Chapter Text
The conventional narrative, as perpetuated by Dimitri, is that Claire was manipulated by Bill Hawks to go into the time machine, and was an unwilling test subject. This is often taken as the truth of it all, and an extra reason to hate Bill Hawks. Bill Hawks is an easy person to hate, after all, for just making money he got from the deaths of many people in the explosion.
But I think it’s more complicated than “Claire was entirely unwilling and was just too nice to say no to her coworker” or “Claire was being manipulated/lied to by Bill”. So this is an examination of Claire’s dialogue when she talks about the time machine, to attempt to study exactly how much she consented and how much she knew about the time machine.
Let’s start with the cutscene right before the explosion, shall we?
Claire, first of all, was actually aware of the experiment. This is, as opposed to Dimitri, who wasn’t aware that the experiment was happening, saying the following: “By the time I realized Bill planned to go ahead with the experiment, it was too late to stop him.”
(Side note: I think it’s ironic that both Claire and Dimitri ended up “running late”, in a manner of sorts – Claire was running late when she left Layton, and Dimitri was also late to the lab.)
The implication of this is that one and/or both of them decided on purpose to not tell Dimitri that they planned on going ahead with the test. After all, Dimitri had expressed apprehension beforehand about going ahead with the test, saying it was too dangerous.
Claire and Dimitri are implied to be fairly close – they have similar haircuts (which is definitely a purposeful character design choice). Bill has a “distance” of sorts from the two of them; Claire in the future never really talks to him [citation needed]. If Claire had similar apprehensions, she probably wouldn’t have kept the fact that they were going ahead with the experiment a secret from him – she knew it was important to keep it a secret from him, because he would have attempted to dissuade her from going in. The key takeaway from this is that in spite of any implied closeness between them, she didn’t tell him that the test was going forward. She didn’t want to be dissuaded.
Claire says when she persuades Layton to turn back that “[Clive] isn’t the only one to blame”. Layton just nods. She’s referring to herself in this line as someone else to blame for all this, but Layton believes she’s referring to Bill, or even perhaps Dimitri – he later alludes to blaming him for what Clive did by saying that Clive was a “victim of a political agenda for progress, no matter the cost”. Remember that Layton had no idea that Claire was/is Celeste when she said that; he had no context for any deeper meaning.
However, we’re going to focus on how she blames herself.
She is part of the scientists that made the mistake. She is part of the “we”. She blames herself for what went wrong. She was responsible for the construction of the machine, and she was part of what drove its destruction. This is how Claire consistently frames it; all of them bear some level of blame for the destruction of London. I don’t think she would be as willing to blame herself if she weren’t willing to be the test subject.
She doesn’t hesitate to implicate herself for the destruction. She is and always has been a part of this. She was responsible for the construction of the machine – and she was responsible for its usage.
Claire never brings up the part where Bill took corporate funding from the time machine, so we’ll never know her thoughts on that specifically – all we know is that she believes all three of them responsible, and is willing to hold herself accountable by refusing to fight her fate.
So, after examining what Claire has to say about the explosion, what can we conclude?
Claire was most likely willing to test the time machine. She is willing to take part of the blame for the explosion and the devastation caused by it as part of the crew that constructed the time machine. She was almost certainly not coerced. Whether she knew about the corporate funding or not is a toss-up – it’s more likely she was motivated by scientific discovery than by greed – but it doesn’t change the fact that she was not completely coerced into it. There’s room for nuance here – there could have been some manipulation involved with her that’s caused her to believe she was completely willing, but she definitely wasn’t outright coerced, and I think people (cough Dimitri cough) tend to underestimate the amount of agency and control Claire had over the situation.
Is Bill Hawks enough of a bastard to have gone ahead with the experiment, even if Claire hadn’t consented to being used as the subject? Sure. Do I think that was the situation? Absolutely not.