Apple TV’s drama series Drops of God, adapted from the Japanese manga “Shizuku No Kami,” released its finale today, and it’s one of the best endings you could hope for in a show. At the helm of the show is Camille Leger, a young woman who’s spent most of her life with her mother after she took her away from her father, Alexandre Leger. Camille’s father was an important man, to say the least; Alexandre was a pioneer in the study of wines, and he’d accumulated a massive fortune worth millions. Camille, on the other hand, was a neurotic writer who stayed away from alcohol at all costs and suffered greatly from multiple emotional vulnerabilities. Today, we take a look at why Camille was hardwired this way and if, in the end, she was able to overcome the issues that ailed her.
Psychological trauma in childhood often presents itself through various cognitive symptoms, such as failure to hold a relationship as an adult or an inability to function to the fullest in society. On other occasions, such traumas present through physiological illnesses related to the event that impacted the person in their childhood. Camille Leger, who spent most of her adult life with her mother, suffered from one such psychological trauma that kept her from living her life like most other people in their 20s. The daughter of globally famous wine expert Alexandre Leger, she spent most of her life living with her mother, shunning parties, night outs with friends, or even dating, for that matter. The reason behind such a life stemmed from her self-confidence issues and, on top of that, the physiological illness where Camille began bleeding from the nose at one sip of alcohol.
In France, where wine is as common as beer in Mexico, not being able to drink alcohol led to a lot of hassles for Camille. Obviously, people won’t want their evenings to be ruined every time a friend of theirs takes a sip of wine and needs to be rushed to the ER. Moreover, she couldn’t make her relationships last, and she didn’t know why. It can be assumed that until she understood what was wrong with her in the first place, she’d not know how to fix herself. But as fate would have it, the famous dad whom her mother ripped her away from makes his presence known once more in his daughter’s life on his deathbed. Upon traveling to Tokyo, Camille learns that her greatest weakness will be put to the test because Alexandre has prepared a competition where the entirety of Camille’s knowledge of wine will be examined. In this weird duel, where she’ll compete against Alexandre’s “spiritual son,” Issei Tomine, she needs to clear her rounds of tests related to wine tasting.
To compete for Alexandre’s multi-million-dollar fortune, Camille needs to taste a variety of wines to determine which wine her father has selected for the two competitors in the first round of competition. However, the tiniest attempt to sip wine results in a nosebleed, making it highly problematic for Camille to continue. She’s convinced that Alexandre made her drink from a glass of wine when she was 5 years old, which triggered such an intense reaction that has lasted all her life. However, one day she revisited the memory and realized that it was actually she who’d finished an entire glass by herself, and it wasn’t her father who made her drink. For the majority of her life, Camille’s mother blamed Alexandre for making their daughter sick by making her drink wine. This was the root of all evil, why Camille was made to spend her life as an outcast, and the last straw that ruined her relationship with her father. However, this new revelation was like life breathing new meaning into her stale existence, and now she was suddenly replenished with a vigor she’d never experienced. No matter how many wines she sipped, her nose never bothered her. Realizing that her father didn’t make her drink immediately cleared the cloud she’d formed in her mind, and she was ready for the competition.
However, when it came to writing the name of the wine for the first round, the self-confidence issues that’d bothered Camille for so long returned. After initially writing the correct name, she struck it out for another, and that’s what cost her the round. But her perspective was to change soon when she traveled to Italy with Lorenzo and learned how her father used to handle vineyard owners. Soon, Camille was using the name of her father’s Leger Guide to seek entry into wineries and taste wine, but she was chastised by a hotel owner for her actions. Using an important magazine to intimidate poor winemakers isn’t a sign of strength because true strength doesn’t mean intimidating others into submitting. Camille realized this and flatly declined her father’s friend, Luca’s, offer to be the editor of the Guide. She’d finally learned to state her opinions in a loud and confident voice and to stand behind what she believed was right. However, Luca quickly showed his true colors and threw her out of his house, but he’d come to regret that within a week.
The other issue Camille suffered from was her inability to make relationships last. That was until she felt something she’d never felt before with her childhood friend, Thomas Chassangre. One evening in Tokyo, under the influence of alcohol, Camille kissed Thomas, who was engaged to Marianne, who was particularly nasty to Camille for some reason. Thomas, fortunately, realized he’d be cheating on Marianne if he kissed back, so he stopped Camille and left for France, but the two stayed in touch, although awkwardly. It was on the final night of the competitors’ stay in the Chassangre vineyard for the final round when Thomas knocked on Camille’s door and kissed her. She’d finally found the man with whom she knew it’d last because there was a feeling that she knew Thomas at a level she’d never know others at, and she’d not need to anyway. Thomas had broken off his engagement, and he was here to be with Camille because he’d felt the same way for her as well but couldn’t act on his feelings before ending his relationship.
After discovering that her competitor Issei was her father’s illegitimate son, making him Camille’s half-brother, she found the only missing piece in her life. A sibling whom she loved and who’d love her back, not because they shared the same father but because their lives were spent in similar solitude until they found each other. Camille won the competition but sent half of the 87,000 extremely expensive wine bottles from her father’s collection to Issei while making sure Luca didn’t get a dime. She also handed over the editing rights to Lorenzo and Miyabi for the Leger Guide, making sure Luca would never terrorize any winemaker using the Guide again. In the end, Camille was a different person: confident, determined, and hand-in-hand with the love of her life, and all of it was because she was able to get to the roots of her trauma and uproot it completely. In the process, she found a loving brother, a $7 million mansion, and half of the 87,000 bottles that her father didn’t want split. She went against her father and his selfish friend and did as she pleased with her inheritance because now Camille was no longer the timid girl her father had known.
