VMI 2.02 Driver Ed transcript
Hear this episode at VMIpod.com/2-02
Content note: Veronica Mars contains heavy themes, and this episode includes storylines concerning murder, suicide, mental health, vehicular crash
A LONG TIME AGO ON VERONICA MARS:
Veronica’s busy: serving coffee, investigating whether the driver crashed the bus deliberately, and ruining post-coital moments with Duncan.
So Detective Wallace handles a case all by himself, and guess what, it’s all in the hope of winning over the gorgeous but hostile Jackie - played by Tessa Thompson!
Logan fires guns with Mr Casablancas, and has sex with Mrs Casablancas - not at the same time.
Sheriff Lamb sucks SO much that Keith Mars decides to run for sheriff.
And a dead body washes up on the beach, on his palm is written ‘VERONICA MARS’ - drink!
JOY: Listening to Radiohead until Duncan puts me on a strict Nelly diet, I’m Jenny Owen Youngs.
HZ: Looking just like my picture - that's why they call them pictures - I’m Helen Zaltzman.
You’re listening to Veronica Mars Investigations, Season 2 Episode 2: Driver Ed.
HZ: We've been doing a little spring cleaning around here at Veronica Mars Investigations.
JOY: A little dusting, a little scrubbing, a little emptying out Keith's safe, get the nooks, get the crannies...
HZ: And we've changed the format a little bit.
JOY: Yeah: instead of telling you every single thing that happened in the episode and talking about everything, yeah, we are instead going to zero in on the major points, the things we think are the most important and the most fun to talk about. So we can just get wild, say what needs to be said, and not worry.
HZ: So here goes our top five from this episode, and then at five is Detective Wallace! Cracking a case all by himself! Veronica doesn't have time to help him, and so he takes all of the lessons that he's learned from her in the past year and runs with it to find out who dented the Porsche that doesn't really belong to Jackie, the new character that Wallace is hotting for.
JOY: This rocks. Wallace knows so much; he's learned a ton, and he does an incredible job.
HZ: He's getting it done. I mean, he's highly motivated.
JOY: He's highly motivated, understandably.
HZ: Because Jackie's a very beautiful character, and she's also kind of difficult. So we first meet her - she's actually ordering a macchiato off Veronica, in a bit of a rude way.
JACKIE: Can I get a macchiato?
VERONICA: I'm actually just the hostess, but I -
JACKIE: Look, I don't care if you're the house magician. Can you just make me a macchiato?
VERONICA: You're a macchiato.
HZ: I don't know about you, Jenny, but when people are rude to servers, that's a bit of a deal-breaker to me.
JOY: Yeah, that's got to go. But also Veronica, while she is on her break, she is standing very close to her workstation. Neither one of them really handled the situation the best it could have been handled.
HZ: No, Veronica very quickly discarded the whole 'customer's always right' thing.
JOY: Right, right.
HZ: It's interesting seeing Tessa Thompson in this, given that her career is now stellar.
JOY: Yeah, another person who was in Veronica Mars who is now incredibly successful.
HZ: And I'm happy for her; she's very charismatic, I think, on screen even in this but I feel like she's done a bit of a disservice with the character in this. I think they're not quite sure who Jackie is, because they have just piled all of the styles on her at once. She's wearing elements of five very different outfits at most times.
JOY: She's like a girl group. But like all five of them at a time. Sporty, Ginger, Scary, Baby -
HZ: And Belts. I think they're just trying to show she's rich because she also wears a lot of metallics, so her shoes are made of gold. She's more glammed up than Veronica. But I think it's also them being like, "Hey, teens were all of these things, she's a teen, give her all of these things!"
JOY: Yeah. Well, if she's rich, she'd be able to afford them all. And she'd probably want to wear them all at the same time.
HZ: And we also learned that she has a dad who is away a bunch and they don't seem to know each other that well. It seems like he hasn't been parenting her a great deal for the last few years, and now is his time.
JOY: And this is the guy we met last episode.
HZ: Sports man.
JOY: Sports man. He's a famous Shark. He's Keith Mars's favourite baseball player, Terrence Cook.
HZ: Terrence Cook. I think we spend more time with him later, but not this episode.
JOY: No, he's in and out.
HZ: And then she takes his car without permission. Wallace offers to show Jackie around, I suppose a bit like Veronica the previous year, but Jackie hasn't been taped to the flagpole like Wallace.
JACKIE: Thanks for taking me. I don't know what I would've done, this school is sooo big.
WALLACE: You know, I'm just trying to be a nice guy.
JACKIE: How's that working out for ya?
WALLACE: I'm getting about three hallways' worth of quality time. I'm gonna say it's going pretty good.
JACKIE: Look, I haven't dated a guy in high school since the eighth grade.
WALLACE: I'm an old soul. Seriously, these eyes have seen things. Did I mention I'm a nice guy?
JACKIE: Ah, 'nice', the great panty-dropper.
WALLACE: Okay, I'm not that nice.
JACKIE: Oh yes you are.
WALLACE: How do you know?
JACKIE: Because I haven't tried to make out with you yet.
JOY: Just to see Wallace get to spread his little detective wings and take everything he's learned and do such a great job, I mean, he really nails it. I particularly love how while he's trying to get information about who hit the car, get a description of some kind, he blends right in with those hacky sackers.
WALLACE: What's up, man?
HACKY SACK PLAYER: What's up?
WALLACE: I always see you guys playing hacky sack over here after lunch. Chip?
HACKY SACK PLAYER: Sure, nice.
JOY: Which you may recall, in an earlier episode - what does he say? - the hacky sack is the last great dominion over which the white man rules, or something to that effect. He just blends right in, because they play out there every day, right around when people are driving cars, and observing, and I quote, "A decent assed blonde chick, driving her green car into the Porsche."
HZ: How can you tell what someone's ass is like when they're driving a car?
JOY: Well, she got out and left a note, displaying, I guess, her ass, by default.
HZ: Thank you, Detective Youngs.
JOY: I'm so sorry. But he does this amazing thing where he gets the info from them - it's a green car; he does this cross check with students at the school who have green cars, and he narrows it down; one of them has a mint car, one of them's been getting a ride to and from school from somebody else because she twisted her ankle or something; and it's revealed that none of the students match the description. No blonde girl with a decent ass and a green car can be found. But when he's working at the Sac-n-Pac, oh my gosh: a reporter comes in and he recognises the paper on the reporter's pad as the same shape as the note.
BERNIE: You go to Neptune High?
WALLACE: Yeah.
BERNIE: Must be rough. Anyone close to you involved in that crash?
WALLACE: No.
BERNIE: Good. Thank God. Still, you probably knew some of the kids, right?
WALLACE: You looking for a story?
BERNIE: Well, you got something?
WALLACE: Can I see this for a minute? I've never seen notebooks like this.
BERNIE: Reporters all use them. Easy to hold and write at the same time. So, you said you knew some of the kids.
WALLACE: No I didn't.
HZ: A little plot in this episode is that a lot of journalists are posing as high schoolers, and this guy at the Sac-n-Pac is a journalist pretending to be a customer trying to get information out of Wallace; and Wallace is wise to that pretty quickly, I think.
JOY: Yeah. I mean, why is this guy even trying to pretend like he's not a reporter out of the gate? I would just think it's not the kind of thing that you need to like get all subterfugey about?
HZ: No. I'd imagine actually a lot of people are far more likely to spill stuff when asked by a reporter, I think partly because it seems authoritative, and people tend to yield to authority more than just some random asking them stuff.
JOY: Mm hmm.
HZ: But then all these reporters posing as high school students, did that happen at your high school, Jenny?
JOY: I mean, if it did, they were really blending. So I don't know.
HZ: Having done all this good detectiving, Wallace gets a little kiss for his trouble. And Veronica spots it, and seems immediately pissed off.
JOY: How dare a young man in Neptune have affection for a female who isn't Veronica Mars?
HZ: Veronica hates the sexpeople, unless they're rich.
JOY: True.
HZ: But she also always has a problem when there's romantic interest for Wallace. She's hostile to it. On the Wallace Is Super Popular episode... I suppose she was helpful when Wallace and Georgia were matching in episode four of season one, but that was also quite an un-hot match.
JOY: Yeah, she does seem to get jealous. She likes to feel, you know, like the apple of Wallace's platonic eye, I guess.
HZ: Yeah, they're best friends, right? It's been confirmed that best friends.
JOY: It's been said many times.
HZ: And therefore she must be his only friend. In at four: the old favourite of this show, mental health shaming! They're trying to establish that the driver of the bus that crashed last episode had depression, so that must mean that he's capable of murdering several people.
JOY: Sure. Yeah, that's a pretty A plus B equals... what?
HZ: So Veronica's main case this week is with the bus driver's daughter Jessie, who is played by Ari Graynor. They meet in the toilet office.
VERONICA: I'm sorry, did you want something?
JESSIE: Yeah, so I need proof that my father didn't kill himself. I have a mother and a little brother and we've become accustomed to having a place to live and, like, food. Insurance companies don't pay if they decide it's suicide.
VERONICA: Jessie, I wouldn't even know where to start with that. I mean, how do you prove that someone didn't kill themselves?
JESSIE: If I knew, I wouldn't be waiting for Veronica Mars in a bathroom.
VERONICA: I'm sorry. I can't.
JESSIE: Great. Because "I'm sorry" is so helpful.
HZ: And then someone called Shelby turns up in the toilet office and I had to check first whether she was the Pam One or the Kimmy One.
JOY: And she is neither, she's the Shelby One!
HZ: And she says something objectionable, so Jessie punches her, and Veronica, as we know, cannot resist a punch. So she's probably like, "Do I kiss Jessie? No, she's grieving. Okay, I'll take the father's case."
JOY: Right, right, right.
HZ: Last season, the sort of big mystery was happening somewhat in the past, whereas this one is happening in real time in front of us.
JOY: Yes, far fewer flashbacks.
HZ: Yay! They can clean the lenses.
JOY: There's so much stuff going on with this part of the episode. First of all, there is a bowl of about 8000 granny smith apples on the Mars dining table.
HZ: Is this the shot where they've greeked Veronica's Apple laptop by placing a bowl of apples in front of the apple logo? That definitely happens in one of these.
JOY: Wow! Maybe granny smith apples were having a big year in like 2005.
HZ: Oh maybe, a rich harvest. Maybe they are plastic?
JOY: That seems likely.
HZ: Do the Marses eat fruit? I don't buy it.
JOY: Difficult to confirm.
HZ: Although they have kind of made over Veronica this year as someone much more into healthy eating.
JOY: We'll see if it lasts.
HZ: Fewer -aroni meals.
JOY: I love how when she goes to the bus driver’s neighbours' home -
HZ: The Cotters.
JOY: She goes to the Cotters' house and identifies herself as Dawn Lamb, which is so funny and hilarious. It's like, is Sheriff Don Lamb well known enough around town that people would know what he looks like? Maybe not; but would his name homophonically kind of like ringing a bell where they're like, "Oh, this sounds real, it's the sheriff's office, Don Lamb, I know that name."
HZ: A great win for homophones. Veronica is visiting here because this is the last place where Ed called, and there's this whole plot point where he made a phone call from a payphone in a convenience store, and it was to this place. But the woman who answers the door feigns ignorance about it, which is is a bit suspicious.
JOY: Because her husband is home.
HZ: But while Veronica is doing this, Don Lamb, ie the sheriff -
JOY: D-O-N.
HZ: - D.O.N, has found bus driver Ed's suicide note on his computer.
JESSIE: Sheriff was kind enough to print it off and fax it over. "I'm sorry to leave you this way, but I truly believe in my heart that it's for the best. I can't go on like this. I can't stay just for the kids, even though they mean more to me than anything. This isn't good for them."
JOY: It doesn't read exactly like a suicide note. necessarily.
HZ: It's usefully ambiguous.
JOY: Yeah, usefully vague.
HZ: It's quite rough when we visit his home, because the mom is screaming at Jessie the daughter and her little brother, and then Jessie's quite sweetly trying to keep her little brother calm and also explain about their father dying. That's a rough job,
JOY: Rough job, and the character of Jessie is pretty impressive across the board in this episode.
HZ: Yes, she's great. It's a shame that this is the only time we see her. She's very fleshed out for a single episode character.
JOY: Yeah, not always the case on this show. It's worth noting that Veronica is wearing - buckle your seatbelt, Helen! - Veronica's wearing a pink button-up shirt, and then over it, she's wearing a green sweater that has vertical stripes of sheerness. So she looks like a watermelon on top. Then she's wearing plaid pants, and then what's that around her waist? It's a purplish bluish diagonally striped necktie that she has tied around her waist as a belt.
HZ: 2005, you could wear neckties on every part of the body.
JOY: Any part of the body. EVERY part of the body.
HZ: Do you remember there were skirts that were made just out of neckties?
JOY: Hell yeah I remember that, of course, Helen!
HZ: Then Veronica pays another visit to the Cotter house, and just the woman answers this time. She's wearing a very bright pink floral cardigan and a peach skirt, so that is what she wears for mourning.
JOY: Well, mourning on the low.
HZ: Yeah, I guess. And Veronica has deduced that if Ed had called that number and it was a wrong number, why would he have stayed on the phone for four minutes? So Veronica has deduced that Ed wasn't planning suicide; he was planning to leave his family for this woman.
JOY: And Mrs Cotter breaks pretty much instantly and is just like, "We were so in love, but he was afraid to leave the kids alone with the mom," who we get enough clues in this episode to see that she seems a pretty harsh person to be your parent.
HZ: Yeah... You only see her after her husband has died and also been accused of murdering a bunch of people.
JOY: Fair. Fair point.
HZ: That would make, I think, most people act quite emotionally. But I suppose they've established that this is not an isolated incident of anger. I think Veronica does some good investigation of this case, with good intentions. But she makes Jessie meet the woman that her father was having an affair with. And I know that Veronica is used to weird parent affair situations, but not everyone is.
JOY: True - but maybe she recognised that Jessie is showing great emotional intelligence throughout this episode, so maybe... I think maybe the intention is to A. prove to Jessie for sure there was something here and like your dad didn't want to die, this was definitely not intentional; but also maybe to show her - because it seems like Jessie really loved her dad - and maybe just show her that her dad had something good going on, even though it was a complicated and like in transition or whatever; like something that I would imagine would be helpful in mourning is sharing space with somebody who really cared about the person you lost as much as you did. And it doesn't seem like - you know, she's got a little brother who doesn't totally understand what's going on, a mom who seems difficult, unavailable, harsh. Maybe this, connecting with this person, will help Jessie in her grieving process.
HZ: Maybe. They do live in the same apartment complex, so that's awkward. But the call that Ed had made was telling this woman Carla that he wasn't going to leave his kids. So I suppose Jessie also knows that her father made a sacrifice for her and her brother.
JOY: And this woman's speech about love and regret is so moving to Veronica that she decides she needs to have sex with Duncan immediately, quick, in case she's gonna die soon.
CARLA: Now, I wish I was…less understanding, because I never really got to be with the man that I loved.
VERONICA VOICEOVER: You know the charge that goes up your spine at moment of epiphany? It just hit me. I'm not gonna let the list of things I want to do before I die turn into a list of regrets.
JOY: Oh, you know what's on my bucket list, Helen? Sex with Duncan!
HZ: No, Jenny!
JOY: Bleurgheurgheurghhhh.
HZ: So Veronica seems to have proven that the suicide note is not a suicide note, and therefore the sheriff shouldn't be investigating Ed's thing as a deliberate suicide and murder plot. So the useful outcome of this also is that Woody Goodman, aka Steve Guttenberg, has been trying to get Keith to run for sheriff, and Keith doesn't want to, but then he's at the sheriff's department, and he sees Jessie trying to persuade Sheriff Lamb to stop assuming that her father died by suicide and therefore killed all the people in the bus deliberately.
JESSIE: My father did not kill himself.
LAMB: We have the note. We have the physical evidence. The case is closed.
JESSIE: Open it back up. That wasn't a suicide note. He was leaving my mom for another woman. I have proof. Listen to me. You have to give another press conference, okay? Please, I have a little brother. He's eight. He needs to know that my father didn't kill those kids.
LAMB: Sorry about your loss. The case is closed.
HZ: And because Lamb has been such a shit about it, Keith is like, "Fine, fuck it; I'm going to run for sheriff again."
JOY: Yeah, love to see Sheriff Lamb ignoring new evidence in the interest of just having a closed case. Fuck this guy. But exciting that Keith is gonna run for sheriff.
HZ: So off this single episode plot, we've also got a longer running plot, of Keith getting back in the game. In at third is a subset, I would say, of the bus driver plot, which is Kevin fucking Smith, doing some store clerking.
JOY: He has had some experience! When they were casting this role, I'm sure they were like, "Well, we've got to get the best in the biz at being a shitty clerk."
HZ: He's the clerk at the store where Ed bought some snacks and used the payphone, and he's really odious. He's selling all these souvenirs of the bus crash; he's got this shirt with a school bus with angel wings on it.
JOY: And a halo on the bus. Yeah, disgusting. How fast he got those things made, oh my god!
HZ: Where's he using for printing?
JOY: I really don't know.
HZ: So he was the last person that driver Ed spoke to, before the crash, in person. So Veronica pretends to be murder-obsessed. And she's also wearing makeup, so she's clearly trying to honeytrap this guy.
VERONICA: It must have been so freaky to be the last one to talk to the bus driver.
DUANE: It was weird.
VERONICA: Just thinking about him standing here is like...just so cool. Or maybe you think that's weird, I don't know. I'm kind of into the macabre.
DUANE: Yeah, you're one of those freaky sex and death type kids, aren't you? We've been getting a lot up here lately. Boss tells me to throw them out, but I'm like, "No way, man." Goth money spends just as well as, uh...non-Goth money, so. But if we've been getting a lot of Munsters in here, I'd say that you're the Marilyn, hon, 'cause you're...pretty.
VERONICA: Thanks!
HZ: So easy! These kinds of people are so easy for Veronica.
JOY: Yeah, how convenient that he's so gullible.
VERONICA: Okay, would you think I'm sick if I asked for the last meal the bus driver ate?
DUANE: I would, but you wouldn't be the first, you know. You'd be like the ninety-seventh person that asked for it.
VERONICA: Really?
DUANE: Yeah. Let me tell you something, if I was gonna do a kamikaze, you know, off a bridge with a bus full of kids and stuff, convenience store would not be the site of my last meal. I’d want to...I’d want to eat something on the brink of extinction, you know? Like the last emu, or meerkat.
JOY: Meerkat. He says about meerkats specifically, "I bet that would go down smooth," and I feel like, no. Small, tough, gamey...
HZ: I think you'd probably have to stew it. And even then...
JOY: Best avoided.
HZ: But also, if that was your true ambition, you could probably get that done way before you were likely to die. "Okay, just before I die, I want to eat a meerkat," if that was your bucket list...
JOY: We’ve really got some interesting bucket list contenders in this episode.
HZ: She's also doing some good detectiving. There's a lot of good detectiving this episode. And she also realises that he bought a St Christopher. People were trying to read in to the significance of this. And she's like, "Oh, he just needed a change for the payphone!" Payphone. So it's quite a critical clue. And Veronica being in grifting mode is my second favourite thing in this episode, because she goes to the sheriff's department and because Deputy Sacks is such an innocent, even after all these years of Veronica Mars buzzing around the sheriff's department, getting his colleagues in loads of trouble, he lets her hang around in a room alone there.
JOY: Ostensibly for the purposes of filling out a job application.
HZ: Bless! Like she would ever get a job at the sheriff's station. There's no way they would hire her.
JOY: Well, when he asks if she's serious, she says, "As a code seven on 183 in a res dist." We've got another case of impersonation, kind of, as she makes up Deputy Ann Shaughnessy on the phone in order to get the info from whomever about what phone number was dialled from that payphone.
HZ: And it's great because then Lamb gets back and he's like, "You left Veronica Mars in a room alone?" And then she gets to sass him.
LAMB: What are you up to, Veronica?
VERONICA: The last question, actually, "Why do you want this position?" Honestly - and really tell me the truth - how much of an ass-kiss would I be if I admit it's to be close to you? Seriously, why do birds suddenly appear every time you're near?
HZ: I like that Lamb, who is pretty busy this episode, having to do some serious investigating of this major event on his turf, does still not have the upper hand over Veronica Mars.
JOY: No, never, never. Is it also worth mentioning that the guy in the flowered shirt, who Veronica helped light a candle at the cliffside memorial site, washes up on the beach at the end of the episode with her name written on his hand?
HZ: Curiouser and curiouser.
JOY: What could it mean?
HZ: Her name written very clearly on his hand, despite him having washed up.
JOY: Yeah, and huge letters. Can you picture that dude writing something on his hand in Sharpie?
HZ: I assumed that someone must have written it on his hand after his body washed up on the beach. Because otherwise, there's no way - it would just be like a big grey smear. So that's a curiosity as well. And you have to drink.
JOY: Of course.
HZ: So what's going to be at our number one? Is it going to be Duncan putting Veronica on, and I quote, "A strict Nelly diet" because she's been listening to Radiohead? That can't be left untamed, and the only other musical artist this show has ever heard of is Nelly.
JOY: It really is odd.
HZ: No, that is not our number one.
JOY: Is it gonna be Veronica's tie dye red and pink pyjama pants look like period pants? No!
HZ: It is... the sexpeople versus the nonsexpeople!
JOY: Aaaah, a tale as old as time!
HZ: A real showdown in this episode, because Logan and Kendall are sexing; they are sexpeople with each other. I suppose if we had the hots for Logan, either of us, Jenny, we would be like, "Oh, great!" But as neither of us do, we're like, please sir, put the pond green hoodies back on.
JOY: Yes, please.
HZ: There's some quite disgusting school banter between them:
LOGAN: Afternoon delight, considerably better than fifth period English.
KENDALL: Ah, you need to not remind me you're in high school. There's an ick factor.
LOGAN: Is that so?
KENDALL: Yeah. School in general, not very hot, unless I'm wearing a naughty schoolgirl uniform. Then it's very hot.
LOGAN: Mmm, I'm sure it would be for the three seconds you had it on.
HZ: Bleurghh. And also, that seems like such a hackneyed fantasy, like, "Let's throw that in to show that these are sexpeople." But what I do love is that you have this contrasted with Veronica and Duncan having sex with each other for the first time where it was consensual and they're both sober.
JOY: Right, right. But then Veronica, in spite of being sober, has to ruin it. I mean, if it wasn't already ruined.
DUNCAN: What are you thinking?
VERONICA: You know, I was trying to remember the over-under on the Ohio State-Texas game. [Fake-spits.]
JOY: And then pretends to spit on his chest!
HZ: Also then Duncan re-ruins it because then they hear the sexpeople at in the next room and they don't know at the time that it is Logan or Kendall. And they're like, "Oh, sexpeople," and then he puts on some soft rock and they just lie down.
JOY: It's also worth mentioning: my eye caught, as Veronica is sneaking out later when Duncan is asleep, from having been lulled into dreamland by that soft rock, Veronica sneaking out of of the hotel room and she grabs her boots in one hand and, Helen, her fucking tie belt in the other hand.
HZ: Nooo, leave it behind!
JOY: Sneaking out with her two most important accessories.
HZ: I also noticed there's a Mona Lisa cushion at the end of his bed and a mini Michelangelo's David and mini tower of Pisa.
JOY: Well, that's how you know that this is an expensive hotel, because it's worldly.
HZ: But all through this episode, they have so little chemistry. It just seems like Veronica, if it's not forbidden in some way, because his parents aren't around to cause trouble any more, then her interest is waning. And they don't really have anything in common, do they?
JOY: It doesn't really seem like it, no. He's just so blank.
HZ: But them together postcoitally is so much like a picture in a like ad where it's like "Has the spark gone out of your marriage?" They're teenagers! What happened to the teen hormones?
JOY: Yeah, yeah. And do you think this is brought into focus at all for Veronica when she sneaks out into the hallway and bumps into Logan?
HZ: Well, she realises Logan is one of the noisy sexpeople.
JOY: Right, right. And also, he is her ex at this point, and they have a significant amount of chemistry. So like, is she seeing him and thinking, "Oh, I could have been making a racket, a disturbing racket, that could have been me"? Especially when Logan says, "If the cuddling is the best part, he didn't do it right."
HZ: And it seems like everyone agrees. What is good is that usually this show hates sexpeople. But in this episode, the sexpeople go unpunished, because they get to sexpeople together - and they don't get caught. They have a narrow squeak when they're at the Casablancas house and Mr Casablancas and Cassidy and Dick come home unexpectedly, and they managed to cover it very swiftly.
JOY: Amazing quick thinking.
HZ: Logan rushes up to the brothers' room and starts playing on their console like a grumpy teen.
LOGAN: Dude, why is your step-mom such a bitch? I mean, seriously, a guy asks for one sandwich.
HZ: Kendall pretends to have been painting her nails, wearing her usual scanty housewear.
BEAVER: Why is Logan's truck in the driveway?
KENDALL: Because there's water in the pool? He's upstairs waiting for you. You know, I'd really rather your friends not just show up whenever they want. I'm not running an orphanage here.
HZ: I love her ironic mothering, because in the previous episode as well there was like, "Want a rice krispie treat? Then make it yourself!"
JOY: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!
HZ: But it is a high risk thing.
JOY: Yeah, yeah. Mr. Casablancas shoots a lot of guns.
HZ: Yeah, he has a bonding experience with Logan, unaware that his wife has also been pelvically bonding with Logan.
JOY: ‘Pelvically bonding’...
HZ: And they all go to the shooting range together, all the guys. Have you been to the shooting range with a friend's parent?
JOY: Never a friend's parent, no. Just acquaintances. Never anybody I've been close with.
HZ: Never anyone where you think, "Oh, they might be sometime picturing me out on that target."
JOY: God no, never go to a shooting range with your enemies or potential enemies.
HZ: Or with anyone also sleeping with the person you're sleeping with. But then maybe that's what makes it exciting to them, the risk.
JOY: Also when Mr. Casablancas and Kendall come into the Casablancas residence, and Beaver has fallen asleep watching like a surf rock video with popcorn in his lap, and Mr. Casablancas like scares him.
HZ: That's so horrible! It's horrible getting pranked by your parents, and I should know.
JOY: So the popcorn goes everywhere. And Kendall's like, "You'd better clean that up, because if we get bugs, I'm gonna be pissed." So they go upstairs; Cassidy's cleaning up, and then he finds a condom wrapper, Helen, and do you know what that condom wrapper says? It says 'live large'. Now, having never interfaced with condoms directly myself, I am left to wonder: do all condoms, regardless of actual size, have branding keywords that they use to make whoever's buying them feel a certain way?
HZ: I would imagine that is one way in which they encourage penis-havers to take responsibility.
JOY: Oh, that's an interesting way to think about it. I would just think like oh buy our brand, it will make you feel like your dick is the biggest.
HZ: I don't know when the first ones would have been because you have different brands here in the US, but when I heard that Trojan was a thing, I was like, okay, a lot more men would probably be willing to buy something like that.
JOY: A great big wooden horse.
HZ: That's what they're packing; wooden horses.
JOY: Right right right. What are condom brands in England? Wait, can I guess? Stiff biscuit.
HZ: Oh, that's wonderful. Then you dunk it in tea to make it soft. I suppose the analogy holds.
JOY: Kinda.
HZ: Except for the tea.
JOY: Well. Hmmm. Interesting.
HZ: Royal sleeves.
JOY: Mighty Scone. Ooh: the King's English. That doesn't really work. I just like it. Ooh, ah, the Tower of London. Big Ben! Big Ben, obviously.
HZ: Jenny!
JOY: I know; somebody get me on the marketing board of an English condom company, please.
HZ: That was like watching some close-up magic. Is it worth noting that the Casablancases have been out at some kind of do, some kind of gala, so she snuck off -
JOY: - in the middle of a thing, to go have hotel sex.
HZ: She would have to redo her hair, because she's wearing very prim hair when she gets back but not during the sexpeople scenes. And also wouldn't you smell a little bit - because condoms are quite smelly. I don't know if she had shower time. Definitely didn't have shower time when they returned to the house unexpectedly. And you would think the sexpeople smell might be discernible.
JOY: Yeah, right?
HZ: So although the sexpeople have won this episode, if Cassidy has found a clue to sex-having, it can't all go great forever, I don't think.
JOY: No, no, this is a crack in the wall. Let's see what happens.
HZ: Now, to check over the crimes that have been committed in the course of this episode, let's head over to our experts in legal stuff and Southern Californianess Lo Dodds, for this week's LoDown.
THE LODOWN
JOY: Lo.
LO DODDS: Yeah.
JOY: Is it a crime for a journalist or honestly like anyone else to pretend to be a high school student? Except I guess like, police officers will go undercover and do it, and I guess that's fine.
JOY: Right. Drew Barrymore.
LO DODDS: She's the ultimate journalist that poses as a student. And the answer is: it kind of depends. Because unless there's a law specifically for that state or that area that says you cannot pretend to be a high school student, what you're really looking at is all the crimes that you have to commit in order to become the high school student. There was a guy actually convicted of this recently, who went back to high school, much like David Arquette in Never Been Kissed, to relive his basketball career.
JOY: Oh my god.
HZ: Oh, that's sad.
LO DODDS: In order to do that, obviously you've got to get a fake ID, which is a crime.
JOY: You have to kill an 18-year-old, skin them, don their skin, spend a lot of money at Abercrombie and Fitch and PacSun probably, CK One cologne...
LO DODDS: You have to falsify government records, which is what he got tagged with. But when he went to high school, he actually of course committed the crime of dating a 14-year-old and having indecent exposure with a 14-year-old. And so there were lots of crimes that came after that; but the actual just impersonating a high school student - and he had actually tried to do it at two high schools, because he claimed to be a refugee from Hurricane Harvey, so they were just kind of letting kids in there during that time. So yeah, it depends. If you just, like Veronica did, if you just showed up for the day, pretended to be a student, to have lunch, maybe talk about some goat-stealing, like, what are they going to charge you with? But depending on what you've done to get there, yeah, and what you do once you get there, kind of a problem. They could also get tagged with trespassing. But again, the guy that actually did this just recently didn't get any jail time at all. Even though he was dating the 14-year-old. He just had to register as a sex offender.
JOY: Well, he can join the entire population of Neptune, California, in that respect.
HZ: I assume that it's only really on TV that journalists can get away with posing as high school kids, because on TV, high school kids are played by people in their mid- to late-20s, so a journalist wouldn't look out of place.
HZ: Jenny, do you have a favourite line from this episode?
JOY: In fact I do. And it's delivered by Kevin Smith's clerk Duane, when he says, "Goth money spends just as well as, uh, non-goth money."
HZ: I can't argue with it. It is true.
JOY: It's true. And you?
HZ: Logan and Richard Casablancas, who seems to be called Big Dick -
JOY: Which means by default, Dick Jr could be called Little Dick, unfortunately. I don't know why Beaver is not using that to his advantage.
HZ: I suppose everything is to Beaver's disadvantage in that household of bullies. But when your father is a bully, like Big Dick, then he probably will have Little Dicked Dick himself. He's having this conversation with Logan about work-life balance, and he's basically like, "When I'm at work, my family doesn't exist; when I'm with my family, work doesn't exist." And Logan says, "I think my father has a similar philosophy. Of course, he's a murderer, so..." How did you write this episode overall, Jenny?
JOY: I quite liked it. There was so much happening. I wish that I could unsee Veronica and Duncan together in bed, but aside from that, lots of great things about this episode.
HZ: There's some wonderful detective work.
JOY: Yeah, there's some wonderful detective work.
HZ: There's Ari Graynor being -
JOY: - awesome. Prime grifting from Veronica; Wallace shining - I'm gonna give this like four and a half out of five decent assed blonde chicks.
HZ: And I think there's also some intrigue with the body washed up with 'Veronica Mars' on the hand.
JOY: Yes - an opportunity to drink!
HZ: It really had a lot going on. I think I will give it 4.2 Mona Lisa cushions.
JOY: Nice. Very nice.
HZ: Thanks.
JOY: Well, hey, that's this episode of Veronica Mars investigated.
HZ: Case closed!
JOY: That was Veronica Mars Investigations season two episode two: Driver Ed.
HZ: Watch season two episode three and join us in a week to investigate it.
JOY: Find the show on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @VMIpod.
HZ: The website, where the show lives under the sofa with a mysterious condom wrapper, is VMIpod.com.
JOY: You can also find all of our beautiful merchandise.
HZ: It's very good. The T-shirts are so soft. The pins are so -
JOY: The pins are so pinny.
HZ: Very pointy.
JOY: Yes, you can find those, and you can also donate to support the show if you like what we do here, over there at VMIpod.com.
HZ: I'm Helen Zaltzman, and you can find more of my work at theallusionist.org, my entertainment show about language, and I also make an entertainment show about myriad topics; it's called Answer Me This and that's at answermethispodcast.com. And they're also available at the podcast places; you know how this works.
JOY: You do. And you should listen to those shows if somehow you haven't been listening to them, because they're so beautiful and fun and I love listening to you talk, Helen. I'm Jenny Owen Youngs; I make a lot of music, you can hear some of it at jennyowenyoungs.com or on Spotify, Apple Music, or whatever; you can also, listen to me talk about another petite blonde protagonist over my other podcast Buffering the Vampire Slayer.
HZ: This episode was edited and mixed by me, Helen Zaltzman.
JOY: The music is by Martin Austwick and Jenny Owen Youngs.
HZ: The sheriff of this town is Hrishikesh Hirway.
JOY: The show is distributed by PRX.
HZ: Until next time: who's your daddy?
JOY: Actually, who's your daddy?
HZ: He's someone for whom, when he's with his family, work doesn't exist, and when he's at work, his family doesn't exist.