VMI 2-04 Green-Eyed Monster transcript
A LONG TIME AGO ON VERONICA MARS:
Veronica’s back working at Mars Investigations again, yay! Her latest client, Julie, is rich pretending to be not rich and hires Veronica to investigate her boyfriend, who she fears is not-rich pretending to be rich. Keep up!
Keith is reluctantly investigating Alicia, who’s lying about a man from her past.
And Weevil’s earrings are more than very shiny: they’re important to the plot, we’re not complaining.
Meg is still in a coma, but nonetheless coming between Veronica and Duncan, who has been visiting her every day.
But before Veronica can get into that, she needs to get into Meg’s secret laptop before her controlling parents get wind of it.
JOY: Late because of a whipped-cream fight at the sorority house, I’m Jenny Owen Youngs.
HZ: Dreaming my whole life of a beautiful woman bringing me a sandwich, I’m Helen Zaltzman.
You’re listening to Veronica Mars Investigations season 2 episode 4: Green-Eyed Monster.
HZ: I think this episode contains the smallest cardigan we have seen so far on this show.
JOY: Dude!
HZ: It is on Jackie, and I'm pretty sure it is just a cardigan that she has ripped off an American Girl doll and then attached extra sleeves.
JOY: Yes. It actually looks like she stole — thieved — a small cardigan from an American Girl doll, squeezed and shouldered her way into it and then self-crocheted around her arms in like this very... It's kind of like a loose weave, and a deeply pointless, and what, so your option, to wear under this, is you can wear either a tank top or a cap-sleeve kind of tee?
HZ: She's gone tank top.
JOY: Probably the responsible choice. Why would you want to make a shirt out of a doily, is a question. Do you guys have doilies in England?
HZ: Do we ever. Well, we did in the past.
JOY: You invented doilies.
HZ: We invented them, and then we murdered them. And Jackie found the last remaining doily and put it on her body. And what I admire is she's wearing this green tank top with pink embroidered flowers, and this pink doll's cardigan has green sleeves, which is presumably where she crocheted herself, the sleeves, to make it a human-sized doll's cardigan.
JOY: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
HZ: So it all looks like it's sympatico; but we know the truth. The midpoints of Jackie's arms are very much on theme with this episode, Green-Eyed Monster. The first thing I wanted to talk about this episode is that all of the songs chosen for this episode I think were just chosen because they have the word ‘jealous’ in the title.
JOY: I was picking up on that in a big way.
HZ: Oh, it's hard not to.
JOY: This show loves to go hard literal on the lyric for their music supervision. They proved it from the very start of the show by going with the Dandy Warhols theme. It feels so hit or miss to me, and I think it is perhaps largely due to the focus on lyrics and anti-focus on sort of like the musical vibe, or emotional quality, of the songs that are used.
HZ: A lot of characters in this episode are suffering from jealousy, and the main one is Julie. She's new to us because she's a single-episode plotline. Her plot reminded me a bit of season one. It's Veronica back at Mars Investigations, taking on a case that Keith doesn't have time for, of someone who seems like a lot. She's an exhausting kind of person who makes her own life worse by hiring private detectives.
JOY: Based on what we see of Julie and Colin across the span of this episode, I'm interested in how their energies combine to a successful relationship. Maybe he's so mellow that it levels her out a little, and she is so energetic that maybe they just kind of even each other out?
HZ: Maybe. Because she seems to be very impulsive and just prone to following her emotional tides, which are vigorous. And maybe Colin holds her back a bit in a useful way? But she's coming to Veronica because she needs her boyfriend Colin investigated, because she's found an engagement ring in his gym bag. What a prick!
JOY: How fucking dare he, Helen, how dare he?
HZ: What I loved about this, though, is that we got to find out the different tiers of the Mars Investigations packages:
VERONICA: Start with the basics. Our standard package: your garden variety background check, criminal record, aliases.
JULIE: I need way more than that.
VERONICA: Well, there's our premium package: Mr Mars will get to know a few friends, chat up an ex or two.
JULIE: Which is exactly what I'm afraid Colin's doing. Look, Colin lives off a trust fund. He has a lot of free time. I'd like to know how he spends it.
VERONICA: Well, there is our silver package.
JULIE: What's the silver package?
VERONICA: Premium package plus surveillance, phone records, email monitoring. It's basically an all-access pass to what he's doing when you're not looking.
JULIE: I'll take it.
JOY: I feel like Veronica was making these up on the spot. Did you get that sense at all?
HZ: Very much so; and good for her, because Julie had said she's very wealthy, so Veronica thought, "Let's extract some wealth." And it's so tantalizing: what's above silver?
JOY: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
HZ: She climbs into Colin's lungs and lives there for a year, studying every breath?
JOY: I love that Julie is going hard about how stressed out she is about where he's spending his time and what he's doing - meanwhile, he currently thinks she is at yoga class while she is actually hiring a private investigator to follow him around. Also, just want to say in the scene, Helen, I don't know if this like rings a huge bell in your mind like it does for me -
HZ: - my belfry -
JOY: Yeah, your belfry - but Veronica is wearing a black leather cuff with an olive green star on it.
HZ: Olive green! She still holds a candle for the green one!
JOY: Wow, OK. I hadn't even gotten to that point in my brain, but amazing.
HZ: LoVe lives!
JOY: Amazing call. But these wristbands were so prevalent at this time, at least in my circles; I have such a clear sort of Hot Topic-y kind of memory of this exact leather cuff. I had it probably in three colourways.
HZ: What happened to all of them?
JOY: They're all in a leather cuff landfill by now, Helen. Or maybe they've all moved to an island together, and they've retired. They're all living on a beautiful farm in Montana.
HZ: That sounds nice. You know, in three years time, they'll make a comeback.
JOY: Oh, yeah.
HZ: The early 2000s is already getting revived. I'm so sorry.
JOY: Ugh.
HZ: But you're ready. You're ready, Jenny.
JOY: No, I don't wanna be ready.
HZ: You've got the wrist real estate already marked out. Keith comes in as Julie is leaving and seems really pissed off, A) that Veronica is dealing with clients, not organising the office, and B) points out that Veronica works at Java the Hut now, and he doesn't even laugh when he's saying the name "Java the Hut".
JOY: That's how you know Keith has too much on his plate.
HZ: Veronica points out that the tips from showing people to tables in a coffee shop won't pay for Stanford. And Keith says, "The Kane scholarship will." And I was like, is the Kane scholarship still happening? Because I don't remember her winning it.
JOY: Didn't that already pretty much get decided?
HZ: It felt like they left it as a single episode scholarship back in season one.
JOY: Yeah, yeah, yeah, and so much has happened since then.
HZ: So then Veronica fakes a phone call to Julie saying Keith can't take the case, but Vinnie Van Lowe is a respected detective.
JOY: Hah!
HZ: Nice bit of trolling Keith, whilst the shot reveals that there's a dial tone, it's a fake phone call.
JOY: Oh my God.
HZ: Which you would think Keith would be able to smell, because he can smell bullshit coming from Veronica.
JOY: Yeah, but she's learned from the best.
HZ: That's true.
JOY: We assume.
HZ: So then she meets Julie at the Neptune Onlyplace, AKA Java the Hut, and isn't it weird for Veronica to do detectiving at her other job? Like, wouldn't the staff be like, "Go and put an apron on"?
JOY: The high school bathroom is not available to adult women who are not students.
HZ: Julie's problem with her boyfriend is this:
JULIE: My family is wealthy, like, very. I tend to fall for guys who nail the girl who's teaching my spin class, while letting me pay his rent. Money isn't supposed to matter, so I'm letting Cllin think I'm regular old middle class.
VERONICA: I see. Well, is there something that's prompting your concern right now?
JULIE: Phone calls, at late hours. Lame excuses for getting out of the house. Lately, it's tennis. There is a framed photo of a woman on his bar.
VERONICA: OK…
HZ: What could be more incriminating?? You would think if you're trying to hide something from your fiancée, or potential fiancée, you probably wouldn't frame that thing and put it in a visible spot.
JOY: Also, here's an idea: why not just say, "Hey, guy I'm in love with, who's that in that photo? We're two adults who have conversations with each other and can ask questions and get answers."
HZ: You know what isn't important to successful relationships, though, Jenny? Trust. Communication.
JOY: Yeah. Would you rather have a relationship with great communication, or a relationship where you hire someone to take a very long lens to the track and photograph your boyfriend?
HZ: As we learned last episode, when there are people exercising, a long lens becomes invisible. So Veronica just gets to sit on the bleachers watching her mark sprint around the track, taking very noisy pictures.
JOY: Clack, clack.
HZ: Sometime we should get a photographer onto this show to tell us what all these different lenses do, how far they go, which would be the most effective for taking pictures of someone running around a track. And she calls Julie and says, "Spying on Colin's boring." Julie, however, has been doing some spying on Colin: she's found that in the last six days he has received 20 calls from the same number, which she has already sent to Veronica.
JOY: So, Veronica's going to check out this house, the house that the calls are coming from inside of. She rolls up, I think she takes some more long lens photos from the car; she gets closer and -
HZ: It's not tennis, oh no.
JOY: Oh wait - he's just having a Hebrew lesson.
HZ: Right.
JOY: He's just preparing to convert to Judaism.
HZ: For some reason, though, Veronica has already called Julie going, "Sorry, it's bad news, he's not at tennis." And Julie, because she's quite histrionic, and I think also must have some deep emotional scarring, she immediately gets in her car and screeches in front of the house, still wearing her hair curlers and moustache bleach, and Veronica has to run and tackle her to the ground.
JOY: This tackle is one of the more impressive feats of physicality we've seen on the show up to this point. A flying tackle.
HZ: Especially as Veronica is a tiny chihuahua-sized person.
JOY: Yes.
HZ: And it'd be like a butterfly landing on Julie's arm. But perhaps this will teach Veronica not to report to clients dramatically and prematurely, and use terms such as "bad news" and "more bad news".
JOY: Right?
HZ: Keith knew she's not ready for the jobs.
JOY: Then Julie, with Veronica's help, slowly puts together what this would mean. She's like, "He's not Jewish, I'm Jewish." Veronica's like, "Get there, get there, get there. Come on, get there!" It's just not enough. It doesn't make her feel any more secure.
HZ: It's so weird, isn't it? Because presumably he's only becoming a Jew so that they could get married Jewishly.
JOY: Right.
HZ: So it seems like a romantic gesture.
JOY: But she's already whipped into a froth and can't be defrothed so easily.
HZ: No, it's hard to defroth a Julie on a misbegotten mission. But the good thing about it is we get to see costume Veronica again. She's got a short skirt on. She's got pigtails, fishnets, boots, and a tiny cardigan - but not nearly as tiny as Jackie's cardigan, so she's still going to be furious about that. And she has enlisted Wallace to help, even though Wallace was getting busy with Jackie.
JOY: In the middle of making out with Jackie, god.
HZ: Wallace is like a mile away from her body, and leaning in as if he's trying to clean a very difficult to reach window with his mouth.
JOY: Helen! In the United States, we like to leave room for the Holy Spirit. You want at least 18 inches of clearance between your body and theirs, meeting only at the lips, up top, like the arc of a bridge or something. Your mouths are the keystones.
WALLACE: Veronica, are you in immediate life-threatening danger?
VERONICA: At this precise moment, no.
WALLACE: Then I'm hanging up.
VERONICA: Wait!
HZ: Stop answering the phone, Neptune people, when you're busy sexually!
JOY: Yeah. Why are you all answering the phone in the middle of sexual activity? Why?
WALLACE: Hey, I'd love to help, but I've got my own scenario going on right here.
VERONICA: Wallace, if you're getting all that Jackie love with two dollars in your pocket, imagine what you'd get with, say, $200?
HZ: Cue him choosing Veronica over Jackie, I think it's legit that Jackie's pissed off.
JOY: It's legit that Jackie's pissed off, but you can also see so clearly in Wallace's sweet eyes that he wants to spend that $200 on Jackie, right?
HZ: I know that she is being portrayed to him as an expensive girlfriend.
JOY: Think of all the sandwiches he could bring to her, reversing traditional Neptunian gender roles.
HZ: It's what the Fennels do, though; they take sandwiches to their loved ones.
JOY: It's like forty sandwiches.
HZ: What do you think Jackie's sandwich of choice would be, though?
JOY: Hard, actually. Hmm. Is Jackie the kind of girl... You know how there are only two kinds of girls in film and television? Girls that like only eat salads, and girls that are like, "Out of my way, I'm not like other girls, I eat, like, meatball subs." I can't tell which type of film and TV girl I think Jackie is.
HZ: I think Jackie would be sushi all the way.
JOY: Ooh, that makes so much, yeah, that rings so true.
HZ: Wallace I guess is pretty used to Veronica's honeytrap attire.
VERONICA: Sorry I'm late, whipped cream fight at the sorority house! Did you get me a mic?
WALLACE: You got some place to hide it? Do you own those clothes, or did you make a stop at Dirty Coeds-R-Us?
VERONICA: Ha ha.
HZ: He's also pretty used now to being her assistant, because he gives her a tiny microphone to put on her clothes.
JOY: Oh my god.
HZ: He wants to get paid tonight so he can spend the money on Jackie, and Veronica's like, "Well, the other day Jackie was at the Neptune Onlyplace with some other guy," and Wallace is like, "Well, so what?"
JOY: Yes. Just stirring. Veronica is unswayed by Wallace's so-whatting.
HZ: Yeah.
JOY: She seems pretty bent on the idea that Jackie is not to be trusted.
HZ: Although you would think Veronica is also not to be trusted, given that she's about to go and deceive a man. Or "Lolita his ass," as Wallace puts it. And the amazing plot is that Veronica is letting the air out of her own tyre, and then she goes and rings a doorbell asking for help. And here we meet Colin, Julie's boyfriend.
COLIN: Can I help you with something?
VERONICA: Please, that would be so great. Wait - do you have an accent?
COLIN: Yeah, I'm Scottish.
VERONICA: Really? Like, from Scotland? That's so awesome. Foreign men are so much sexier than regular men.
HZ: I didn't notice his accent nearly as quickly as Veronica. Granted, I'm not a detective, but the actor Michael E. Rogers, he is indeed from Scotland.
JOY: He's hot. Do you think that you were not as quick to perceive his accent because a Scottish accent is a lot closer to an English accent than it is to an American accent?
HZ: I think because he barely had a chance to speak before she stopped going on about his accent. I didn't really get a chance to cotton on.
JOY: It's almost as if, Helen, you aren't watching hunks like a hawk at all times to see if they happen to have a Scottish accent.
HZ: Where am I going wrong?
JOY: There, I think that's the spot. Change your ways. Renounce Satan and listen for Scottish accents on hunks, please.
HZ: I think it's different in the British Isles, Jenny. It's not that they're not nice, but we don't objectify them in the same way.
JOY: But what if you were time-traveling?
HZ: What if Scotland only appeared every hundred years?
JOY: In Brigadoon or Outlander... Why are people always time travelling and appearing near, what, not monoliths, but what's the multiple version of a monolith?
HZ: A multilith?
JOY: Why is magical shit always happening in Scotland?
HZ: Couple of reasons: one, it's very misty there. Makes for a magic atmosphere. Two: they've got a fuckton of castles, so it's easy to film historic things. Although so has Wales, and Wales is also misty, so I don't know why Scotland got chosen over Wales. Anyway, kind Colin goes out to help Veronica with her car, and she crouches very close to him and does some innuendo. She says she can't get the nuts off - fnarrr - because they're too tight - fnarrrr - and she can't hold the wrench because she just put lotion all over her hands - fnarrrrrr.
JOY: Ugh.
HZ: Has she got all of her honeytrap ideas from the setup of porn films? This is the only explanation that makes sense.
JOY: Yeah. A hundred percent.
HZ: Wallace is filming this across the street.
JOY: This is the most unbelievable part of the entire — somehow, this is like more offensive to me than the long lens at the track, and in the gym. Wallace with the handheld, just like looking like, "Oh, yeah, we're going to get this guy."
HZ: Like a young African-American man is allowed to just stand around without getting into trouble for it.
JOY: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
HZ: Veronica has got a very cute smudge of engine oil on her head, and Colin, because all Brits carry a crisp monogrammed handkerchief, lends it to her to wipe off that grease. And that, of course, necessitates her sticking out her arse and bending to do that in the wing mirror.
JOY: Oh, God. Aren't there other ways?
HZ: Maybe it's just she's used to the men she knows being such basics that this stuff works. Colin’s not swayed by it, though, and he offers to call Veronica a tow truck, and she asks if she can use his computer to turn in a midterm paper that's due in in a few minutes, and she skips over to his house seemingly entirely unworried about going into a stranger's home when she's in professional seduction mode. And the mic that she's got on doesn't work when she's in the house, so Wallace can't hear what's going on and monitor the situation. Don't you think that's a bit weird, that she's just like, "This'll be fine."
JOY: I think 18-year-olds feel a lot more invincible than we, as 30-somethings, feel.
HZ: I don't think I was ever the kind of person that would have been able to successfully honeytrap anyone.
JOY: No, but I definitely like went into houses and entered situations that I would never do now.
HZ: They go into the house and go up the stairs, which are lined with angry red paintings with words like SEX, SIN and ART stencilled on them. Was that just the production team being like, "Let's get some shit art that a rich celebrity would have bought"? And then she just comes on so strong at Colin. I mean, strong for a Brit, because I don't think we recognise such a direct approach. But she's like, "Oh, my roommate Paige would love this place," I think implying, “I could get Paige over for a threesome.” And she poses to show off her body; she kind of chases him along the sofa. She invites him to a party and he's like, "I'm alright for parties, thanks." And she's like, "Oooh, you're like a caged animal." And he says, "Well, I'd have to ask my girlfriend about that."
JOY: Yes, what a good boyfriend. He's doing so great. Report this, Veronica.
VERONICA: Can I ask you something?
COLIN: Sure.
VERONICA: What about me? I mean, if the range were pretty to drop dead gorgeous, where would I fall?
COLIN: You'd fall under ‘knows she's gorgeous, but likes to hear it anyway.’ Don't forget about that mid-term.
HZ: Do you think that a man not falling for the Veronica Mars seduction technique must mean that he's faithful, rather than he's just not into what Veronica is doing?
JOY: It could be either. I am definitely put off by what Veronica is doing, but I guess statistically this might be considered a proven method in terms of, like, what she's trying to accomplish, I guess?
HZ: Yeah. Colin's not into it, and he says, "Don't forget your midterm." What a responsible chap. She goes and does something with his computer and a disk, and grabbing 36MB of files took a lot longer in those days.
JOY: Oh, yeah.
HZ: And then she learns that this is not Colin's House. Oh no.
JOY: Well, this is Nicolas Cage's house, of course, Helen. Couldn't you tell from the art, and the many posters of Nicolas Cage?
HZ: He's housesitting for his pal Nicolas Cage. And I thought that Nicolas Cage had much more Gothic taste in homes than this, because at the time he owned a castle, I think, and a haunted house.
JOY: Right, he owned the most haunted house in New Orleans.
HZ: How do you measure that?
JOY: You know, that's a really good question. It's just colloquially known as a lot of people died in the attic, I think, during a fire, way back when. I guess probably a lot of buildings in New Orleans have had a lot of people die in them.
HZ: Yeah.
JOY: Do let us know on Twitter if you have any hot New Orleans most-haunted house hierarchy thoughts.
HZ: I want absolute scientific measurement of these claims. What is it that prompts Wallace at this point to ring the doorbell? Is it that usually Veronica's managed to seduce information out of someone within two minutes and she's been gone for five?
JOY: Yeah. I think he just wants to get a visual and make sure, just check what's happening right now. And he's trying to be cool, being like, "Uh, I'm, uh, selling... I'm selling candy, and, and pens..." Oh my gosh, Wallace says ‘pens’ like ‘pins’.
HZ: Maybe he is selling pins. Who doesn't need pins occasionally? You've never got one when you need one. And he's like, "It's for the starving children of the world." Maybe Colin is more innocent than Wallace, because he's like, "OK, I'll take two boxes of candy."
JOY: But alas, Wallace only has one open box of candy.
HZ: Of Ay Chihuahuas. Is that a real kind of candy?
JOY: I've never heard of it.
HZ: And then Veronica salvages the situation by barrelling through both of them, grabbing Wallace, and hustling away in a very suspicious fashion. So if Colin didn't sense trouble before that, surely he would at that point. He didn't even get his candy or his pins!
JOY: Yeah. Colin is just like, "Weird, what a weird day I'm having," but in a Scottish accent. And then goes back inside.
HZ: Well, maybe he's used to strange women turning up at Nicolas Cage's house.
JOY: Yeah. Actually now thinking about that in retrospect, like the whole situation, I would anticipate that actually probably a lot of women just show up at that house.
HZ: Spray painting words on the art. For some reason, though, when Julie comes in to Mars Investigations for the meeting, she acts like all of this is terrible news, that Colin was not interested in another woman, and is housesitting for Nicolas Cage. I mean, why wouldn't you mention to someone you were dating, "Oh, I don't just have a lot of Nicolas Cage posters"? It's less weird to be housesitting for Nicolas Cage than to have a lot of Nicolas Cage posters, right?
JOY: Right. True.
HZ: And the photo Julie was paranoid about is of Nicolas Cage's then wife Lisa Marie Presley. I would've thought Julie would have been capable of recognising Lisa Marie Presley.
JOY: Right? It does seem weird, especially then.
HZ: Yeah. Julie seems like someone who would have read a magazine at some point in the previous decade. But the dealbreaker is that Colin had searched for Julie online. Boooo!
JOY: Yeah. She flips out about this. Julie, do we even have to tell you why this is bonkers that you're flipping out right now?
HZ: She seems like a person who has some issues to go through. And so when Keith turns up he's like, "I need to speak to Veronica alone." And Julie says, "Well, I'm going to go and stand in traffic, or jump off a pier."
JOY: Why, madam? What is bad?
HZ: And then Veronica calls Julie, who's crying in her car, and she says:
JULIE: You think you're dating Prince Charming, but you're really dating Prince Charming's Kato.
HZ: Is that a Kato Kaelin reference?
JOY: That is a Kato Kaelin reference. Can you believe it?
HZ: I could not!
JOY: Can you believe it, Helen?
HZ: It didn't seem like the ideal thing to refer to, or all that necessary.
JOY: Yeah, that felt like from very, very, very far out of left field.
HZ: Also, wouldn't that imply that the analogue for Prince Charming is O.J. Simpson?
JOY: Yes. And also that Prince Charming is going to murder you. Or not. Allegedly, allegedly.
HZ: So then she says she's broken up with Colin, which is another very impulsive move. She doesn't seem ready to have a stable, sensible relationship.
JULIE: I just called him. I ended it. It's over. As soon as he checks his messages.
HZ: Also, Julie found the ring two weeks ago, and Colin was only doing this search five days ago. So if Veronica's right, he's probably just looking up your dad to ask him permission to marry you. And you also lied to Colin about your financial status. What the fuck?
JOY: Yeah. How are these people even dating? As we have already kind of wondered. It doesn't make a lot of sense. Colin, why don't you call me? Why don't we go on a tour of your whisky facility, and spend some quality time together? Because Julie is not ready.
HZ: No.
JOY: And he's just so mellow.
HZ: From the whisky.
JOY: From, oh yeah, yeah, he's just full of whisky. Yeah. So he's a Scotch whisky heir.
HZ: It's probably too late, because she finds this out after Julie's dumped him. Then when Veronica's home and laundering Colin's handkerchief, something jogs a memory. And she's like, "When your mother's an alcoholic, you recognise a lot of whiskys." She pulls out this bottle of Loch Nevin whisky - and at the same time Julie opens a package from Veronica with Julie's name spelt incorrectly, probably because Veronica keeps getting woken up at 2am this episode, so her brain's broken. And this box contains the hanky, the whisky, some sort of brochure of Scotland. It's maybe a list of honest, rich Scottish bachelors. And a note, in all caps, from Veronica:
VERONICA VOICEOVER: “Julie, I wanted you to have these. Everything Patrick Colin Nevin told you is true. He does have a trust fund, perhaps bigger than either of us imagined. The enclosed article mentions that he hates to flaunt his wealth or his celebrity friendships. You both wanted to be sure you were loved for who you really were. And it seems that one of you was.”
HZ: And I don't think Julie's gonna get it, even though the note's in all caps, I don't think she's going to put these clues together and realise, "Oh, it's OK, because Colin's actually a rich person too."
JOY: What is the messaging of this plot?
HZ: Well, it seems to be a money message, because like the great revelation to Veronica is, "Oh, money matters." You're like, "Well, as someone who dates sons of the ultra-rich, surely you would have thought of that at some point in the last few years?"
JOY: Yeah.
HZ: Do you think that you would be on terms with someone where engagement was a possibility, but also you were up for hiring a private detective to investigate them, and didn't really know that they were living in someone else's house?
JOY: This is not a woman, this is just a woman-shaped bundle of red flags that are all crumpled up and bound together. This is not the foundation upon which one builds a lasting relationship, at all. I'm so scared for Colin. I hope he's gonna be OK.
HZ: Well, he's probably going to go off and housesit for Vin Diesel and she'll never find him.
JOY: Hot. Well, you know, maybe this is the hammer that will break the glass of Julie's profound insecurity. Maybe she will finally feel loved and worthy through Colin's great efforts, and maybe it will allow her to love herself and ultimately allow herself then to be loved.
HZ: We've got another relationship being riven by secrets and lack of trust this episode, and I'm much more upset by this one.
JOY: Yeah, this is very upsetting.
HZ: Don't do anything to my Keithlicia! There's this beautiful scene where Alicia turns up to the Mars office. She's got a sandwich for Keith.
KEITH: Tell me that's a ham and cheese sandwich.
ALICIA: And I almost went for the chicken salad.
KEITH: Oh, you just fulfilled one of the top ten male fantasies. Oh, yeah, a guy dreams his whole life of a beautiful woman bringing him a sandwich.
HZ: And then she says, "Oh, by the way - have you got a spare gun that I could borrow?"
JOY: Couples goals. This is so beautiful. “Tell me that's a ham and cheese sandwich.” “Do you have a spare gun that I could borrow?” Amazing. I love it.
HZ: This is what happens when you go from short- to medium/long-term relationships. The conversations shift a bit.
JOY: Alicia tells Keith, because he's like, "Does this have anything to do with that guy who was trying to talk to you in Chicago?" And she's like, "Yeah, that guy, we dated 20 years ago."
HZ: "So I must shoot him."
JOY: So he has to be pierced with a bullet. Keith, very responsibly, says he will not loan a gun to someone who doesn't really know how to use it very confidently.
HZ: And someone who lives with a 7-year-old child.
JOY: But he will come over and be her guard dog.
HZ: Yes.
JOY: Hell fucking yes. Hell yeah, sleepover with Keithlicia. Nice.
HZ: Although the kids are supposed not to know that Keith is sleeping over, because in the morning, while they're having breakfast, he's like, "Hey guys, just came over to fill you with some donuts."
JOY: I love this commitment to the lie. It's very Keith, very pure. It's great.
HZ: When your mother was courting her now-husband, did he do donut pretences?
JOY: What a great question. Who can remember? So long ago... I don't know. I do know that they saw each other from across the physical therapy swimming pool and they were both like, “Nice.”
HZ: Wow. That's amazing.
JOY: That's their meet-cute.
HZ: That is very cute. Were they both having physical therapy, or delivering physical therapy, or cleaning the pool?
JOY: No, they were both doing physical therapy, like receiving physical therapy, I guess.
HZ: And they're still going strong.
JOY: Still going strong.
HZ: Physically and romantically.
JOY: Exactly.
HZ: I like that neither Veronica nor Wallace are fooled.
VERONICA: My dad spent the night at your place?
WALLACE: Yep.
VERONICA: He do the AM-donut-fakeout run?
HZ: How would Veronica know? Because before Alicia, Keith dated Miss James, who appeared not to have kids, so he wouldn't have had to do any kind of fibbing. And Veronica squished that relationship pretty early on. And then before that was Lianne, so has Keith been having a lot of flings that we have not seen that Veronica didn't try to destroy? I call bullshit on Veronica knowing about Keith donut technique, as if it was his regular thing.
JOY: I bet he's he's been doing it just with Alicia, like a bunch.
HZ: That's probably true.
JOY: They're both hip to it. So it seems like maybe it's something that Keith's been doing just for their benefit. And they're like, "Oh my God, this again, like how many times can you bring donuts over because you were in the neighbourhood at 6:45am?"
HZ: And do you think the Marses share a collection of long lenses, or do they have their own separate ones? Because we now see Keith outside Alicia's house taking photos with his longish but very loud lens, as this guy is snooping about and trying a window.
KEITH: Smile! Oh, yeah, work it, work it! Work it!
CARL MORGAN/NATHAN WOODS: You're gonna be pulling that camera out -
KEITH: Uh uh - light's much better where you're standing.
HZ: Keith shows that he's got a gun at his hip, and it's hard to know whether this guy, played by Cress Williams is armed, because he is wearing an extremely baggy leather jacket. It's like a circus big top made of leather on a normal-sized man's body.
JOY: Yeah. There could be anything under there. Guns; a bear trap; small dog, you know.
HZ: How is even keeping it from just sliding off his body?
JOY: Sheer will, Helen.
HZ: Why is it on this show they only have tiny jackets or gigantic jackets? Maybe they're the only ones left in the sales?
CARL MORGAN/NATHAN WOODS: Keith Mars, former sheriff, private detective, author.
KEITH: Wow. Carl Morgan, three years Lompoc, assault and battery, cocaine possession, intent to sell. We should really give our publicists pats on the back.
CARL MORGAN/NATHAN WOODS: I expected you to become a problem at some point.
KEITH: There's a flight to Chicago leaving San Diego at 4:45. You need to be on it. The next time I shoot you, it won't be digitally. Unless I hit you in the finger, then we'll have a big laugh about it.
CARL MORGAN/NATHAN WOODS: Your old lady took something of mine. I'm not leaving till I get it back.
KEITH: She's not my old lady. She's my special lady friend.
HZ: Keith's dropping a Big Lebowski reference there, when the Dude says, "She's not my special lady, she's my fucking lady friend."
JOY: Ah, that's why it felt generally familiar. Nice.
HZ: Can't resist an opportunity to drop a little movie quote, even though he's having this kind of difficult interaction with someone who is portrayed as threatening in this scene. Keith's next stop is to see Lamb, who is basking in his office in stripes of light and darkness, showing the duality of Lamb's nature, I don't know.
JOY: Is there another side to Lamb's nature? Remains to be seen. I love their cute little bant... Are Keith and Lamb in love? Is that what's happening?
LAMB: Who let you into my office?
KEITH: That's funny, I was wondering the same thing. I thought you might want to catch a bad guy or something. That's Carl Morgan, drug dealer. He's currently wanted for questioning in Chicago on an armed robbery.
LAMB: Drug dealer, for me? It's not even my birthday.
KEITH: He's buddies with a dealer I'm tracking. There's no bounty on him; nothing in it for me.
LAMB: Mmm, nothing but the joy of giving.
KEITH: It's not a present, Sheriff, tt's kind of your job. For now anyway. Hope you're having fun.
JOY: And then they kiss.
HZ: It's like they're both tops, and can't decide who's top today. And yet Lamb is doing his job better than Keith.
JOY: Yeah.
HZ: Because later, Keith walks out of Alicia's house and he passes a lawn sign for his sheriff campaign, and he sees that his car's been clamped, and he knows immediately that's Lamb's revenge. Even though the clamps don't say "Fuck you, from Don Lamb" on them.
JOY: Ah, you call them clamps?
HZ: What do you call them?
JOY: We call them boots.
HZ: Really?
JOY: So his car has been booted.
HZ: I've never heard that before, Jenny. Are you lying to me?
JOY: I'm not lying to you!
HZ: Did you get this from some kind of 1940s film?
JOY: Like How To Prank Your English Friends. Because we call the trunk what you call the boot, right?
HZ: And you call the clamps the boot.
JOY: Yeah.
HZ: And we call nothing the trunk. It's just occurred to me that in America you call the thing that lifts up the front the hood, and in Britain we call it a bonnet.
JOY: Right.
HZ: Hood is like something that maybe a man would wear, whereas a bonnet is very much like period drama. Or a baby. But what Lamb has discovered is that:
LAMB: You send me in to arrest Carl Morgan, AKA Nathan Woods, Chicago cop, big-time decorated detective. Did you think I wouldn't check up on the guy, Keith? His record is one phonecall away.
JOY: What!
HZ: His record is one phone call away, and Keith hasn't made this phone call himself.
JOY: Blinded by love.
HZ: Lamb has done some better detectiving than Keith. When has that happened? He's fucked it. And he also looks very shocked because of what that means about his beautiful and beloved Alicia.
JOY: Yep. Yeah, this is disturbing information for Keith.
HZ: Keith goes into Alicia's house and no one's in and he rifles around and get some files.
JOY: Just because you have a key doesn't mean that stealing files from Alicia's filing cabinet is okay.
HZ: He finds a very useful file, I guess.
JOY: It's like ‘Alicia: Bad Stuff’.
HZ: She was born Cherie Parker Saunders on March 9th 1968, at the Chicago Memorial Hospital. In 1985 she filed a rental application for a place in Chicago, and she's still got that form, and the rent was $1600 a month - which sounds like quite a lot for Chicago place in 1985. And the name Cherie Woods.
JOY: Oh my god.
HZ: But by 1987, she was going by Alicia Fennel. He's very upset by this information he's discovering.
JOY: Keith may be upset, but I'm delighted to learn that Alicia is a Pisces. Isn't that just, doesn't that just feel right? Feels great to me. I love it.
HZ: And then we go back to the Fennel house. Wallace is outside, sleevelessly tinkering with his car.
JOY: Hot.
HZ: Have you had occasion in the past to think Wallace is hot?
JOY: I actually was just thinking about Vin Diesel and Fast and Furious when you said "sleevelessly tinkering with a car." That's where my mind went. So, there's Wallace, noodling with his car, as you say, and who should roll up but Nathan Woods — and oh my god, this is a huge reveal, he is Wallace's dad, or so he says.
HZ: What a bomb to drop.
JOY: What's he been doing for the last 18 years, one wonders?
HZ: Wallace has thought his dad is dead. That's what we learned about Wallace before.
JOY: Right. Yeah, yeah.
HZ: And presumably Wallace's cute little brother, who's seven, has a different dad to Wallace, because otherwise Wallace would have been old enough to notice.
JOY: Right.
HZ: I don't know what the best way is to reconnect with the child that you haven't seen for many years, but is this it?
JOY: This probably isn't it. I don't think this is it.
HZ: That's a big drop of news, at the end of this episode. And it made me stressed.
JOY: What else is going on in Neptune? Meg's still in hospital, in a coma, and Veronica turns up to visit her and discovers that Duncan has been visiting her every day. Veronica did not know this. Because I guess she's so busy with her multiple jobs that she wouldn't have time to notice that her boyfriend was somewhere else for quite a lot of time per day.
HZ: Yeah. And she finds this out from Meg's parents, who come out of Meg's room and yell at Duncan.
MR MANNING: You again! Why do you come here every day? How many times do I have to tell you: we never want to see you again! Now stay away from our daughter!
MRS MANNING: And you - I mean, how can you come here? Don't you know that your presence is upsetting to us?
HZ: So if Meg's on a ventilator, because she's in a coma, she would be in the ICU. Because if you're on a ventilator, that's where they tend to keep them. In ICUs, they tend to be pretty strict about who is allowed to visit, so I'm not sure that Duncan would be allowed in, but also she probably wouldn't get a visit from four family members at one time, because the Manning parents come out and also Meg's little sister, Lizzie, who we met in Episode 8, who's the wild, exciting sister.
JOY: Party Lizzie.
HZ: Oh, I don't know if she's Party Lizzie anymore, because she's wearing what looks like a private school uniform, a prim one, with very tame hair compared to before.
JOY: Reformed Lizzie.
HZ: And then she's got a tiny sister who's sheltering behind her, and it looks a bit like she's got a black eye, but I didn't know whether that was deliberate or not. No one remarks upon it.
JOY: Oh, shit. I didn't even notice it, but Eagle-Eye Zaltzman.
HZ: Maybe she's just tired.
JOY: Maybe. It's not great.
HZ: I'm pleased to see Lizzie again. The parents seem shit.
JOY: They seem pretty bad.
HZ: We see Lizzie again, later, in a much different outfit to this prim schoolgirl outfit. She turns up in the middle of the night to Duncan's hotel room. Veronica is also there because she has turned up with some flirtatious dim sum for Duncan.
[knock at Duncan’s door]
VERONICA on phone: Have you had dinner?
DUNCAN: No, I'm tired of room service. [Opens door: it’s Veronica, holding up a bag of food.]
VERONICA: Then may I suggest dim sum, and then some?
JOY: Ew. Ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew. Ew. OK, I'm going to say this, and then I need to go get some Listerine. "Dim sum and then some"?
HZ: It gets worse. It gets worse, Jenny.
DUNCAN: What if we start the evening with ‘and then some’ and work our way back to the dim sum?
VERONICA: It's officially under consideration. May I ask you something first?
DUNCAN: Yes to costumes, no to props. Does that cover it?
JOY: Helennnnn!
HZ: Veronica does have a lot of costumes, but her props are bugs and tasers. So I can understand why he didn't want to use those.
JOY: Yeah, I guess. I guess that makes sense.
HZ: I will say that I do love that in the US you can get dim sum at any time of day, because in Britain I've never found a place that serves it after 3pm.
JOY: You're kidding.
HZ: No.
JOY: Wow.
HZ: Then Veronica ruins the dim sum and then some, or the then some and then dim sum that Duncan's angling for, by saying, "Why didn't you tell me how often you'd been visiting Meg since the accident?" And it's hard to carry on the sexy chat after that kind of line.
JOY: Yeah. It's not great.
HZ: She's really done the roleplay badly there.
JOY: Yeah.
HZ: “I'm roleplaying as one of the Manning parents.”
JOY: Ugh. Sick.
HZ: Later, Duncan's asleep, and Veronica is eating in bed, wearing an enormous blue T-shirt that I assume is Duncan's, whilst checking Colin's browser history for Julie. I noticed that the search engine that Colin's been using is called Planet Zowie, which someone named a fan site for Veronica Mars back in the day.
JOY: Wow.
HZ: And he also searched a site, genealogygopher.com, for Julie. There's also a small sculpture of a bull on the nightstand, because this hotel room is full of art that doesn't relate to any of the other art.
JOY: Yeah.
HZ: But later they're woken by a knock. And Veronica's like, "Shit, it's my dad." And it's actually Lizzie dressed as if she's on her way out to a nice bar.
JOY: Yeah. You know those bars where you take your sister's secret laptop so you can find out what's on it before her parents get to it.
HZ: It's the perfect disguise.” Where are you off to at 2am, Lizzie?” "Oh, just down to the wine bar in full makeup and a sequinned top." She's got Meg's secret laptop and she needs to see what's on it before her parents do, and it needs to be done by morning, and she thought, "Who can do this? The son of a computer billionaire!"
JOY: No, no, Duncan can only redistribute wealth, wear blue, eat double helpings -
HZ: - drink milk -
JOY: - and tie a sweater around his shoulders.
HZ: Distribute glitter generously.
JOY: Mm hmm.
HZ: And sing Grease. Even though Duncan has been trying to hide the presence of Veronica, lucky that she's there, because she's like, "Getting stuff off a computer? Well, I know that Duncan is not capable, but Mac is ready to go in the middle of the night" - also fully made-up, and gets into the computer very quickly. Meg's wallpaper, did you notice? It looks like a pink and white pavement in a sort of flame shape with the word "hot" in big capital letters.
JOY: What? Why not, why not?
HZ: She moves all of Meg's emails to a USB stick. In the morning, Duncan is brushing his teeth, tits out.
JOY: Haaaaaa!
HZ: Duncan's got a chest this episode. I don't know if you noticed.
JOY: Helen, I am broken!
HZ: I'm sorry. How disgusting.
JOY: You broke me. "Tits out." OK. I'm ready to proceed.
HZ: Veronica's walking out, but she sees the USB stick.
JOY: Tempting.
VERONICA VOICEOVER: Are you crazy, Duncan? Leaving this out here in the open? Do you leave heroin out when Iggy Pop spends the night?
JOY: Veronica, Jesus!
HZ: It's what's been happening this episode. We've had the tiniest of cardigans. We've had Julie and her boyfriend, who seems like a good dude, but tough shit for him. We've had Keith's morning donuts. We've had Carl Morgan being unveiled as not a drug dealer, but a cop named Nathan Woods. And we've had Meg in hospital, her angry parents who invade their daughter's privacy. We've had Lizzie. We've had Mac in the night.
JOY: Mac in the night!
HZ: What's your top story from this episode, Jenny?
JOY: Is it Jackie throwing shade at Dungeons & Dragons, how dare she? She also calls Veronica "Goldilocks" and "Miss Pixie Stick", which seems worth mentioning.
HZ: Good work, Jackie. Unfortunately, not much screen time this episode.
JOY: It is — are you ready? It's Chekhov's diamond shingle! The earring of one Weevil Navarro, the telltale shingle just gleaming away under the floorboards audibly.
HZ: I thought him wearing earrings that looked like diamond solar panels in the first episode of this season was just a stylistic choice.
JOY: Yeah, yeah, no no no. What's a worse stylistic choice, that or the genie hoops going on in this episode?
HZ: Well, I was just so pleased to see Weevil.
JOY: Yeah.
HZ: Because he's not been around for the last couple of episodes - and he's looking great.
JOY: Truly.
HZ: He's got a whole new crew of guys that are following him around.
JOY: So it seems.
HZ: Just laughing at his jokes, not saying anything. These ones look more grown up. Veronica, during the scene where she and Weevil square off against each other in the school hallway, is wearing a brown T-shirt with what looks like a fried egg with the silhouettes of birds on it.
JOY: Why? Helen, why?
HZ: I assume it's meant to be a sunset, but it really looks like a fried egg. Weevil does some references to Martha Stewart and Judge Wapner of The People's Court. Do people really talk like this?
JOY: Only on TV in the mid-2000s.
WEEVIL: Yo Martha. Heard you took a ride downtown behind a 187. So, did you flop for the cops or did the local Wapner hook you up with some ankle bling?
VERONICA: You know the deal, cuz: every time a kitty cries in this town, Onetime tries to put a case on me. Speaking of bling: what's up with the hoops? If I rub your head, do I get three wishes?
WEEVIL: You rub my head and you might want to make seeing tomorrow your first wish.
HZ: In Weevil's brief appearances in this season, there's definitely been an earring focus.
JOY: But now, finally, the underwear focus we've all been waiting for.
HZ: Certainly not the henley focus.
JOY: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
HZ: What the fuck?
JOY: He wants to know if he's being brought in so he can put on his good underwear, and Veronica, rightly so, says, "You should probably do that anyway." Always wear your good underwear, Weevil. Please, do it for us.
HZ: The important thing about Weevil's earrings is they trip a memory for Veronica, which is her being shown, by Lamb, in the evidence bag, this earring, which implicates Weevil in the bus crash plot and the death of Curly Moran. And they walk and talk.
WEEVIL: A couple weeks ago, a few days before Curly beached, I got this weird call, some guy saying Curly was behind the bus crash.
VERONICA: You don't know who it was?
WEEVIL: They just said Curly was hired by the Fitzpatricks to get back at Cervando.
VERONICA: As in the Fighting Fitzpatricks?
WEEVIL: Uh-huh.
VERONICA: I think my dad put, like, five of the Fitzpatricks in Chino.
WEEVIL: Look, they're Irish Catholic. For every five you put away, there's ten more at home. Cervando had been going around bragging about how he hustled Liam Fitzpatrick out of a few grand down at River Styx.
VERONICA: That's a lot of info for an anonymous call. What'd you do?
WEEVIL: Nothing.
VERONICA: I'm sure.
WEEVIL: The Fitzpatricks are meth-head lunatics, but they're not gonna kill a bus full of kids over three grand. Their problem with Cervando would have been solved in an alley with a baseball bat.
VERONICA: Gimme your cell.
WEEVIL: I called the mystery guy back already - all it does is ring.
HZ: This is where we learn about the Fighting Fitzpatricks. I don't think we've learnt about them before, right?
JOY: No.
HZ: The crime family of Neptune. Also, Cervando is important, but do we spend any time with him before he died? So to me, hinging a plot on a kid who died on the bus who we didn't really know, and a crime family we've not met yet, feels very theoretical rather than truly compelling.
JOY: Yeah.
HZ: Also I'm worried that Weevil and his earrings are tied up in it.
JOY: Yeah, no, it does definitely, doesn't feel earned or like worth caring about. Yet. The other thing that happens in this plot that is important is that a call came from Logan's house that gave the tip about Curly in the bus crash, which prompts Logan to twist his invisible moustache and say, "Veronica Mars has accused me of evil." Drink!
HZ: Logan does some of those beautiful moves that he's so good at, and he seems in slightly better spirits than in the last episodes of this season. But he's like, "Well, I couldn't have made that phone call because I had a party that night," and immediately produces this flyer for his own party that was just next to his hand - and that has a different day on it to the one Veronica's asking about.
JOY: Oh
HZ: She's asking about the 24th of September, the flyer says it was on the 20th.
JOY: “Props department, get me someone in props.”
HZ: “You're all fired.”
JOY: Yeah.
LOGAN: That was the night of my Life’s Short party.
VERONICA: Of course, a group of lower-middle-class Neptune High students plummet to their deaths, and the 09ers throw a party.
LOGAN: Hence the Life’s Short part. It was in their honour and in the end, it wasn't just your social betters; in fact your pal Weevil and his biker boys crashed it. Oh, and Lamb and a half dozen deputies came by to break it up - or at least collect the kegs.
VERONICA: There are five numbers registered to your house. This call came from a number I don't recognize.
LOGAN: Gee willikers, Veronica, it sounds like you're on to something. Maybe the pool boy did it.
HZ: But in the midst of all this, we see Keith answering a call at Mars Investigations and desperately trying to get through a heap of files and makes a mistake, and this means that he needs Veronica back on the squad.
JOY: He's ready to admit that he needs help.
HZ: She seems thrilled to have her job back. And I'm thrilled, too, because I much prefer it when the Marses are working together. What a wonderful team.
JOY: Yeah, all is as it should be.
HZ: So now it seems like a good time to head over to visit our resident Southern California legal expert Lo Dodds, to investigate the crimes that took place in this episode in today's LoDown.
THE LODOWN
HZ: Blagging your way into someone's house/Nicolas Cage's house, and then taking stuff off their computer: at what point does that become illegal?
LO DODDS: So you have to go through the steps. Now, even the police do sting operations. So as long as we're not venturing into entrapment territory — he lets her into the house, so she's not trespassing. Yes, she's portraying herself as a young, dumb coed, but she's not really doing anything illegal at that point. At the point she gets on his computer - again, he let her on his computer. The stuff that she's stealing from his hard drive, it would really depend on what that stuff is. So at this point, all I'm really seeing is maybe like criminal trespass; maybe he'd sue her for invasion of privacy, but she doesn't seem like she's downloading financial information or anything. It sounds like she's just got his web history, which, I don't know why she'd need to download his hard drive for that. And maybe, I don't know, if she found something really private, like, I don't know, maybe his Outlander fanfic or something, he could sue her for invasion of privacy. But those are civil lawsuits, not really crimes. She'd get probably a very minimal criminal trespass charge there.
JOY: I just blacked out after "Outlander fan fiction", so...
LO DODDS: So I just don't understand why they had this Scottish actor, and he barely speaks in the whole episode, and it's like, why Scottish?
HZ: He appears once every hundred years.
JOY: Hot Scottish dude appears once every hundred years, converts to Judaism for fiancée, nice.
HZ: At what point does honeytrapping become illegal honeytrapping?
LO DODDS: Well, a honeytrap itself is not really illegal as long as you know everybody's above age. Entrapment is when you have entrapped someone to commit a crime that they would not have otherwise committed had you not been there.
HZ: So there has to be crimeing involved.
LO DODDS: Other than the deep background check, nothing is really inherently illegal about following the Scottish guy around, unless he notices Veronica and starts to call the cops because some twee little blonde is following him everywhere.
JOY: When we see all of this stuff between Nathan and Keith, can you make some kind of official call about like who's doing more illegal stuff? What's going on? I feel like you're not allowed to threaten people with a gun in California. I feel like you're also not allowed to break into somebody's house through a window, even if you are a police officer two thousand miles away. What's going on here?
LO DODDS: You have to remember, we're in California. It's totally legal to own a gun. And it is totally legal, as we learned from the Jessica Chastain episode, for Keith to defend himself or defend others around him. So Nathan creeping around, literally attempting to break into the Fennel household, I think he was totally within his rights to pull out his weapon and be like, "What the hell are you doing?" Nathan is trespassing, depending on what - it's not really clear why Nathan would be attempting to break into the house; but, again, whatever he might have been planning to do, he could be charged with attempted burglary. He definitely has no legitimate police purpose for getting into that house; he has no warrant; and even if he did have a warrant, that's not how the police are supposed to come into your house if they have a warrant.
HZ: Nathan seems to be behaving very strangely for a police officer.
LO DODDS: Why do you break into the house? What is he hoping to find in the house? Like, pictures of Wallace? I don't understand what the motivation there was.
JOY: Very weird.
HZ: And he hasn't found Wallace in 18 years? The Marses could have found him within about a second.
LO DODDS: Yeah, all his police resources, he didn't bother to just simply hire a private eye who would look it up on privateeyez.com?
HZ: He just didn't want to pay the subscription.
LO DODDS: Exactly. It is pricey.
HZ: He has to go the long way round, of flying to California and looking in a phone book.
LO DODDS: Of all things!
JOY: We definitely haven't established how far Chicago and Neptune are apart.
HZ: Good point, good point.
JOY: That could be an hour drive.
HZ: He just took the elevator one floor further down in the hotel and ended up in California.
JOY: Helen.
HZ: Jenny.
JOY: Would you believe me if I told you that we picked the same line? It is inarguably the best line in the episode, for sure.
HZ: I'm surprised it doesn't happen more often.
JOY: Yeah right? This, I think, presses so many good buttons at once. It's Keith saying to Nathan: "The next time I shoot you, it won't be digitally, unless I hit you in the finger, and then we'll have a big laugh about it." Amazing. Great job, Keith.
HZ: Unfortunately, that's his last laugh this episode. But what a good one.
JOY: Yeah.
HZ: I do like it as well when Veronica is razzing Weevil about his noticeable earrings, when she says, "If I rub your head, do I get three wishes?" I presume your three wishes would be to rub Weevil's heads, thrice?
JOY: Three more times.
HZ: And how do you rate this episode overall?
JOY: It's one of those fun romp episodes. I'd like to have seen a little bit more Logan.
HZ: Yes.
JOY: I wish I could lobotomize that, what would have been pre-coital banter between Veronica and Duncan, from my mind.
HZ: Well, to be fair, Veronica did ruin the prospect of coitus by bringing up Duncan's comatose ex-girlfriend.
JOY: She very thoughtfully took sex off the table for us. Thanks, Veronica.
HZ: She did that for you.
JOY: There's so much going on, and feeling very entertained. Julie was a little much.
HZ: She was a lot much.
JOY: She was a lot much, but, all in all, I think I'd give this episode like four out of five incidences of Wallace's tiny, adorable brother asking him if he's hitting that.
HZ: He's a worldly seven-year-old.
JOY: He's seen a lot. What about you?
HZ: I enjoyed that it was not too high stakes, I wasn't too stressed.
JOY: Yes.
HZ: I liked that Julie's boyfriend was actually a decent guy.
JOY: Yes.
HZ: And that also Veronica was safe, even though she was putting herself in a risky situation. I agree more Logan would have been great. Bit more Jackie would have been good. I'm worried about the Fennel peril about to descend. And I'm a little confused, and not all that invested in the Fighting Fitzpatricks earing plot thus far.
JOY: Yeah.
HZ: Although I love that it's earing-based. So overall, I'm gonna give it 3.9 door handles on Duncan's hotel suite bedroom which look like ornamental swords.
JOY: Could you send the remaining 1.1 door handles that look like swords to my home, please?
HZ: Yes, because they're enormous. So 1.1 door handles would probably do several doors.
JOY: Excellent. Well, that's this episode of Veronica Mars investigated.
HZ: Case closed.
JOY: Huzzah!
JOY: That was Veronica Mars Investigations season 2 episode 4: Green-Eyed Monster.
HZ: Watch season 2 episode 5 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 - well, it's just house-sitting for Nicolas Cage - is vmipod.com.
JOY: If you like us and you like the show, and you want to support it in any way, there's a couple of ways you can do that. We have a merch store that you can find via our website that has a beautiful new Gay For Weevil pin, among other things.
HZ: Could you wear those as large earrings?
JOY: Yes. I think it's even bigger than a shingle, Helen, which I think, from what I've gathered from the show, means it's an even better earring.
HZ: Yes, that's how earrings work.
JOY: So we've got, we've got those and a couple other cool pins and a shirt kicking around. We've also enabled a donate link on our website and some of you have donated to the show, and we just wanted to say frikkin thanks. That was really nice of you.
HZ: Thank you very much.
JOY: We appreciate it.
HZ: That was very generous.
JOY: Gosh.
HZ: It's just if you can afford it. Absolutely don't worry about it if money's tight.
JOY: Not required.
HZ: But if you're a very rich Scottish whisky baron -
JOY: - You'll want to donate.
HZ: Send us some handkerchiefs.
JOY: And then also, yeah, send us a case of whisky, and that would be fine, Colin. I'm Jenny Owen Youngs, and when I'm not making this podcast, you can, you know, hear me talk about another petite blonde protagonist over on Buffering the Vampire Slayer. You can also hear me sing a whole bunch via my various musics which you can learn about at jennyowenyoungs.com.
HZ: Dooo ittt. I'm Helen Zaltzman, and I make podcasts such as Answer Me This, which you can find at answermethispodcast.com, and The Allusionist at theallusionist.org. Both do not talk about current events, so if you're looking for things to take your mind off current events, those shows are pretty safe. Also The Allusionist, I've been doing some special episodes called Tranquillusionist, which are just things to lull you to sleep or cease anxiety a bit. Those can be found at theallusionist.org.
JOY: Listening to the Tranquillisionist is scientifically proven to basically turn you into Colin. You'll be unflappable.
HZ: Even when a teen tries to break into the home that you're sitting and put some moves on you...
JOY: Yikes.
HZ: ...and then wants to use your computer for a fabricated excuse, you'll be like, "I can weather this."
JOY: This episode was edited and mixed by Helen Zaltzman.
The music is by Martin Austwick and Jenny Owen Youngs.
JOY: The sheriff of this blessed town is Hrishikesh Hirway; he's booted your car.
HZ: Doh!! The show is distributed by PRX.
JOY: Until next time, who's your daddy?
HZ: Who's your daddy?
JOY: He's that really mean guy in the ICU who has just ordered you out.
HZ: At least he's not the guy that's just introduced himself to you while you're fixing your car.
JOY: Oh, true. So many daddies in this episode. New daddies.