The End of the World introduces the operating conditions of The Department of Truth. Cole Turner begins as an FBI agent investigating a Flat Earth network and ends the opening movement as a recruit who has seen evidence that belief can alter the world it describes. The arc does not replace one certainty with another. It places Cole between a secret government institution, an expanding mythology, and the personal damage caused by learning that familiar history may be maintained by force.
Across its first five issues, the story moves from an apparently ordinary conspiracy investigation to a field encounter with Bigfoot and the Department’s first demonstration of reality management. Cole’s recruitment is therefore both professional and existential. Ruby and Lee offer him access to an explanation, but the explanation is also a demand: he must decide whether the public version of reality is worth defending when the methods used to defend it are violent and deceptive.
Cole investigates Flat Earth believers, is brought into contact with the Department, and participates in a Bigfoot operation.
Department personnel say that collective belief can make a conspiracy physically real and that secrecy prevents catastrophic manifestations.
The arc draws on Flat Earth culture, FBI procedure, cryptid folklore, and the American tradition of secret institutions. The fictional Department is not a real government agency.
Cole’s investigation
Cole’s initial case concerns a network that treats the shape of the Earth as a hidden truth. His investigation is framed through interviews, surveillance, and the unease of an agent who recognizes that the people he is questioning are not simply irrational. Their claims are supported by communities, videos, diagrams, and the social reinforcement of people who have learned to distrust official explanations.
The case becomes personal when Cole’s childhood memory of the Star-Faced Man resurfaces. The figure has no place in the ordinary report, but it gives the Flat Earth investigation a private charge. Cole is not only examining a theory. He is approaching the image that organized his earliest fear.
Recruitment and the Department
Ruby’s intervention changes the investigation’s scale. She does not ask Cole to accept every conspiracy claim. She shows him that the Department has spent decades preventing belief systems from crossing a threshold where they acquire physical consequences. Her language is practical because the institution survives by treating impossible events as operational problems.
Lee Harvey Oswald becomes the arc’s most unsettling guide. He represents the Department’s authority while carrying the historical weight of the real assassination. Cole is asked to work for a man whose public identity is inseparable from a national trauma, and the contradiction becomes part of the recruitment test.
The Bigfoot operation
The field operation establishes that the Department’s theory is not merely philosophical. Agents encounter an embodied Bigfoot manifestation and kill it. The creature is dangerous, but the scene is also a moral crisis: a believer has spent decades searching for the being, and the Department’s decision determines whether his discovery becomes proof, grief, or another suppressed memory.
The operation leaves Cole with an account that cannot be reconciled with the public record. It also shows that the Department’s personnel do not share one moral position. Some agents obey containment doctrine, while others protect witnesses or conceal decisions from superiors.
Consequences
By the end of the arc, Cole understands that the Department is neither a simple guardian nor a conventional conspiracy. Its work prevents some manifestations while producing the secrecy and evidence suppression that allow other beliefs to grow. The opening story therefore gives him no clean allegiance. It gives him a choice between competing risks.
Later arcs repeatedly return to the questions introduced here: whether belief must be suppressed to keep people safe, whether evidence can survive a revised reality, and whether Cole’s own memories are independent observations or parts of a story that has already been managed.
References
- The Department of Truth #1–#5Primary canon; opening arc chronology and field operations.