VMI 2.06 Rat Saw God transcript
Content note: Veronica Mars contains heavy themes, and this episode includes storylines concerning murder, death from cancer, and violence.
A LONG TIME AGO ON VERONICA MARS:
Logan gets arrested for Felix’s murder, is put in a jail cell with his dad, and his house is burned down. Oof!
Abel Koontz turns up - he needs Veronica to find his daughter Amelia DeLongpre, so he can see her before he dies.
Amelia took her $3m of Kane fake confession payout, and spent it on international good times - then disappeared in the midst of a foam party in Ibiza.
Keith loses the sheriff race but keeps sniffing around the bus crash case - and finds a strange clue in the wreckage.
JOY: Wouldn’t mind if Weevil pushed a pizza into my face, I’m Jenny Owen Youngs.
HZ: And road tripping to see Staind, I’m Helen Zaltzman.
You’re listening to Veronica Mars Investigations, Season 2 Episode 6: Rat Saw God.
JOY: Helen, is this... is it a reference to something? What is it?
HZ: It is a reference to a young adult book written by one Rob Thomas several years before, that, judging by the Wikipedia summary, doesn't have content in common with this story. All it has is the word ‘rat’, and at the very end of this episode there's a rat. So are we missing something with this reference?
JOY: It's very strange.
HZ: The rat seeing god - the rat doesn't seem to be seeing anything.
JOY: Well, we don't know where that rat may or may not have ascended to.
HZ: And who's the god? Is it Cliff? Is it Cliff?
JOY: I hope it's Cliff.
HZ: It's probably Clarence Wiedman, isn't it?
JOY: Clarence Wiedman has a definite god vibe going on in this episode.
HZ: I was quite excited to see him again. It's been a while since we saw Clarence Wiedman, and I didn't expect to return to Abel Koontz and Amelia DeLongpre, did you?
JOY: No. Gosh, no.
HZ: Even though I've seen it before, I'd forgotten.
JOY: Yeah. Yeah, me too.
HZ: And celebrity cameos!
JOY: So many of them.
HZ: At least two.
JOY: Two at the same car rental desk. in fact.
HZ: Joss Whedon is the first cameo, playing a car rental guy - and yet apparently he got this cameo because he wrote an extremely enthusiastic blog post after season one. It said: "My peeps and I just finished a crazed Veronica Marsathon, and I can no longer restrain myself. Best. Show. Ever. Seriously, I've never gotten more wrapped up in a show I wasn't making, and maybe even more than those. Crazy crisp dialogue. Incredibly tight plotting. Big emotion, I mean BIG, and charsimatic actors and I was just DYING from the mystery and the relationships and PAIN, this show knows from pain and no, I don't care, laugh all you want, I had to share this. These guys know what they're doing on a level that intimidates me. It's the Harry Potter of shows. There. I said it."
JOY: Just be cool, dude. Jesus.
HZ: And as a reward, you get to play a kind of inconsequential boring guy.
JOY: This seems to be a trick of his, because when the original run of the Marvel comic Runaways was announced to be coming to an end, he wrote a very impassioned letter to them, and then he ended up writing the next series of comics.
HZ: Way to manifest, Joss.
JOY: Yeah, just make a couple of wildly successful shows and then when they're done, and you're bored, write strongly enthusiastic letters of praise to any other property you like so that you can just sneak your way in there.
HZ: As someone who makes shows about both Veronica Mars and Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Jenny: is the best show ever?
JOY: It is not. Sorry. I mean, I think it's great, but maybe this is the wrong place to say this - and shame on you, Helen, for asking me in this forum - but Veronica Mars is definitely not better than Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for my money. Buffy just has something for me that Veronica Mars does not.
HZ: Not got as many vampires, for a start.
JOY: Not nearly as many vampires.
HZ: And then Joss Whedon's colleague is played by Kim Stolz, who was in America's Next Top Model cycle five, and she won this part in a challenge on the show.
JOY: I was wondering, because you had mentioned earlier, like the last time somebody had a cameo, they were also from America's Next Top Model. What was the...
HZ: It's almost like they were on the same channel.
JOY: Yeah, this upstream model is strange.
HZ: Also, I thought this is a bit unfair: it was listed in a magazine article about the 25 worst cameos of all time. And - it's just fine. It's very brief, and she's playing someone who works at a car hire place, and they're usually on script anyway.
JOY: That sounds like somebody needed to fill a listicle quota and they just googled "brief cameos" or something. Or "cameos of people from modelling shows".
HZ: Well, Kim Stolz has gone on to own a cocktail bar, and in 2018 was appointed managing director at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, head of Americas prime brokerage sales.
JOY: What the hell?
HZ: Weren't expecting that twist, were you, Jenny?
JOY: I really wasn't, but it's wild.
HZ: The reason why we get those cameos is this exciting plot - I thought it was interesting to have a mystery of the week that was also tied to a really long plot arc, because the mystery of the week is Abel Koontz is back.
JOY: Abel Koontz!
HZ: And you know it's him, because Veronica is walking up to the Mars HQ and she sees someone slumped in the doorway and then that someone goes, "Verrronica Marrrsss". And so she takes the obligatory drink, but then she counters with "Abel Koontz?" So you have to take another drink.
JOY: Ah, touche. Didn't expect that table to get turned back on you so soon, Abel, did you?
HZ: But then they drop the traditional Abel Koontz super-sinister act, because he's dying. His breathing is very laboured and he wants to see his daughter before he dies. Remember his daughter?
JOY: Amelia? Amelia DeLongpre?
HZ: She was last seen in season 1 episode 17, where she gets given a load of money thanks to the Kane payout to Abel Koontz for falsely confessing to Lilly Kane's murder, and then fucks off at Clarence Wiedman's behest. And now she needs to fuck right back.
JOY: Of all the behests available in the known world, I would think that Clarence Wiedman's behest might be among the more compelling.
HZ: I would not fuck with his behest.
JOY: Yeah, not worth it. Not worth it. Too tall.
HZ: Presumably Veronica is doing this not for a fee. She seems to be doing it because he's dying and it's another daddy-daughter relationship, and we know that this show specializes in those. Really does not give a shit about mums, does it?
JOY: Lynn Echolls?
HZ: She only got three episodes!
JOY: She ripped the cheque up. At least I see what you're saying, though. Moms don't stick around. Who is the other mom? Celeste Kane, she's off in Aspen.
HZ: Being a shit mum, probably snapping people's skis for looking at her funny. But this, I thought, is a pretty exciting plot because, A. there's a time limit, because he's dying; and B. we're back with the whole Kane Software chicanery. So Veronica's first port of call to find Amelia is going back to Loyola Marymount, and she knocks on the dorm door and it's answered by a guy called Mike, who is Amelia's boyfriend, and he's wearing a Tshirt that says ‘France’, and I thought he had a really large and tidy fridge for a student.
JOY: I didn't notice his fridge. I did notice his stupid necklace. Did you notice his stupid necklace?
HZ: No. Is it puka shells?
JOY: It's not puka shells. I think it was sort of like a hemp-ish, choker-ish thing with like one big bead upfront.
HZ: Oh, what like they wear on Naked And Afraid to hide their microphones in?
JOY: Let me just google that really quick.
HZ: Gotta get watching Naked And Afraid.
JOY: Okay. Let me just google ‘naked and afraid’ really quick. Celebrity boners, naked and afraid... Oh, yeah, yeah, kind of like this necklace actually. Like, alarmingly like this. I hate that I'm looking at this.
HZ: It's a great show, Jenny.
JOY: Helen.
HZ: It's a great show! There's a lot of pixelation.
JOY: Is it?
HZ: Yes!
JOY: Is it better than Veronica Mars?
HZ: It's different.
JOY: OK.
HZ: Mike says he last saw Amelia in ‘Eye-beeza. Can I call it ‘Eye-beetha’, is that OK? I mean, in Britain, people say ‘Eye-beefa’, with an F, which is not accurate either.
JOY: This is interesting, because I I usually hear people say it right in the middle of where you're saying it and where they're saying it on the show. I usually hear people say ‘Ih-beetha’.
HZ: That's probably a more accurate vowel sound than what I was doing.
JOY: Soft I, then a T-H for the Z.
MIKE: Well, we went to Europe. Ended up in Ibiza. I mean, we met fun people, we went to the beach every single day, tracked down all these cool parties on this big Ibiza website. It was cool.
VERONICA: I'm sensing an ‘until’.
MIKE: Well, one night we're at this club, right, one of these places that drop this foam crap on you at midnight. So we're there, we're hanging out, they drop the foam, and...that was the last I saw of her.
VERONICA: Did you check under the foam?
MIKE: I had to call my parents to fly me home. It basically kind of sucked.
VERONICA: Well, at least you got to go to Europe.
MIKE: And all I got was this lousy T-shirt.
HZ: I thought it was kind of amazing, someone ghosting their boyfriend by disappearing under foam party foam. Maybe she dissolved?
JOY: I think this is what foam parties were made for.
HZ: I think they were made for wet clothing, Jenny, really. Wet, translucent clothing. Imagine Mr Darcy in the 1990s and 2000s.
JOY: Ha! A foam party at Pemberley. Of course, Pemberton. Pembertron. Hah! The notorious foam party scene.
HZ: I don't think those flap-front trousers are going to respond well to a dousing of foam.
JOY: Gosh no. They don't respond well to much.
HZ: Maybe high winds? And what a lovely boyfriend; he doesn't seem all that worried about her disappearing. He was just like, "God, it was so inconvenient she did that, I had to call my parents to send me the money so I could get back."
JOY: Yeah. I don't know - this is not how I would respond if my girlfriend disappeared in the middle of a foam party, but hey.
HZ: You'd probably at least scramble around looking for her.
JOY: Yeah. Or like, calling the police.
HZ: Veronica doesn't get a whole lot of useful out of Mike, so she goes and pays a visit to Amelia's roommate Dawn, who seems surprised that Amelia would go to Ibiza because she's not a party person. Unless money made her into one? If you had three million dollars, Jenny, would you become a party person?
JOY: No. I am tired, Helen. I would hire an assistant.
HZ: So this is all confusing information for Veronica, and suddenly a thought strikes her and she visits Mike again, to discover Amelia had taken his phone cards. Despite having three million dollars, so could probably afford her own.
JOY: Yeah, what?
HZ: Unless she'd spent all, and thus needed phone cards. So Veronica gets the numbers of those phone cards and goes home, and also posts a missing persons ad for Amelia on the kinds of websites that are frequented by people in Ibiza, I suppose.
JOY: What is this? Is this real? Is this something that could have actually been accomplished at the time, or is this pure fabrication?
HZ: In a pre-Facebook, or at least pre-widespread public Facebook... but then, Facebook existed for college kids at the time, so maybe that would have been the way?
JOY: Yeah. And I guess Veronica could have probably pretty easily weaselled her way onto Facebook, even though she was not yet in college and didn't have a college email.
HZ: Yes. But I'd imagine the people in the writers room for this show were not at college after Facebook was invented the year before. She studies the records of these phone cards. Calls from New York City, London, Florence, Lisbon, Ibiza, and... Neptune? Last week? The fuck?
JOY: Yeah, great. This whips us over to Kane Software.
HZ: It's got a massive K out the front. I hadn't noticed that before. Is it new?
JOY: Big old K, maybe it's new? Maybe they're trying to downplay the -ane and up-play the K-? You know, what with the recent legal troubles of the Kanes? But Clarence Wiedman is whipping into his office to discover that Veronica is already sitting at his desk, asking him, "What are you the head of again?" Amazing. So great. Kicking off the greatest partnership the show has seen to date.
HZ: How can you say that in an episode that also has Cliff in scenes with other people? Every scene Cliff is in with someone else is the greatest partnership of all time.
JOY: OK. OK, OK, OK: I love Cliff, but he's advocating for people or bantering with people. But Veronica and Wiedman - they start as antagonists and then by the end of the episode they're like in a buddy cop movie, high-fiving each other. It fucking rocks. It rocks! Dream team.
HZ: I know - and who would've thought that you could see Clarence Wiedman onscreen and not just be terrified and repulsed? What I love as well is that she has placed a phone call from across the street - there's this payphone that Amelia called from last week. So she calls up Clarence's assistant and is like, "Your car's being towed," so she rushes out, thus leaving the way open for Veronica to just sneak in. But the assistant is dressed as Clarence Wiedman, who dresses in these sort of formal yacht club clothes with like brass-buttoned blazer and striped tie. She's got that outfit on as well, and I don't remember Alicia Fennel having to wear that when she was Clarence Wiedman's assistant.
JOY: Well, maybe once he got rid of Alicia, he decided no more fucking around. Formal yacht club wear only in the Wiedman Wing.
HZ: Do you think they put that clothing on him because they were like, how do you make this handsome and scary young man look like he belongs with all these rich middle-aged fart guys? Brass buttons. Instantly done.
JOY: Yeah. Yeah, well, yacht clubs, historically...
HZ: I've never even been to a yacht club.
JOY: I mean, me neither. Just like conceptually, I feel like it casts, you know, a filter on everyone and everything and makes them yachtier, richer, whiter, more boring. You know? Though I guess Wiedman's not boring.
HZ: He's not fun in this scene yet, though. She's explaining the Amelia DeLongpre situation; he's like, "I have no further interest in Amelia DeLongpre," which is a good conversational shutdown that I may use. "I have no further interest in your conspiracy theories about 5G." Something that piqued my interest about Clarence Wiedman's office is that he's got a lot of monitors showing the security footage, which seems like another person's job really, if he's a security guard rather than the Kane assassin. But also, the monitors would be behind him as he sits at his desk. So are the monitors positioned just so he can stand peering out the window whilst also surveilling all of the camera footage? It's the only way I can explain it.
JOY: Yeah, maybe. Or maybe it's designed so that when employees of the company who might be tempted to sell out information to competitors, as they stroll down the hallway from their office to the cafeteria, they pass by Clarence Wiedman's office and they see this hulking silhouette of a tall man who sometimes wears jaunty fedoras, silhouetted by the glowing monitors of every inch of the grounds being surveilled at all times. I think it's a fear tactic.
HZ: Well, actually, I thought it's the surveillance of Kane software, but it's probably just the surveillance of all the bugs and cameras he's got elsewhere for his many projects.
JOY: Many projects. He's a busy guy.
HZ: Veronica, after a seemingly inconsequential chat with Duncan and Dick at school, who are like, "Yeah, dude, we're gonna get fake IDs!" After all the bother last year with the fake IDs, this trips a thought in Veronica. She calls Dawn, Amelia's roommate, and discovers that Amelia had a fake ID in her cousin's name, which was Margot Schell. Then she goes on privateeyez.com and discovers that Margot Schnell rented a car at San Diego Airport just last week. And hence the celebrity-run branch of Lariat Car Rental.
JOY: Oh, boy. Veronica doing her like...
HZ: "Oh wow, you speak German! Do anything for me please, Herr Whedon."
VERONICA: Here's my thing: my friend, she rented the coolest car from you guys, and some of us were going up to see the Staind show, and I wanted to find out what it was so that I could rent one for us to roadtrip.
DOUGLAS: Okay, what's the name?
VERONICA: Margot. Schnell. Margot with a T, Schnell is -
DOUGLAS: It means fast. In German.
VERONICA: Wow. You speak German?
DOUGLAS: Ja wohl. Okay, uh, that's a LeSabre.
VERONICA: And what did they call that awesome colour? It was...
DOUGLAS: White? That's called white.
JOY: She spools this info out of Joss Whedon, leaves the rental desk, does an incredible transformation in which she puts on glasses and a jacket -
HZ: And she takes her hair down. Unrecognisable! And she has to do this because now Wallace is gone, she has acknowledged the absence of Wallace, but in a way where it's like, "Oh, not that I'm worried about Wallace going through this big deal with who his true family is, a thing I just went through myself a few months ago." She's like, "Well, now that Wallace is gone, it's a one person operation. No one to do me favours."
JOY: Veronica! Yeah, she's got to do all the favours herself.
HZ: And she and Clarence Wiedman aren't yet on buddy movie terms where he could put on glasses and a different jacket and go in and bullshit the next employee. What's amazing is she goes out, does this very quick costume change, at exactly the same time Joss Whedon leaves the office. How convenient.
JOY: What are the odds?
HZ: Bang on time. Everything's coming up Veronica Mars, and she's got some fresh bullshit.
VERONICA: You have to help me.
STACY: What's the problem?
VERONICA: Well, to begin with, my colleague is an unbearable Nazi who couldn't find his own ass with a mirror and a miner's hat. Kinda like that guy, you know? Long story short: I'm doing this big presentation, I'm about to crush him for the promotion, and I realized I left my laptop in the rental, and I'm totally screwed. You have to help me.
JOY: She plays on this employee's - played by Kim Stolz - resentfulness of Joss Whedon, her boss. I feel like they're really laying into this like, "Wow, that guy sucks, like, what a dick," when I feel like he didn't do anything for us, the viewer, to be like, "Yeah, fuck that guy. Of course she hates her boss." Other than just him being her boss and being a dude and being the employee of the month or whatever.
HZ: She sees him berating Kim Stolz from outside, so maybe she's like, "OK, this is something I can work with."
JOY: Shame on me for missing it.
HZ: And she gets Kim to track the whereabouts of the car for her through the invocation of shitty male bosses, and obtains the location of the car from two days ago. So this is a very efficient trip: double bullshit, useful information. It's hard to know what she was planning to do with it. Just drive around until she sees it? Just do increasing circuits of California?
JOY: Yeah, well luckily the car was in Waverly two days ago, and Waverly has one hotel and nothing else. Motel, excuse me.
HZ: Well, Veronica's like, "I've never heard of Waverly before," and fiddle music plays, to imply it's somewhere far. But Waverly, California is right up at the top of the state in Lassen County. So no surprise Veronica's not heard of it, but that will be -
JOY: That'll be a long drive.
HZ: A full day, or more, drive. Or 20 minutes, via the Neptune teleport.
JOY: Right, of course, the Neptune wormhole.
HZ: I don't know. Go with it.
JOY: We go with it, as we always do when it comes to Veronica Mars geography.
HZ: We go all the way to Waverly in an instant.
JOY: And Veronica is trying to get just some little bit of information out of this motel desk clerk, but he's pretty adamant that the only way she's gonna get anything is by paying $30 a room.
MANAGER: You want a room? It's thirty bucks a night.
VERONICA: Actually, I'm looking for someone.
MANAGER: Well, if it's me, congratulations. Otherwise, unless you get lucky at the Gas-N-Sip, your options are pretty limited around here.
VERONICA: It's a friend. She probably passed through here in the last couple days. Have you seen her?
MANAGER: Yeah. Yeah, she got a room a couple of days ago.
VERONICA: Can I see the room she stayed in?
MANAGER: Like I said: rooms thirty dollars a night.
JOY: She pays $30 to see the room that Amelia stayed in, and while she's in there Keith calls her and he's like, "Where are you?" And she's like, "I'm at an art gallery in Neptune." And he says, "Send me a picture, prove it."
HZ: It's so weird. That's the least Veronica thing to do. Who the fuck would be convinced by that? Keith was like, "Well, we do need some more artfor the house to go with the backup drawing." What?
JOY: So she quickly hangs nine - there are apparently nine paintings in this motel room.
HZ: So much art for $30.
JOY: And also nine nails that she's able to put together on a wall.
HZ: Maybe she takes those with in the Mars toolkit.
JOY: Oh, right. And sends him this picture to prove that she, in quotes, that she is "at an art gallery," right?
HZ: It's a good bit of quick thinking.
JOY: Yes. Salute.
HZ: Bad alibi.
JOY: Then she gets on the WiFi, right?
HZ: Bluetooth.
JOY: To upload this photo.
HZ: She's a-bluetoothing.
JOY: And her computer tries to also connect, or detects, Amelia DeLongpre's Palm Pilot?
HZ: Kids. Palm Pilots...
JOY: We, what even... How do we even begin?
HZ: You know those retro typewriters that are back in? Like that, but it would fit in the palm of your hand, and it wouldn't make a clickety-clack sound and a "ting" at the end of a sentence. Does that work? But Amelia DeLongpre is not in this room, so she has to pay $30 to get into each of the rooms next door, both of which are just as empty.
JOY: But then, eureka. The noise of the ice machine depositing some ice that has recently been frozen into the main container. She pops out there, pops open the lid, digs around in the ice, and holy shit, it's a hand, Helen! A hand that belongs to Amelia DeLongpre!
HZ: That's a real Jesus fucking Christ moment. I would have thought, even for Veronica, finding an actual dead body in an ice machine in a remote place would be pretty horrific. Also, what makes her look in the ice machine? Because she's not expecting Amelia to be dead, is she?
JOY: I think that by the time she gets the ice machine, she's just like looking everywhere. You know when you lose your keys and you're so at a loss for where they could be that you start looking in places, you start looking in the bottom of the mug that has all your pencils in it?
HZ: Yeah. Check the microwave.
JOY: In a bag that you haven't used in two years, and like all of that. She's just looking anywhere that could contain a thing.
HZ: She runs back into her room and starts making a call. But to whom? Because Wallace is no longer working for Veronica Mars. But, uh-oh, she is interrupted by Clarence Wiedman in casual wear.
JOY: Dude.
HZ: By which I mean he's wearing Nathan Woods's marquee-sized black leather jacket.
JOY: Can you imagine following up the discovery of a dead body in an icemaker in a remote location, can you think of a scarier thing to follow that up than, holy shit, Clarence Wiedman just followed you into your room and closed the door behind him?
HZ: Not many things. Not many. But what is so glorious is he's not here to murder or terrify Veronica. He's on the trail of Amelia DeLongpre as well, because he was like, "Well, I fibbed a bit earlier: she had been in touch, but only last week because she wanted to extort another $250,000 from the Kanes in return for fucking off again." And so he gave her marked bills and they started turning up at this motel. How do you find out where a bill has been spent?
JOY: Maybe Lo will know.
HZ: Maybe he's somehow managed to bug a dollar bill because he's that good. Can just sneak them in, in between the lines of ink.
JOY: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
HZ: They go back to the desk and this obstreperous manager. Clarence Wiedman doesn't have time for that guy's shit.
JOY: No, no, no. This rocks.
VERONICA: Was anyone else in here two nights ago, did you see anyone with her?
MANAGER: Why? Is he missing a friend too?
WIEDMAN: Answer the question or I'll break all your fingers.
MANAGER: Just the guy she come in with. What? You didn't ask!
HZ: Amelia had been at the hotel with a brown-haired medium-sized guy in a Tshirt, which just narrows it down to -
JOY: It's every single dude on the show! Every single one except Dick.
HZ: Clarence is like, "Veronica, I need you to take me to that guy." So that commences a million-year-long road trip.
JOY: Yeah. Does he follow her? Does he get in the Mars mobile?
HZ: They deal with Amelia DeLongpre's body off screen. I don't know how the police are going to investigate it - it's amazing, really, that Veronica finds the identity of the murderer before the police probably have even identified the body. And maybe they never will. Mike is their first port of call.
JOY: They bust into Mike's place.
HZ: Don't even stop to admire the fridge.
JOY: Clarence Wiedman is jamming cloth into Mike's mouth and holding him hanging outside the window, all like, "Did you kill Amelia?!" While Veronica is freaking out.
HZ: The campus is so well lit as well. It's like he's shouting and dangling a guy out of a window in a well-lit dorm.
JOY: Yeah, everyone's just looking up being like, "Oh, it's that guy with the fedora from last season who visited our campus, blending in."
HZ: Maybe he's glamouring people as he leaves, so they forget all about it.
JOY: Very possible.
HZ: And he's like, "Did you conspire with Amelia to blackmail Kane Software? Did you kill Amelia?" And the guy's just like, "Agh! Agh!" Which Clarence takes as a no, and I took to him being scared shitless to be dangled out of a window with a gag in his mouth.
JOY: Yeah, well, you figure if you're that scared and you do know something, you're gonna be reacting in a different way. I think doing whatever you can to communicate like, "I have information and you can have it."
HZ: I suppose Clarence is also probably pretty well used to reading the subtleties of someone's responses when he's dangling them out of a window.
JOY: Yeah, yeah.
HZ: And they leave, and compliment one another's performances - and this is the highlight of the episode for me. What an incredible turnaround, seeing Veronica and Clarence working together, and also him doing a joke. It properly made me laugh.
VERONICA: He doesn't know anything! If he falls, he's going to break his neck!
WIEDMAN: Did you conspire with her to blackmail Kane Software? Did you kill Amelia DeLongpre?
MIKE: [terrified squeals]
VERONICA: Wow. Where'd you learn that interrogation technique?
WIEDMAN: Harvard. That's a pretty convincing hysterical routine you got, where did you learn that?
VERONICA: Watching cheerleading tryout results.
HZ: Back home, Veronica is emailing Wallace, just to give him the latest news about the sheriff race, Logan jailed etc, all the things he could be working on for her. But then she's interrupted by a video call from someone whose username is EnriqueFreaque69.
JOY: Yes, yes, yes! Hell yes, it is. I very casually wondered if this was a sly compliment to Enrico Colantoni.
HZ: Oh really? I was thinking it was, “What would the young girls be into in this era? Enrique Iglesias? Very well.”
JOY: That's the everyman's answer, Helen, but I'm here to hold up a magnifying glass and look a little closer, if you know what I mean.
HZ: This person met Amelia DeLongpre in, presumably, Ibiza, and sends Veronica a group photo of them at the beach, in which Amelia's face seems to have been photoshopped in from a really, really different picture, because it's like a spotlight in the middle of the photo.
JOY: Dude, right? The lighting!
HZ: Yes, it's hilarious. Mike is next to her, and the woman warns against Amelia's boyfriend. She's like, "He seems cool, but he lies," which I think is not quite strong enough, really, as a tip-off goes. But nonetheless, Veronica immediately sends the photo to the manager of the shit hotel, and he identifies the guy that came in with Amelia as not Mike, but the guy on her other side.
JOY: With the shitty facial hair. No offence.
HZ: Yes, although he didn't have the shitty facial hair when he visited. So fair play to this manager recognising this guy in a group shop with different facial hair and head hair.
JOY: Do we believe this guy? Who knows?
HZ: It's a critical clue, Jenny, so we have to. And Veronica calls Clarence, gives him the name of this guy, Carlos Mercado. Clarence has found that some of the dollar bills have shown up at Caesar's Palace in Vegas, and intimates that he's off to kill him.
JOY: Yeah, he's a diplomat's son, and Clarence Wiedman is gonna murder the shit out of him. Bold move, sir.
HZ: You still don't know why they were at that hotel in Waverly.
JOY: Yeah. We'll never know, I guess.
HZ: Unless this fictional Waverly is somewhere on the way to Vegas.
JOY: Oh, that could be. I mean, in this universe, sure, why not?
HZ: You might as well take a detour up via Lassen to see it. Come back down via Mono Lake - that would be nice. You could go to Death Valley on the way down to Vegas. You could even go to the shooting location of Tremors, if you're doing a big road trip of it. If you don't end up dead in a freezer.
JOY: I just want to say that I am alarmed by how much more you know about what goes on in this region of the United States than I do.
HZ: Look, if you need me to program for you a road trip route from Neptune up to Lassen and then down to Vegas, get in touch. I'll do you a nice spreadsheet.
JOY: OK, nice.
HZ: I will not program in where you dispatch your travel companion; that's up to you. So now, what remains for Veronica is a really sad task: she goes to the hospital to see Abel Koontz, and the nurse says he's got a day or two to live. And she's like, “Do you tell this guy that the daughter he wants to see one last time before he dies is dead and murdered, and murdered because of the money that he got for fessing up to a crime he didn't commit? No.” And she's like, "I'm sorry, Amelia's snowed in in the Himalayas, she's on her way," and they hold hands. Grim. She's discovered a dead body, and then has to sit with Abel Koontz while he's dying.
JOY: Life is not easy for Veronica Mars.
HZ: Never.
JOY: Never, ever.
HZ: But it was interesting - it felt like a season one Veronica again, more than some of the episodes of this season, but more mature, like dealing with this heavy shit, but also cooperating with Clarence Wiedman in a different sort of way. So this is a really dramatic plot, but a really sad one.
JOY: Yeah. Is this the right thing, that she did? I feel like the right thing.
HZ: Yes. I've got some unanswered questions about this plot. Not just how did they end up in Waverly or why, but why did she disappear mid-foam party? Is it because she chose that moment to run off with the other guy?
JOY: I get the sense that she might not have been going around with that guy willingly. Like maybe he grabbed her, and it was just like, "OK, I'm overpowering you, you're now going to come with me, we're gonna go back to the United States, you're gonna extort more money out of this company." But maybe it's easier to get people to extort money from companies when they think you're in love with them? Either way, maybe it was just easier for him to kind of kidnap her, or easier for her to just ghost, than to explain and say goodbye to Mike.
HZ: I would have thought what would be easiest for him, given that she got the $250,000 in cash, is just take that and drive off, leaving her in Waverly, but not dead.
JOY: No, you’ve got to kill her. Because you're a diplomat's son.
HZ: What's she going to do? She can't go to the police and be like, "This guy took my blackmail cash."
JOY: Right, right. That's true.
HZ: I always just think generally there's a better solution than murdering people. But, to be fair, I haven't tried murdering anyone yet, so maybe it's a solution whose strengths I just don't know.
JOY: But just popping back to the foam party for one second, I want to just say that I find when I am leaving a party the easiest way to do it is without anybody knowing. You know what I mean? Leaving a party can be so difficult. Especially by the time you're leaving a party, you're probably ready to leave a party.
HZ: I mean, it's probably 40 minutes since I got to the party.
JOY: Yeah, it's been 40 whole minutes and you're ready to go home. And you know that breaking up with your boyfriend is going to take, god, who knows how long? Thirty minutes? An hour if he starts crying? Then you've got to say goodbye to all of your friends, and they're probably in various states of inebriation, maybe one of them is on a spiral, and then you get sucked into that drama. Best to just disappear when the foam drops. That's what I'm saying.
HZ: Yeah, she's doing some Cinderella shit. What I'm going to do is just make foam appear when I'm ready to go and people'll be so distracted, they'll be like, "How the fuck did she do that?"
JOY: “Where did this foam come from?” Can we talk about the rich white boys of Neptune?
HZ: Yes, which ones?
JOY: I feel like there's a cluster of activity around the Logan-Duncan-Dick hub that all hangs together.
HZ: It's the sheriff election this episode, and for some reason there's a party for it in the presidential suite at the Neptune Grand in which Duncan lives, even though Veronica is not there.
JOY: You know how teens are always throwing parties for local sheriff elections.
HZ: Anything that you can livetweet, throw a party for it.
JOY: Sure, sure, why not?
HZ: But we weren't livetweeting in 2005, Twitter wasn't around yet.
JOY: You know what is around in 2005? Dick being disgusting.
HZ: Always a dick.
DICK: Dude. My stepmom?
LOGAN: I'm a total piece of crap.
DICK: Better you than the cable guy, I guess. And I'd be lying to say I never perved on your mom while she was prancing around the pool in that hardly-there bikini of hers.
LOGAN: Great. So, no hard feelings?
DICK: No - she gave me a few.
JOY: Ugh.
HZ: ‘Hard feelings’
JOY: Must we?
HZ: What a wonderful memorial for Lynn. Very respectful.
JOY: Yeah, put it on her tombstone.
HZ: What was interesting, though, was that we find out a bit about Dick's biological mother at this party, as he's flirting with Gia by doing a poor-little-rich-boy-with-absconding-dad act. Maybe it works for Dick?
GIA: Do you even know where your dad went?
DICK: Let's just say I'm not at liberty to discuss. Our lawyers say if he ever sets foot on US soil, he's looking at ten to fifteen at Club Fed.
GIA: So you're all alone? What's that like? Is it cool? Or, I guess, weird?
DICK: It's tough, you know? My real mom's got a new family up at Frisco, so I'm pretty much the man of the house, just trying to take care of Beav and stuff.
HZ: Gia seems more mellow since we met her in episode one, maybe because she's settled into Neptune? Her dad won the mayoral election.
JOY: Yeah, yeah, that tension is behind her now. She's figured out what to wear and when.
HZ: Yes, she's subdued in colour palette compared to the Paris Hilton-wear of her debut episode.
JOY: True, true. And she asks Veronica what she thinks about Dick, and Veronica says, "Uhhh..." she's thinking...we see her think, "What do I think about dick?" - she's squashing down all the memories of terrible pillow talk between her and Duncan as she focuses in on Dick - and then, Helen. Helen. Helen! Incoming message from Anton Chekhov. There is a garment that Duncan Kane is wearing. It's a short-sleeved argyle polo sweater.
HZ: Yep. Pale blue and black.
JOY: Just file that away. Anton wants you to recall that at a later point.
HZ: You know, this show has been teeing up for some important argyle events. It's been subtly sewing argyle into scenes, and now this episode, it's argyle time. But entering the party is Deputy Sacks, looking kind of cooler than usual, but I don't know whether that's because he's the only adult at a kids’ party.
JOY: Could be.
HZ: But he's not there to party. He's there to arrest Logan.
SACKS: Sheriff would like to have a word with you.
LOGAN: And I'd like to be the cream filling of an Olsen twin sandwich
JOY: Ew.
HZ: I did check, and the Olsen twins were adults by then and a year or so older than Logan. But twins are not sex props, they are people - and also related people.
JOY: What is it about people and twins and threesomes? You ever think about that, Helen?
HZ: Not in a desirous way. I feel like it's a bit disrespectful of the family relationship between them.
JOY: The family relationship, the autonomy… The mystery of twins, and the pain and struggles that we shall never know as two non-twins.
HZ: I have nieces who are twins, but they are ten, so it feels like not the time to talk to them about it. So they are reviving this plot where Logan is suspected of the murder of Felix. Do you think they've realised that just trying to dispatch it in a bit of flashback and voiceover in the first episode of the season was a bit skimpy for a murder? A murder which supposedly polarised the town?
JOY: I think there's like the skimpiness, and there's also they need Logan to be in peril. They need Logan tension at all times. Don't you think? Like Duncan is the tortoise of the piece, and Logan is this manic hare.
HZ: The trauma hare.
JOY: Yes.
HZ: Well, the thing is, when Logan is untraumatised, he's a terrible person. And when Duncan is traumatised, he is being badly written and acted. So it's much better when it's happy Duncan, and Logan in a real terrible predicament.
JOY: Yeah, yeah, yeah, we can forget about what a shit he is most of the time.
HZ: It is hard. He does some real shit things this episode. At the sheriff's department, there's a lineup already, and Logan is sardonic, and even does the Sally Field Oscar line which Veronica used in season 1 episode 16. Double-dip reference for the show.
OFFICER: Number four, step forward.
LOGAN: Oh, wow, I'm stunned. You like me! You really like me! Well first, I'd just like to say the other nominees are all such wonderfully gifted criminals. And I wanna thank my agent and my publicist, for always shooting me from the left side.
JOY: He's basically up there with like a little straw hat and a cane, all like, "Yadda-da-da-da-da-da!"
HZ: Maybe he borrowed the boater that Sacks is wearing for Lamb's campaign? And then he goes off to sell a monorail to the town. There's a lot of Lamb in this episode: after the lineup, he's telling Logan off in a corridor, and I noticed that, out of all the weird lighting effects on this show, they'd done something quite cool here where there's this amazing shadow of chain link on the wall behind him giving the impression of imprisonment. But anyway, Logan is doing the whole rich boy thing and Lamb is like, "I draw a lot of water in this town." I'd never heard this expression "I draw a lot of water in this town" before.
JOY: Yeah, what the hell? Sir, what does that mean?
HZ: He runs wells.
HZ: The next unusual lighting state is in the interrogation room where Logan is, and there's some inexplicable but cool-looking stripes of bright green light next to him on the wall, but seemingly unconnected to the window next to it; the blinds don't really line up. The table is really brightly lit, but the people sitting on either side are not illuminated. Nonetheless, we can see that one of them is Cliff!
JOY: Hooray!
HZ: Had these two not even met? Because they are a great double act, right from the start.
LOGAN: Where were you, getting thirds at the Crazy Girls lunch buffet?
CLIFF: Actually, they discontinued the buffet. Some health code thing. Okay: my name is Cliff, I'll be your if-you-can’t-afford-an-attorney attorney. So. What are you trying to prove?
LOGAN: Um, my innocence?
CLIFF: No, I mean with this poor little rich boy stunt. Having me represent you doesn't make you look innocent; it makes you look like an arrogant jackass. If the witness's story holds, you are going to trial.
LOGAN: Hm. The guy's lying.
CLIFF: June 27th, you gave testimony saying you couldn't remember a thing. Now he comes forward saying he saw you, bloody knife in hand, ranting like a maniac over a dead body.
LOGAN: And what exactly did I say?
CLIFF: "The expletive racial expletive had it maternal expletive coming."
JOY: Mmm, chef's kiss. Delicious.
HZ: Beautiful. There's a lot of Cliff this episode, so I am happy as fuck.
JOY: God, it's good to see him.
HZ: Logan says that the witness is lying.
JOY: But no! It's not the same guy.
HZ: It's not?
JOY: Mmm-hmm.
HZ: So Logan should have a lineup for bridge witnesses so he can pick out the one that he saw who told him to drop the knife.
JOY: Yes, precisely.
HZ: During this, Cliff answers his phone, even though he's too busy to talk. Surely he shouldn't have it on during his lawyer chat.
JOY: Dude, this doesn't track for me in terms of Cliff and professionalism. Taking a call in the middle of a client meeting and then doing that caller's bidding, committing some kind of fraud or crime in front of his client?
HZ: It's Veronica, needing a favour.
VERONICA: Cliffy. Need a quick favour.
CLIFF: No can do. I'm right in the middle -
VERONICA: Cliff, come on, you owe me!
CLIFF: I owe you? Who unconfiscated all your fake college IDs?
VERONICA: Who got the Lincoln out of your ex's name?
CLIFF: Well, who helped put that lien against Lee's Wok and Donut?
VERONICA: And who proved that stripper was colourblind?
CLIFF: Okay. Who am I calling and what am I giving them?
HZ: So he hangs up in front of Logan, phones the operator, and does some amazing distress-sounding bullshitting, just right in front of Logan:
CLIFF: Hello? My - my daughter's disappeared. She left her husband and ran off with some wild girlfriend - I think they got into some kind of trouble but I'm sure it's not her fault. The police said they were headed to Mexico, but no one's seen them - I just need to know if she's okay. Please: could you tell me if she's used her card?
HZ: It's like a magic trick.
JOY: Yeah, it's beautiful.
HZ: I don't think Cliff cares because he doesn't want to be Logan's lawyer. Throughout the episode, he's telling him to get a real lawyer. Then Lamb pushes Logan by the shoulders along a corridor into a cell which is occupied already by Aaron Echolls. It's all the season one terrifying people, this episode. Abel Koontz, Clarence Wiedman, Aaron Echolls.
JOY: Fucking Lamb had Aaron transferred this morning, just so these two yahoos could be in a cell together.
HZ: Is that it allowed?
JOY: Just for funsies?
HZ: Can you just transfer someone to freak out their son?
JOY: Doesn't seem like a worthy use of government funds.
HZ: So then they have a fun chat about whether Aaron murdered Lily or not, and he's like, "I don't remember, it was probably angry Duncan." And everyone's like, "We've forgotten about angry Duncan, it's just happy Duncan this season. I can't remember if I tried to kill Veronica, I was just really pissed off.”
JOY: Yeah, you know, classic dad stuff. You know when your dad needs to blow off some steam so he ploughs your girlfriend and then murders her, and then also tries to kill your new girlfriend?
HZ: Dads will be dads.
JOY: And Aaron also wants Logan to get a real lawyer.
AARON: Come on, Logan. Let me help you. Let me call some guys down at the firm.
LOGAN: They gave me a lawyer.
AARON: A real lawyer, not some public servant with a mail-order diploma and a three hundred dollar suit.
CLIFF: Two for five hundred, actually, but your point remains valid. You. You got bail. Let's go.
LOGAN: Bail? What? How? You said, you said my name wouldn't buy me -
CLIFF: Judge Bloom and I schvitz at the same gym.
HZ: Amazing.
JOY: How convenient.
HZ: At school, Duncan and Dick are hanging out, and I didn't think that they were particular friends.
JOY: I think they're just adhered by the glue of Logan. Dick is particularly disgusting.
HZ: In Dick's locker is written the word ‘DICK!’.
JOY: Oh my god.
HZ: Exclamation mark.
JOY: Oh my fucking god.
HZ: Is that so he can remember who he is?
JOY: Yeah. Yeah. And how to spell it.
HZ: Then Weevil rocks up.
JOY: Yeah, a little confrontation.
HZ: This seems to be the way they find out that Logan's in jail.
WEEVIL: Now they got a witness to your boy killing Felix and they're gonna hold him. Jail can be scary place for such a sensitive boy.
DICK: Wait, did I miss a state proposition or something? Is it now a crime to kill a Mexican?
HZ: Of course, Dick has to be a gross racist about it, because when Logan's not around to do the gross racist jokes at Weevil -
JOY: Somebody's got to bear that burden.
HZ: One of Weevil's dudes actually gets a line, and a name. Thumper. And they're all upset that Logan got bail.
THUMPER: These white boys get away with everything. We shoulda done something about that guy months ago.
HECTOR: Seriously, bro. People are saying stuff, man.
WEEVIL: What do you mean, ‘stuff’?
HECTOR: I mean, my little brother the other day asked me if it's true that PCH stands for ‘Panty Club for Homos’. Yeah. Heard it at school.
JOY: "Panty Club for Homos"?
HZ: Panty Club for Homos. That, as an insult acronym, needs work.
JOY: Listen, as a gay, I just want to say that this acronym is so absurd that I can enjoy it. I'm sure that take is not for everyone, but I think Panty Club for Homos is so bad, and so absurd.
HZ: But then the toxic heterosexuality of Neptune is so powerful that this acronym can fell them all. They're so terrified of the idea of homosexuality, and there being a club of panties.
JOY: No Neptune man could stand against the threat of being labelled a member of the Panty Club for Homos.
HZ: What even is a panty club? Is it where they stitch panties?
JOY: I think it's a club where you all have panties. Remember when Logan and Duncan had matching boxer shorts at Christmastime? It's like that, but with panties, and then there's more of them, and then I guess you wear them under your motorcycle clothes.
HZ: Maybe that makes sense, so they don't have a lot of boxer fabric bunched up under the leather.
JOY: Exactly. It sounds aerodynamic to me, so, I mean, if this is the direction the PCH gang is taking, it seems practical.
HZ: Yeah, but they're not taking that direction, because their attitude is that men must be violent or they are unmanned.
JOY: Yes.
HZ: We also get a closer look at one of Weevil's chest tattoos, which is a dog wearing a fedora.
JOY: Oh god.
HZ: Did you not see that?
JOY: I somehow missed that. Excuse me, I must google. Oh, noooo! Is that… Do you guys have the crime dog in the UK? McGruff, I think is his name?
HZ: No.
JOY: Hang on a second. McGruff dog detective. Oh my god, another incredible... OK, google "McGruff dog detective" and tell me if you think that dog looks similar.
HZ: This is so confusing.
JOY: He's always wearing a trench coat, but not a hat. Oh, I found one with a hat.
HZ: I'm not sure this is the same breed as McGruff. It looks angrier.
JOY: OK.
HZ: Yeah, it's got a coat, not a hat.
JOY: You know what's a really great way - if people around town are starting to assert that you belong to something called the Panty Club for Homos, a great way to shake that rep and shove it in everybody's faces is set someone's house on fire. Set someone's entire home on fire.
HZ: You know, repression can make a lot of sparks.
JOY: It's true.
HZ: This is extraordinary. Lamb is driving Logan home. Maybe he does Uber in his spare time? And Logan hasn't stopped the quips this episode, even in his serious situations he's been in, but he's really not doing his best material.
LOGAN: The best thing about two days in jail? Two days' worth of Ellen on the TiVo. That's sweet viewing.
HZ: Lamb is not really listening, partly because the joke is bullshit, but also he's heard something on the police radio and they pull up at the Echolls house, which is on fire. And Lamb's compassionate reaction is, "That's going to mess up your TiVo."
JOY: Boo.
HZ: But at least all those photos of Aaron Echolls are no longer a concern.
JOY: Oh, yes. Thank god we've eliminated a significant amount of Aaron Echolls memorabilia in one fell swoop.
HZ: Although, his Oscars!
JOY: His precious Oscars. Oh no - the urn, the urn of Lynne's seawater.
HZ: Yeah, well, they could go and get more seawater.
JOY: That's true.
HZ: There's loads of it. Logan, having lost most of the people that are beloved to him, has also lost his possessions. He's kind of freed by it in a way, isn't he?
JOY: Yes.
HZ: Then at school, Logan and Dick are having lunch, eating pizza. Logan showing off his ankle tag, dropping the Martha Stewart references. And Weaver on the PCHers rock up angry with some paperwork, allowing Logan to resume his job of making gross racist quips.
WEEVIL: What the hell is this?
LOGAN: Hm. Esta? Una? What is their word for paper?
DICK: Uh, ‘papero’.
LOGAN: Okay, I'll translate, just don't tell the ESL teacher I helped you cheat. That's an eviction notice.
WEEVIL: You bought my grandmother's house?
LOGAN: That's right. Su casa is mi casa. But in my defence, Weevil, I do need a new one.
JOY: This is bad news, huh.
HZ: Detention is so long ago, isn't it?
JOY: Yeah, remember when they just were playing sexy poker together?
HZ: Why didn't Weevil get that tattoo? How quickly can the cash sale of a house go through? Days, really?
JOY: Yeah, this seems... Well, maybe when you're rich enough, shit can just get...
HZ: But still, like here the legal process takes a few weeks. Unless he actually did the sale a few weeks ago, thinking, "Well, things will probably bubble up with Weevil again."
JOY: “If they set my house on fire…”
HZ: “Or just some other thing, like if he looks at me funny.” This is a true rich boy arsehole move. It's pretty indefensible, isn't it?
JOY: Yes.
HZ: Because it has serious consequences for Weevil's grandmother, and also she's lost work because she's not cleaning the Echolls house anymore.
JOY: Right.
HZ: Weevil smacks Logan's pizza into his face, and a fight is about to ensue, but a teacher breaks it up. I feel like that's not going to be the end of things.
JOY: No, it seems like Logan and Weevil have unfinished business.
HZ: The business that this plotline finishes with this episode is, exhausted after a long week of finding dead bodies and watching Abel Koontz die, Veronica goes to the Neptune Grand to curl up with her, quote, "adorable, honest boyfriend." Then sees an argyle shirt lying on the floor with a magazine over his face. So immediately she lies on top of him, and woops...
JOY: Mount that sweater! Oh no, it's on your ex-boyfriend, not your current boyfriend. Chekhov would like you to be aware that here it is, his short-sleeved argyle sweater polo, once again.
HZ: Because, even though Logan presumably has the money to get his own hotel room, he's moving in with Duncan, which is quite sweet. I feel like they could both use the company as emancipated minors. So he's having to borrow the blue Duncan clothes, which is weird because Duncan then walks in wearing a kind of sludge greeny-brown Tshirt.
JOY: Maybe they're just like, "And now we've doubled our wardrobe," and they're just trying each other's stuff on. Experimenting with their looks.
HZ: The other big story this episode is that it's the sheriff election between Keith and Lamb. And this scene where Veronica is watching it on TV with a party going on behind her was familiar probably to anyone who went to a Hillary Clinton party in November 2016, where things become increasingly sombre as the results come in.
JOY: Yeah.
HZ: I wasn't at a Hillary Clinton party, I was in a horrible airport hotel at Heathrow Airport in London, which seemed about the right kind of setting for that. But the good thing about it is that Cliff is there, and I was so happy to see him, and he's eating a cocktail weenie and demanding fresh cocktails from Veronica in a plastic cup.
CLIFF: You're out of cocktail weenies, and I'm out of cocktail.
VERONICA: We're out of gin.
CLIFF: I'm not particular.
NEWS ANCHOR: And our latest results now show Don Lamb nosing ahead by a percent.
CLIFF: Whatever it is, make it a double.
HZ: At the sheriff's department things are more festive. Lamb is chomping a big cigar because he's a cliché.
JOY: Why do people cigar?
HZ: Columbo cosplay?
JOY: I don't know if that's a strong enough reason, Helen.
HZ: Lamb is declared the winner of the election. It's a tight race, isn't it?
JOY: He wins by like one percent.
HZ: Keith handles the disappointment well, Veronica doesn't. She's like, "We should have released the tape of the bus explosion."
JOY: Veronica!
KEITH: Honey, it's over. Go on to your boyfriend's party. I've got Cliff to keep me company, right Cliff?
CLIFF: Right. I promise to hold his hair back if he has to make sick in the toilet.
HZ: "Make sick." All I need from this show really is Veronica, Keith and Cliff as an odd family. And maybe Clarence as their difficult, murderous neighbour.
JOY: Yes! I feel like they could just pare it down to that as the cast, and make it a sitcom, and we'd be in business. Like a noir sitcom.
HZ: At the sheriff's station, everyone's celebrating and hugging and having a party, but Lamb is sort of sitting, just bathed in green light, and not really participating in it. And when Keith calls to congratulate him, he doesn't want to talk to Keith, even though it's a great opportunity to say some really shitty things to him. So Sacks, wearing his Lamb campaign boater - are those a real thing, campaign boaters? - he talks to Keith, and from that Keith learns that they have brought the bus up to land.
JOY: Dun dun dun. Just hang on to that bus news for one second, because first, right, Keith pulls an incredible power move. For a guy who just lost the sheriff's election, Keith has a hell of a moment here. He brings Aaron up into the interrogation room and he's like, "I'm here because of my daughter."
HZ: And Aaron's like, "That's funny, so am I."
JOY: Quips, quips, quips.
KEITH: I just want you to know that if anything happens to my daughter in say, the next seventy, eighty years?
You're the one who's gonna pay for it.
AARON: Now, did you come all the way out here just to give me that tough guy speech?
KEITH: No, I came all the way out here to show how easily I can get to you.
JOY: Keith!
HZ: Oh, Power Keith. He doesn't pull out Power Keith that often, but genuinely, he's able to do terrifying when he wants.
JOY: Yeah, yeah.
HZ: Brilliant. Everyone is on great form this episode. Admittedly, all Duncan has to do is lean against some lockers or walk into a room wearing argyle.
JOY: He's nailing it.
HZ: In season one, after Lynn died, Aaron embarked on this course of glassblowing and different classes, and he's still doing that as he awaits trial. He just got a psychology degree, and is now reading Tolstoy and Turgenev.
JOY: Fucking grief curriculum Aaron, going strong. Incarceration curriculum Aaron.
HZ: And a wonderful dad vs dad scene.
JOY: This is, yeah, so intense.
HZ: It's all about them dads. I shouldn't have been surprised that a Mars would take the law into their own hands, but Keith clearly still wants to be on the bus case and is frustrated that Lamb is like, "I don't give a shit about your voicemail, just gonna blame it on the driver and mental illness and alcoholism and whatever, fuck you, bye."
JOY: He did say that, didn't he?
HZ: In so many words. So Keith breaks in to the evidence hanger thing where the mangled bus is, which seems not wise, and also not legal.
JOY: Definitely not legal. Putting a lot of things at risk here, Keith.
HZ: So he boards the boss and he snoops around, but then he hears a guard going, "Anyone in there?" So he hides on the floor of the bus, and thus finds a clue.
JOY: A dead rat, duct-taped to the bottom of a seat. Helen, what could it mean?
HZ: Well, it's seeing god. Maybe it's rat church.
JOY: Yeah, I'm open to it.
HZ: I imagine, though, that many crimes have been perpetrated in the course of this episode, so let us repair now to our resident legal expert and southern Californian marshmallow Lo Dodds for this week's LoDown.
THE LODOWN
JOY: Lo. Lo.
LO DODDS: Yes?
JOY: If I was the sheriff of Neptune -
LO DODDS: You could do it, Jenny.
JOY: Thank you. Great to have your vote in advance. And let's say there was a father son duo, and they were each accused of murder, and the father was being held in a different facility, and I brought the son in to the county jail, would I be able, just because I felt like it, to transfer the dad into the same facility and then same cell as his son?
LO DODDS: If you're asking whether Lamb could do that, could orchestrate that happening, it would depend on what his particular motivation for doing that is. So Aaron, according to what he says, he's just been transferred from county, which means he's either in county jail, so let's say Orange County or LA County jail, and they have for some reason transferred him to the sheriff's holding cell, because this doesn't appear to be jail. This is like the Andy Griffith holding cell they just have there in the sheriff's department. And so you would be doing that if, say, you were transferring to a different jail, which Aaron could be doing. If you are a wealthy person who is accused of a crime, you can pay to go to a municipal jail, which is not really fancier, but you may be less likely to get shanked.
JOY: Sure.
LO DODDS: There are less dangerous criminals in that one, so he might have been doing a transfer. But your theory that Lamb orchestrated this to get him there probably makes more sense, that he just made up a reason to have him held there for a bit and then sent back to county jail while he awaits trial.
JOY: And, side Q: is there any kind of meaningful difference between getting shanked and getting shivved, or is it pretty much the same thing?
LO DODDS: From my vast experience of shanks and shivs, you could get shanked with a shiv. You can get shivved with a shiv.
HZ: I once was sitting on a bus in London behind a kid who was probably between eight and ten, trying to impress these much older guys going, "Yeah, I'm gonna gun him up with my shank, I'm gonna gun him up with my shank," and they're like, "Oh really? And then what?" And he was like, "I'm gonna fuck a nice pussy, I'm gonna fuck a nice pussy!" It was the saddest music in the world. When you're brought into a lineup, as Logan is, are you allowed to do a whole like, "I'm auditioning for SNL" kind of bit?
LO DODDS: I don't know if you know this, but the police really love it when people accused of crimes are chatty. Logan has been read his Miranda rights here, so anything he says is gonna be admissible, or any something he says that's incriminating is gonna be admissible, so I don't think at any point someone's going to try to shut him up.
HZ: Right - even if he's just quoting Sally Fields, which is unlikely to be necessary as evidence.
LO DODDS: It's also probably not gonna be a reference that anyone gets these days, I think.
HZ: Clarence Wiedman is like, "I paid off Amelia DeLongpre in marked bills." Does he have a tracker on every bill? Because he's very quickly seeing them being spent at a motel, and in Vegas.
JOY: How does it work? How do you track a bill?
LO DODDS: Yeah, didn't you know that, that all of your money has little GPS tracking devices on it? Sorry, no, that doesn't happen, no. When they say that bills are marked it means they've physically marked them with some invisible ink, or maybe visible ink, depending on how fancy the operation is, or they have photocopied them and/or written down all the serial numbers so they know that those are the exact bills that they are looking for. So when someone robs a bank or they pay off a ransom, and they go to arrest a person and they can prove this is the money that came from us. You are in possession of this money, this is just not your extra $200,000 that you had lying around. So when Clarence Wiedman says they started showing up at the hotel, this makes no sense for two reasons. One, if he tracked Amelia to the hotel, he would know she was there, and he wouldn't need to check, because it sounds like he broke in in the middle of the night and started going through their cash register to compare the bills with the photocopies that he had. That seems unlikely. And two, because he wouldn't have been able to track, as in GPS track, the money to that hotel.
HZ: So a convenient bit of storytelling.
LO DODDS: Yeah, well, I don't know. Clarence is pretty nefarious; if he did track her there and he didn't know she was staying there, I don't put it past him to break in and check the cash register, but that seems like an extra amount of work.
JOY: Seems like a lot of legwork.
HZ: It would be easier to put a tracker in the envelope of money, right?
LD Yeah, you could do it the way - what was the kid? Yolanda's brother. Put the tracker in the rubber duck. You could do it that way, like put it in the briefcase. I'm sure they do that.
JOY: Let's say there was a gigantic school bus that had been hauled up a cliff from the depths of the crashing Neptunian waves, and that bus was living in an evidence garage somewhere owned by the police, and I wanted to break in there and have a look-see for myself, see if there were any, like, rats taped to anything, I don't know - gosh, that sounds illegal, doesn't it?
LO DODDS: It's so illegal, and it's worse than illegal because fucking Keith! I can't handle this, he is compromising evidence. He's giving the defence counsel, if and when there is one, the ability to cast that evidence into doubt. To plant reasonable doubt about that evidence. And he's not even doing it stealthily. If he was gonna do it, he could have slipped in through a window, but he bolt cuts the door, so the police now have to disclose to any potential defence attorney this evidence could be compromised along with any other evidence that is in that storage facility.
HZ: Unless he installs a new bolt on the way out.
LO DODDS: Yeah, if he does, if he did it without the police knowing, so the police didn't have to disclose it, great. But there have been cases like this before where evidence lockers have been compromised. Thousands of cases are put in jeopardy when this happens.
HZ: Shit.
JOY: Oh my god.
HZ: We were curious, Lo, that Logan has just managed to buy Weevil's grandmother's house, seemingly in minutes. Even if you're paying cash, how quickly can a house sale go through? Because there's paperwork and shit.
LO DODDS: Super quick. It's super quick if you do not care about getting it inspected. If somebody wanted to buy my house right now and said, "Sight unseen, I'll give you a million dollars, all you have to do is give me a quitclaim deed," it can go through pretty quickly. The whole eviction thing, that would not happen. If you have a lease, and the owner or the landlord sells the property, normally in California your lease obligations transfer with that sale so the new owner has to honour the lease. If she was in default or something, like she was behind on her payments, then he would have some remedies there, but he wouldn't be able to evict her the next day for no reason just because he bought it.
HZ: Jenny, any lines that you will be tattooing on your body next to the dog in the hat?
JOY: Next to the dog and the hat, I'm gonna have to put a two line conversation in which Gia asks, "What do you think about Dick?" And Veronica says, "Uhh, Casablancas, I presume?" While hurriedly clearing and purifying her mind of all her filthy Duncan thoughts.
HZ: Do you think Duncan has genitals? I imagine him being more like a Ken doll.
JOY: A Ken doll, for sure. Ken doll, bless him.
HZ: And that's why you've got so many Duncans, because you've got Doctor Barbie, Pool Party Barbie...
JOY: Yes, Socialist Barbie.
HZ: I was very amused by the conversation when Veronica and Clarence have left Mike's room, having dangled him out the window, and she says to him, "Wow, where'd you learn that interrogation technique?" And he says, "Harvard." A joke from Clarence Wiedman, a joke!
JOY: Right!
HZ: And what's your score for this episode, Jenny?
JOY: Oh my god, I liked it a lot. I think it was tight and full and so much happened, and it was very entertaining.
HZ: Yes. What I admire is that you get this compelling mystery of the week, but you also get movement on several of the long arcs like Felix's murder, the bus crash, the badness of Lamb, and a lot of these characters that I was thrilled, thrilled to see. Who'd have thought I'd be thrilled to see Clarence Wiedman?
JOY: Yeah, yeah, what a second season shocker. Wiedman, a welcome return.
HZ: The welcome Wiedman. And even though it was such a full episode, there are also these scenes where Veronica is the motel checking out the different rooms, and they're quite quiet, and I found that change of pace very effective as well.
JOY: Yeah, OK, this is a great example of a jam-fucking-packed episode where everything kind of just hangs together really beautifully, and the change in pace and all of the development, it all feels really, really good.
HZ: There are a few things where I didn't feel like all of the ends had been tied up, but generally I didn't feel like I'd been bullshat at all. That's a nice feeling.
JOY: So I will happily time travel to deliver it 4.8 Palm Pilots in the bottom of an icemaker at a motel in the middle of nowhere.
HZ: I'm impressed that Palm Pilot was still working after ice, and also they held charge much better than today's phones.
JOY: Oh yeah.
HZ: I thought it was very, very strong. I'm gonna give it 4.6 walls of motel art.
JOY: Nice. Guess that's this episode of Veronica Mars investigated.
HZ: Case closed.
JOY: That was Veronica Mars Investigations Season 2 Episode 6: Rat Saw God.
HZ: Watch season 2 episode 7 and join us next time to investigate it.
JOY: Find the show on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @VMIpod.
HZ: The website, where the show has a nice lie down wearing Duncan’s argyle shirt, is vmipod.com.
JOY: Stuck at home with no enamel pins to adhere to your various stay at home garments? Then worry no longer: we have some fabulous pins and even a Tshirt available in our online store that you can find by visiting the aforementioned website VMIpod.com. We also have a donate link there in case you don't want any stuff and you just love us so much that you want to support the show.
HZ: Also on the website, you can find transcripts of each episode and you can find the collection of cards that Jenny Owen Youngs is designed to help you keep track of the Neptune residents.
JOY: Hey, I'm Jenny Owen Youngs, and in addition to making this podcast, I make another podcast about a petite blonde protagonist, called Buffering the Vampire Slayer. And I also make a bunch of music which you can hear at jennyowenyoungs.com.
HZ: Does Joss Whedon make cameos in Buffy?
JOY: I believe only in Angel. There's an episode where somebody who is in a complete monster suit, I think, maybe got fired on the set and Joss took over and just played this monster. But I don't think he has any lines or anything.
HZ: I am Helen Zaltzman and I make other podcasts: Answer Me This, wherein we answer questions from our listeners on a huge range of topics, and the Allusionist, which is an entertainment show about language, which is a useful thing to know more about. You can find those in the podplaces and answermethispodcast.com and theallusionist.org.
JOY: This episode was edited and mixed by Helen Zaltzman.
HZ: The music is by Martin Austwick and Jenny Owen Youngs.
JOY: The sheriff of this town is Hrishikesh Hirway.
HZ: The show is distributed by PRX.
JOY: Until next time, who’s your daddy?
HZ: Who’s your daddy? Do you think Cliff's a daddy?
JOY: Cliff may not be a dad, but he's definitely a daddy.
