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Ever since they first met, Mia believed that Phoenix Wright had one (nearly) fatal flaw:
He was a terrible judge of character.
Of course, when they first met she also thought he had many, many other character flaws, but as the years passed and he grew from an aimless boy into a determined man, the flaws seemed to vanish from sight.
Some of them were still lurking under the surface of his bright blue suit – his excitability, for instance, remained boundless – but there was still one, just one, that remained firmly lodged in the path between him and greatness.
As her pupil, he was following her lead in completely and utterly trusting their clients, which meant that he needed to know (or at least whole-heartedly believe) in the innocence of those he was representing.
But if he couldn’t judge the characters he ran into…she shuddered to think of it.
Though the ‘it’ in this case was not, as one might expect, criminals taking advantage of him. No, in their bastardised legal system, the shuddering thought was the opposite: Wright refusing to represent those who were truly innocent.
So, as the young lawyer demanded to take on his first case, Mia decided that she would do just as she did when she defended the man himself in university: trust in him wholeheartedly. (Not that he made it easy, especially when he was so nervous that he croaked out her own name when asked who the victim in the case was.)
Her trust, in the end, was not misplaced. He pulled off an amazing win, all because he trusted the character of his friend, Harry.
Mia was so happy that she invited Phoenix for dinner with her and Maya. (And later for drinks, just the two of them.)
And then she died.
But even from beyond the grave, Phoenix’s judgement was proven right, again and again.
Maya was, of course, totally innocent.
As was Will Powers.
And Miles Edgeworth, the man who drove Phoenix into law in the first place.
So, too, was her old friend Lana Skye (an episode she only learned about long after it happened).
Then Maggey Byrde, Maya (again), Max Galactica, all innocent of murder, all grateful to have stumbled into a man with absolute belief in their innocence, and with the skill to prove it.
By this stage, Mia was becoming convinced that Phoenix’s last, worst flaw was gone too – and then Phoenix got hoodwinked while Maya got kidnapped.
But then, what choice did he have? Even if he knew that Engarde was guilty from the start, what could he do but delay the case until she was safe?
Still, it rankled with her (if for no other reason than she wasn’t even sure that she could have seen through Engarde’s deception), and the rankling made her doubt her pupil’s judgement once more.
But he pushed through, defending a young thief without calling on her at all, and then young Miss Byrde (again).
And then, there was Iris.
It was a…difficult, personal case, an absurdity that no normal family would have happen to them. But the Feys were not a normal family, and poor Phoenix had been dragged into the centre of their disaster.
And in the midst of all that chaos, Mia realised that she had made a big mistake.
Back when she had first met the boy in the pink jumper, she had told him to forget all about “Dollie,” to drop his insistence that the woman on the stand was not the one he knew and loved, to get it out of his head that Dahlia Hawthorne was a completely different person to the woman he (imagined) he loved.
She had thought, then, that he was just a young fool who had been led astray by a skilled actor.
But she was wrong. As Phoenix finished this final trial all by himself, as Diego was released from the burden his life had become, and as Iris confessed the truth in full to the man she loved and who had defended her, Mia realised that Phoenix was absolutely right. It really had been a different person on the stand back when the two of them had met.
His last flaw as a lawyer wasn’t just gone. It had never been there in the first place.
(Satisfied that her pupil had surpassed her in every way, Mia’s spirit left for her final resting place. In the end, she never got to see his real flaw: Phoenix was too good at judging character. He knew instinctively that he could trust Trucy – which meant he never realised he couldn’t trust the piece of paper she had given him.)