what Tarver sees or whether they are a pastiche of her actual perceptions, they convey the same plot details. Tarver sees the wall of her cell collapse and behind that wall, elevator doors. She is breaking from the confines of her ignorance and closed-mindedness so that she can escape the control of her employers. It makes sense that this happens after she ingests the tab bearing the symbol of the red cardinal, as again, birds are a symbol of freedom. We can also see the repeated appearance of red cardinals up to this point as having predicted this moment.
At the beginning of the drug trip sequence, Tarver returns to the cave in which the beam collapsed onto Halperin. There is a secret to be sniffed out here, as hinted earlier by the appearance of the red cardinal. At the farthest corner of the cave, Tarver comes across a red door which opens onto what looks like a church hallway. Following the corridor down, she stumbles in on some kind of ritual ceremony. The curtains and banners in the ritual chamber are red, and red rose petals are strewn across the floor. The ceremony involves the sacrifice of a bison by an unidentified black woman, with the male authorities of the town watching on unflinching. All of them are wearing masks. As the woman is about to plunge a sharp implement into the bison, Tarver runs up and grabs her arm.
The symbolism of the masks is straightforward: all of these people are hiding something about themselves and their link through the cult is another indicator of their shady collusion. Most interesting, however, is Tarver's treatment of the bison. As the bison is an embodiment of the walls put up in front of Tarver, we’d expect her to have no problem seeing it destroyed, but instead, she stops the killing blow. This scene makes sense only once we consider it a commentary on the way that Tarver has acted throughout the story up to this point. If the bison represents the FBI and the related institutions that used Tarver and blocked her from getting to the truth, then this act of saving the bison is symbolic of the way she worked for and preserved these institutions. We must also talk here about the imagery Virginia pulls from Twin Peaks, which it has repeatedly referenced up to this point. In Lynch’s surrealist crime story, FBI agent Dale Cooper helps uncover the mystery of who killed a missing girl partly through dream visions that involve a room decorated with red curtains. The red banners in Virginia’s ceremony room resemble the curtains of the red room, suggesting that for its FBI agent, this room will also prove instrumental in finding out what happened to the missing child in the story.
The montage then snakes through a series of vignettes of Kingdom's authority figures in states of shame or breakdown. McCarran appears emotionally vulnerable, the politician cries in a photo booth, the priest is indignantly intruded upon while he's with his second lover, and so on. Each of these scenes starts with us viewing it from the perspective of the featured character, then viewing that character from the outside as Tarver. Here, we see that Tarver’s newfound open-mindedness allows her to get inside peoples' heads which is why we can see these new vulnerabilities in them. In exploring these people, Tarver is able to unravel their secrets and the people themselves, as we can observe from their reactions.
Here is where that truth vs. secrets conflict of the crime genre reaches its crescendo, as Virginia makes its characters completely transparent. We come back to the ceremonial area where Tarver sees the bison dead in front of her, killed by her own hand, and she takes off her mask. As the “mask” falls to the ground, we can see that it is, in fact, her own face. This unmasking tells us that Tarver is no longer hiding who she is. She is admitting to herself that she has been an ally of the authorities in the town, that Halperin found out her ulterior motive, and that the FBI now see her as an adversary. By having her kill the bison, the game shows us that becoming transparent as a person destroyed the barriers in her way. Now that Tarver is completely open, both with herself and us, the audience, we can discover her biggest secret, the one that’s behind her motives in Kingdom and Virginia’s most recurring imagery.
The game returns us once more to the moment in which McCarran first handed Tarver her FBI badge, and then, in the blink of an eye, it transports us to the bedside of a sick, elderly man. Tarver is showing her badge to him. Given the age difference and warmth between these characters, this man is almost certainly Tarver's father, and various contextual clues let us know he’s dying. Not only is he physically weak, but we can see from the snowscape through the window that it is winter, an almost exhausted symbol of death in art. There is also a later shot of Tarver clutching her FBI badge in front of this bed, which is, at that point, empty. Tarver’s father hands her an intact version of the key that has stayed by her side through her ordeal. He then thrusts his finger in the direction of a red door, the same one that has plagued Tarver's visions for the past week. She takes the key and enters, finding a red box inside which she unlocks. We've already seen this snippet of the story: The second of the key breaking off in the lock comprised the first scene of the game, flagging it as the inciting incident. Inside the lockbox, Tarver finds a cardboard box which she then burns in a furnace, either out of her fear for what's inside or at her father's request. We don't see what's inside the box, so presumably, she doesn't either. This is also the interpretation that would make the most sense given how the symbolism surrounding the box flows.
The game has provided us with everything we need to place this scene in the timeline of Virginia: Tarver has her badge but is only just getting the broken key. The rest of Virginia takes place in the spring or summer, based on the general foliage of Kingdom, but this scene takes place in winter. The sound of the hospital equipment also appears in Tarver’s first dream sequence. So we know that this tragedy is one Tarver went through after she got her FBI badge but before the first dream sequence and that there must be a gap of at least a season between Tarver joining the FBI and the first day we see her on the job.
Again, this is a scene which increases our respect for Tarver; she wasn’t just doing a tough job, exploited by the system, she was doing all that while still reeling from the death of her father. The sound of the heart monitor in her first dream was speaking to that unease. The death of her father also explains why Tarver, in her dream state, ran her hands over a military cap in Halperin's office. It must have belonged to her father and Tarver was picking up the legacy of her Dad serving the state. It also explains why that cap was in Halperin's office and why she grew so close to Halperin. Not only are Halperin and Tarver both black women trying to make it in an organisation whose power skews towards white men, they're both people who have a parent who served the state which they then lost, and they're picking up where that parent left off. Keep in mind, the hospital bed that we found in Halperin's apartment was very similar to the one we see Tarver's father dying in, and that must have been why she caressed the sheets in the interaction with it. She remembered her father.
The events surrounding the death of Tarver’s father are inseparable from her thirst for uncovering the truth and are the primer on the game’s symbolism that it purposefully kept from us. Whatever was in the cardboard box serves as a concrete and final connection between Tarver and her father, and now that she can never see what it was, Tarver becomes obsessed with it. The key, the red door, and the colour red in general hound her as symbols tied to her father's unknown secret, which she is endlessly troubled over. These symbols also seep into her everyday work, standing for a general anxiety that she cannot attain the knowledge and uncover the secrets she wants to. This sense of unknowable secrets is part of what motivates her through the FBI case. She may also have become as invested in recovering the Fairfax's lost family member as she did because had just lost her own family member. Tarver’s second dream, in particular, spoke to the loss of her father. In it, we see the furnace she burned her father’s box in, and we see that box containing the dead cardinal, a symbol of lost truth. However, this dream also suggests that she has psychologically linked her father and Lucas Fairfax, as we see the furnace surrounded by “Missing Person” flyers for the boy.
The scenes concerning Tarver's father are quickly followed by two scenes which reveal the truth Kingdom is covering up. It is typical in hero’s journey stories that the protagonist has a personal crisis that they must resolve before they can resolve the existential crisis threatening their world. Sure enough, the ordering of the scenes here suggests that Tarver is only able to get to the bottom of the enigmas of Kingdom once she has come to terms with her own anxieties. This is symbolised in the following shot: We cut back to the ritual room where Tarver's face/mask has smashed on the ground, and a dead cardinal lays among the shards. The broken mask shows us that Tarver is finished with the process of revealing who she is and that her fear of the truth being unattainable, represented in the dead cardinal, was bound up in her personal fears. The shattering of the mask may also be symbolic of the emotionally destructive power that her experience with her father created. Tarver looks up to see the roof of the room lifting off and an alien light encroaching.
In the next scene, we see Lucas Fairfax standing in the clearing near the cave as a flying saucer meets him. A person, who appears to be Judith Ortega, descends from the UFO. The Fairfax boy joins her and is voluntarily beamed into the spacecraft. Tarver tries to run into the column of light, but suddenly it is morning, the spaceship is gone, and we can see a figure that looks like Lucas climbing the rock face in the distance. Arguably, there was no alien conspiracy in Kingdom, and this was all an LSD hallucination, but that would leave a lot of loose ends. The aliens would explain where Lucas disappeared to, why the story kept coming back to the observatory, why Halperin and Tarver were stopped from getting into the observatory, why the ritual lodge was laid out like the observatory, why the area we eventually find the flying saucer in was fenced off, why that fenced area had mysterious equipment around it, why we hear birds in the observatory, and why Ortega, who was noted for her conspiratorial leanings, was later fired despite clearly being an organised and dedicated employee. Although, the loudest clue that the aliens were out there came from Lucas Fairfax's journal. I mentioned earlier that there were pictures of extraterrestrial activity in the pad. Specifically, Lucas had sketched a UFO in the clearing where we eventually find one and had drawn a picture of a feather above it that may represent that the aliens are the truth, being that we could recognise the feather as part of the cardinal. There's also the pamphlet for the observatory in there, and Lucas's journal did have a red spine, signalling that it had secrets to reveal.
At the very end of the game, after the montage is done, Tarver sits alone in the diner with her key and a bill in front of her. Halperin makes a surprise entrance, and her facial expression suggests genuine concern over the bill. The two leave the restaurant, reunited, perhaps in their knowledge of the extraterrestrial secret in Kingdom or by Tarver’s war on the people who discredited Halperin’s mother. Again, we see another common pattern in fiction in that now the protagonist has solved their personal crisis they are able to unite with the companion they care most about. When the two exit the diner, Tarver leaves her key behind, finally letting go of the past. Halperin then drives the two of them out of Kingdom in what appears to be bright, summer weather. Lucas Fairfax walks by the side of the road in a red jumper, signalling he has secrets to divulge. For a moment it looks like Halperin is going to stop the car, but the two drive past him, off into the distance, and the game cuts to credits. The bright summer at the end is in direct contrast to the barren winter that Tarver’s father died in; she has made it to a better future. By abandoning her key and by not going after Lucas, Tarver shows us that she is no longer ruled by a pathological need to uncover every secret. She is free.
Virginia is unconventional both in the tasks it has you undertake and the rewards it compensates you with. The challenge of Virginia is not a gameplay challenge, but one of film analysis. Your reward is not just more story, but an understanding of its subtleties and metaphors. This is part of Virginia's altogether broader cherishing of the concept of investigation. Virginia doesn't just think analysing clues and questioning people is good because it solves crimes, it also encourages us to use these techniques to engage with media, question authorities, and reflect on ourselves. It also doesn't believe in investigation for its own sake; it is more complicated than that. Virginia tells us that there is such a thing as an unhealthy obsession with secrets, and paradoxically, it's only once we analyse the game as intensely as possible that we discover that sometimes, just as we must let go of people, we must let go of the pursuit of certain secrets. Thanks for reading.
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