VMI 2.08 Ahoy, Mateys! transcript
Listen to this episode at VMIpod.com/2-08
Content note: Veronica Mars contains heavy themes, and this episode contains storylines concerning violence, drugs, murder and gay-shaming.
A LONG TIME AGO ON VERONICA MARS:
Get ready for some violence: Veronica follows the trail of the murder witness right to the crime family the Fighting Fitzpatricks, and nearly gets an unwanted face tattoo for her trouble.
Plus: Logan is clonked on the head, bundled into a van and masked interrogators play Russian roulette with his body parts - yes, the PCHers are also investigating the murder, in their own way.
Keith’s trying to find the person who is harassing the parents of Marcos, a student who died in the bus crash. Who’s been leaving toy schoolbuses around their home and voice recordings of their dead son?
...that happen to be from their son’s pirate radio show, a cult favourite amongst the kids of Neptune. Psychics on local TV and this, sure.
And Duncan has some dreams about Meg and finally gets round to reading that letter he found in her air vent.
JOY: A playboy-loving bootyhound, I’m Jenny Owen Youngs.
HZ: And working on my models, and if the paint dries then the colour won't match, I’m Helen Zaltzman.
You’re listening to Veronica Mars Investigations season 2 episode 8: Ahoy, Mateys!
JOY: Helen, I want to thank you for letting me be the fuckboy of this pod.
HZ: A fuckJOY.
JOY: A fuckJOY. Yes, thank you. J-O-I, if you don't mind. I get to have all the fuckboi lines, have a devil-may-care attitude, and I recently acquired some fuckboi sweatpants.
HZ: Wow.
JOY: They are my quarantine indulgence sweat pants, and I wasn't expecting them to be so fuckboiish, but they really are, and I have some news for you, Helen: fuckboi sweatpants are nice.
HZ: What distinguishes a fuckboi sweatpant from a sweatpant?
JOY: They're very tapered. They're very narrow at the ankle.
HZ: Well, that's smart, so you don't trip over the fabric.
JOY: Right. Right. And then the crotch is just ever so slightly dropped.
HZ: Does it draw the eye?
JOY: It definitely implies something. It's like, "We didn't do this as like a garment statement, we just did it because wow."
HZ: Good to keep it breezy down there, Jenny.
JOY: Yeah, of course. Thank you for indulging me in this conversation.
HZ: Which fuckboi garment will Jenny get next? Tune in next time to find out.
JOY: I'm going to bet puka shell necklace.
HZ: Oh, yeah. And now to recap the episode!
JOY: Finally, it's what we've all been waiting for, Helen. It's a window into the dreams of Duncan Kane at long, sweet last.
HZ: New Duncan: Dreamer Duncan. And he even gets cockblocked in his own dreams.
JOY: Cockblocking himself. Cockblocked by his subconscious.
MEG: You made promises. You could save me. All you have to do is want to.
VERONICA: I've heard enough. Have you heard enough?
MEG: What does she have? What does she have that I haven’t?
VERONICA: Well, I'm conscious. And that's just for starters.
JOY: Well, it's hard to believe in a dream sequence when Veronica is wearing a long-sleeved mesh shirt over a black bra.
HZ: And rollerskates. Nice touch, Duncan's subconcious.
JOY: Yeah.
HZ: And then Veronica gags Meg, if you want to get very literal, or maybe she's just putting a breathing mask on her for our times.
JOY: It's interesting that she's using an eye mask to gag Meg.
HZ: Maybe that's just what she had to hand. She got it free on a plane.
JOY: Right. Right right right right right.
HZ: Or all the Mars gags were out on jobs. They have to check them out the Mars Gadget Library.
JOY: Sure, sure.
HZ: Then Veronica smacks Duncan in the face. What does this say about their relationship?
JOY: Unknown.
HZ: I don't think that dreams are necessarily to be taken too seriously, but since this is a dream in a fiction show that's trying to tell you something to advance the plot, I suppose it is just trying to cast some doubt on Duncan's complete happiness in and commitment to his relationship with Veronica. Because there's still this Meg yearning.
JOY: Yes, he seems very conflicted.
HZ: But the punch in the face wakes him up, and then he overhears Veronica telling Logan about her investigation of the cigar store and whether Dr Tom Griffith is a drug pipeline, which Logan's paediatrician was until he got struck off.
JOY: What the fuck? What's up with this town?
HZ: I don't know - what's in the water? Is it just opiates in the water? And alone, Duncan examines the envelope he took from Meg's air vent last episode.
JOY: Looking emo as hell! This is a emo music video outtake. And then he drops the letter from Chris Talley into a small drawer of a nightstand, which is of course topped with a small scooter sculpture. Why not?
HZ: This hotel room has all of the ornaments, as befits a presidential suite. I noticed this envelope had a lot of large, jagged Sharpie writing on it, so whoever Chris Talley in Seattle is, they write in a very clear, visible way for cameras; that's thoughtful. And on the back of the envelope, they wrote "Private and confidential, this means you." Duncan is obeying that instruction, because he doesn't open it until the end of the episode. Such a good boy. While Duncan is contemplating that, Veronica searches ethicalmedical.net, a free resource for holding physicians accountable. If you go to it, it links back to Warner Brothers website. And she finds that Dr Tom Griffith was reprimanded for whatever "inappropriate off-site practise" is, involving someone called Danny Boyd. File that away for a few minutes. And then, very exciting news, Jenny: not only Weevil, but Weevil in a dark henley. It's a message for you.
JOY: This is private and confidential, for Jenny's eyes only. Some goofy white kid is inquiring about his eightball.
HZ: Goofy white kid is credited as Wanna Score Boy, and is played by Lucas Grabeel of High School Musical, Family Guy, and... Can you guess?
JOY: Oh, is it Switched At Birth?
HZ: Yes!
JOY: Jesus H Christ.
HZ: This interaction is a real classic rich white racist boy versus menacing, crimy Weevil dynamic.
JOY: Yes, I'll take it. If it gets us Weevil I'll take it.
WANNA SCORE BOY: Hey man, you got the stuff in yet? I'm, like, wondering if I need to take my business elsewhere.
WEEVIL: What stuff?
WANNA SCORE BOY: I ordered an eightball.
WEEVIL: Coke? Who am I, John DeLorian? I never sold coke to you, man.
WANNA SCORE BOY: Hey, this is a $200 shirt, man!
WEEVIL: Really? It's missing some buttons.
WANNA SCORE BOY: Hey, come on, don't jerk me around. I paid one of you biker guys.
WEEVIL: Oh yeah? Describe this biker guy you paid.
WANNA SCORE BOY: I dunno, he was… you know, brown.
JOY: From Weevil's response, it seems like this is not the kind of business that the Panty Club for Homos has been doing lately.
HZ: It's not Purveyors of Coke and Heroin?
JOY: What the Helen! Oh my god.
HZ: It's just Panties for Homos. Don't even bother inquiring. This shirt that he complains is worth $200 does not look worth $200 to me.
JOY: No, but I feel like in the mid-2000s, one of the marks of shirts that were $200 was that they did not look worth $200.
HZ: What a disappointment. He is on the shell necklace team.
JOY: Ah yes, the only team worth being on.
HZ: Over to Mars Investigations, and Keith is passing tissues to the grieving parents of Marcos Oliveres, who died in the bus crash. And only the dad seems to be allowed to speak much, but the mum is played by Norma Maldonado, who as well as having a huge acting resumé, which does not include Switched At Birth that I could see, has directed lots of Jane The Virgin.
JOY: Oh, hell yeah.
HZ: The people that this show just throws away on a one line part, honestly.
JOY: Incredible. So their son died in the bus crash and they've been getting harassed, right? They're getting voice messages of old recordings of his voice. They're getting small model school buses left around their house. Marco's pictures will be turned around.
HZ: The smell of his cologne. And it's been happening since they started suing the school for negligence over the crash. The mum is like, "Can we just move away?" And dad is like, "We don't run!" Which, I don't know is an argument. If he said, "Well, I really hate moving," fine.
JOY: Yeah, moving sucks. We get it, Mr Oliveres. You could just be honest.
HZ: He says he knows who the harasser is, but he wants Keith to find the proof. But he doesn't say the harasser is this person, so he's made it more difficult for Keith than it needs to be, but keeps Keith busy. Busyness keeps the existential angst away.
JOY: Ah yes. Meanwhile, across town, Veronica and Logan are rolling up to Danny Boyd's house, where a whole bunch of gross and disturbing things are about to happen.
HZ: Did you recognise the person who plays Danny Boyd?
JOY: Who is he?
HZ: He's Taylor Sheridan from Sons Of Anarchy. And then he stopped acting and started writing, and he wrote Sicario, amongst many other things.
JOY: I need to see who he is on Sons Of Anarchy. Ah! He's a cop on Sons Of Anarchy. OK, cool. Now I'm caught up. Thank you.
HZ: He answers the door wearing a white tank top. Got a lots of tattoos, including a Celtic armband and a spider web. He is, of course, a toxic Neptune man. That makes him an easy but dangerous mark for Veronica.
VERONICA: Danny Boyd?
DANNY: Yeah?
VERONICA: My name is Laurie Zachs.
DANNY: Oh, I don't need to know your name, honey, just tell me you're eighteen.
VERONICA: Actually -
DANNY: Oh, who's kidding who - like I care!
VERONICA: Okay. The reason I'm here: I was considering having Dr Tom Griffith perform a surgical procedure on me, and I'm one of those people who really likes to check a doctor out.
DANNY: Doctor Griffith, huh? He's a good man, but I wouldn't go getting too crazy, 'cause you don't need very much work done, you know, I mean, besides the obvious. [gestures at Veronica’s boobs.]
HZ: Isn't it an awful excuse for rocking up to his house, being like, "Well, I just wanted to review this surgeon"?
JOY: Who the hell?
HZ: If she was not cute and female, do you think he would immediately be asking how she got his address, for instance? A legitimate question.
JOY: Yeah. Yeah.
HZ: How do you feel about this running joke about Veronica's boobs?
JOY: Is it just me or does it feel kind of like dated?
HZ: No, I think it is not just you.
JOY: I feel like this is not a running joke we would see now. Right?
HZ: I would hope not. I had given Veronica's boobs zero thought until they just kept going on about them.
JOY: Even though they keep referring to them, I forget they exist on a regular basis. It's just not the point.
HZ: Is it just they have to pretend that she has some physical defect that is so significant, a stranger would immediately have earmarked it for surgery?
JOY: Yeah, they have to remind us, they're like, "Oh, the shitbomb in the glasses and ponytail and paint-stained overalls?"
HZ: And he's like, "I'll show you what my problem was."
JOY: Yeah. "Let me just show you, come this way, through this back little path from my front door to the back door of this bar, where..."
HZ: It's the River Stix, named after the Greek river to hell. It's a very lively bar, though. Pool's happening. Some not very sterile-looking tattooing is happening.
JOY: Yeah. Yeah. And so full.
HZ: It did make me think as well - last week we saw a very obvious tattoo that Madison Sinclair had on the arm. This guy's got a bunch of tattoos. Start watching out for the tattoos in the show. What can it mean?
JOY: Wait, does it means something?
HZ: Dunno - I can't remember anything about this series. Danny very cheerfully shows Veronica a patch of blood in the baize of the pool table. It's his blood from a bar fight. And then he lifts up his tank top to reveal this huge diagonal scar across his chest that Dr Tom fixed. And he's like, "Forty-five stitches!" Do people say the number of stitches they've had as a kind of masculine prize?
JOY: Yes, 100 percent.
HZ: How many stitches have you got, Jenny?
JOY: Well, thank you for asking, Helen, I actually had four stitches underneath my chin from a first grade skateboarding accident.
HZ: Did it look like you had a tiny little beard?
JOY: I had to have one of those H-shaped bandages over it, so it did kind of look like I had a goatee. Which is acceptable fuckboi facial hair, so there you go, off to the races.
HZ: Perfect. I don't know what my stitch count has been. Ten? They're not in there now anymore, so how would I know? I don't think it's that great, though, because I have a big scar on my neck. From a bar fight.
JOY: Yeah. Classic Helen behaviour.
HZ: Sure. And I think there were ten-ish stitches, but even though the stitches are long gone, there are these like long legs on the scar, like a millipede.
JOY: Whoa.
HZ: And I look at them and think, "Wow, stitches aren’t cool. They're kind of grim."
JOY: But people probably notice your scar, and then if they were going to fuck with you, they reconsider. Would be my guess.
HZ: Yeah, they know that I'm very danger.
JOY: Yeah.
HZ: It used to have that effect on people when it was still red, but it's faded quite a bit in the last year to basically the colour of the rest of my skin, so I'm going to have to colour it in with a pen.
JOY: Yeah. You should start highlighting that for sure.
HZ: Pop some stitches back in to it.
JOY: Yes! And Helen, I just want you to know I'm afraid of you.
HZ: Good. That's what I wanted in our relationship, Jenny.
JOY: Great, great.
HZ: So we learned that Dr Tom is not only the impromptu surgeon of Danny Boyd, but a friend of the family. And also Danny calls him Dr Griffiths, even though we've been given Griffith in the past - I don't know whom to believe. Whatever happened in this fight, Danny got three months in county for it. And I'm not sure what Tom got punished for, exactly.
JOY: Right, this seems weird.
HZ: Is it illegal to do some surgery outside of official surgical channels?
JOY: That's probably true. But just the fact that like the police or the medical board or whatever found out about it seems weird.
HZ: Then for some reason, Danny calls over Liam Fitzpatrick, who is very tall and even walks in a menacing way. He's like, "Look, this is whatever Veronica's fake name is. Laurie." And this woman who has been in the background calls from behind the pool table that Veronica's real name is Veronica Mars, and she's Keith Mars's daughter, and they go to the same school.
JOY: What is this high school girl doing in this bar?
HZ: Great question Jenny. And Veronica feebly says, "Go Pirates!" Because she's in a situation she may not be able to win with her wits, because the Fitzpatricks, it's just muscle and lack of scruples.
JOY: Yes.
HZ: The song is another in the Veronica Mars soundtrack of British bands. This time the Stereophonics and ‘Dakota’. Not sure why. Not sure what connection it has to the scene. Maybe they just liked it. Or maybe they were like, "Well, the Fitzpatricks are Irish, so let's put a... Welsh band on."
JOY: Close enough.
HZ: It's just across a little stretch of sea.
JOY: Things get bad pretty quick. She does manage to tase Danny as he tries to restrain her, but then a stack of cases of beer are shoved at her. Is that on wheels or something? I couldn't really tell.
HZ: I think it's on a trolley.
JOY: OK, so that gets tossed at her, and before you know it, Liam has her by the throat on the pool table, preparing to give her a face tattoo.
HZ: He throws her on the pool table by the belt.
JOY: So unnecessary. She weighs like 84 pounds.
HZ: Right. He could just gently pick her up in the palm of his hand. Like a baby bird that has fallen out the nest. But no, that's not really his intent. This is one of those scenes in the show where the violence feels really painful and horrible.
JOY: Yeah. This kind of reminded me of the finale of Season 1.
HZ: Yeah, yeah. I do think they do violence very well, but it's very hard to watch. Kristen Bell acts the shit out of it as well, because she really looks like she's suffering.
JOY: Yeah.
HZ: And also he's borrowed this tattoo needle that was just tattooing someone else.
JOY: Unsterile! I'm shocked at you, Liam.
HZ: I think you're supposed to use new needles for every person. So come on. And then he makes a quip about which Lucky Charms marshmallow to tattoo on to her cheek, even though he gets them wrong. There's not actually pink moon or yellow star, apparently.
JOY: It worked enough to get me hungry for Lucky Charms, Helen. Mission accomplished.
HZ: And is he just saying that because that's how Irish-Americans identify? They're like, "That cereal speaks to me."
JOY: The avatar of my identity.
HZ: It's like a little bowl of the motherland.
JOY: Uh-huh, yeah.
HZ: I'm not sure it is sold in Ireland.
JOY: Is it sold anywhere besides the United States?
HZ: I'm not sure it's legal here.
JOY: So, thank god Logan is so bad at listening to instructions because he rolls up, calling 911, smarting off at the mouth, and then ultimately pointing a fucking gun at Liam. A gun!
LOGAN: I've got 911 on the line, who can give me the address here? No one? Yeah, I've got one of those ankle monitors on, does that help? Yeah. The River Stix. There's blood everywhere. Hey Veronica, let's go.
LIAM: Well, lads, let's see how much damage we can do in the next two minutes.
LOGAN: Stop! I've had a very bad year.
HZ: Logan looks excited as well when he rocks up. It's a real hero's entrance, isn't it? Because he's like, "I'm going to rescue Veronica, and when I did that in episode 18 of season 1, we kissed and fell in love, and she loves it when violence happens involving me, so I'm ready for that." And he just looks so excited. But I also love that he's like, "Ah, ankle tag gag." But it works because the Fitzpatricks don't seem to want to get shot, and Liam loosens his grip on Veronica and she rushes out. In the car Veronica sobs. I had really enjoyed Veronica not being in pain or peril for the last few episodes. It was really quite relaxing. Yet here we are. Maybe Logan needed to punch someone, because it doesn't seem to have made Veronica in love with him again.
JOY: No. No.
HZ: She seems really pissed off.
JOY: Well, I think she's traumatised, Helen.
HZ: She's angry at Logan as well for carrying a gun, because she's scared that he's gonna get killed. He's in a reckless mood. He was like, "It's all right, the gun's not loaded, and it was a present from Dick's dad." Like, what a comfort.
JOY: First of all, why is Mr Casablancas running around just doling out guns? He's like, "Oh, it's Halloween, trick or treat, here’s a fucking firearm."
HZ: Well he was probably like, "Logan, you're like an extra son to me. Have one of my precious guns." They had a good time at the range. Also maybe he was like, "This is not going to fit through the shredder, you'd better have it."
JOY: Right, right.
HZ: I think it's weird when Veronica rushes up to Mars Investigations - which I hadn't noticed before is above a shop called Completely Video - she's trying to compose herself at her desk but still crying some, and Keith walks in and he's like, "Oh, everything all right? Well, here's this case I'm working on, did you know Marcos Oliveres?" He doesn't really inquire that much about her emotional distress, and I did also wonder whether her neck would be quite marked.
JOY: Yeah, you'd expect it to be like red or maybe on its way to bruising or something.
HZ: Right. He asks her to ask around at school, so cut to the TV station, where nothing good ever happens.
JOY: Oh, right. There's this, like, really dramatic — like nobody says anything, everyone's staring at her after she asks if anybody knew Marcos.
HZ: I think they're just waiting to go on air. Like the news anchor is straightening his tie.
JOY: Yeah, yeah, she's definitely interrupting them at like the wrong time. And then finally, someone is like, "Listen, nobody really knew Marcos. He just, like, kept to himself and goofed off with the equipment, and do we ever really know each other, and can we? Can anyone ever really know anyone?" This is like the vibe that I'm getting from this kid. It's very intense. And she's like, "Oh, OK."
HZ: Luckily, the next sound we hear is the soothing ocean outside the Mars home as Veronica leafs through the yearbook in which Marcos is not pictured.
JOY: Who is he?
HZ: But her computer pings, and it means she's got emails. Now, kids, back in the day your computer rang a little bell to tell you that an electronic mail had landed in the box.
JOY: Oh, my God. Helen. You know, I used to... wow. I used to once upon a time be so excited to check my email, I couldn't wait to check my email once a day. I was like, "I might have one email and wouldn't that be exciting?" Cut to now, and I would rather walk across hot coals and drink a gallon of milk than log into my email.
HZ: Warm room temperature milk?
JOY: Well, let's not get crazy.
HZ: Veronica's got five emails.
JOY: Oh my god.
HZ: One of them is shopping requests from Keith. Veronica's yearning for an email from Wallace. So she's not forgotten about him, that's good; but no dice. She also gets an anonymous email about Marcos.
VERONICA VOICEOVER: "I heard you're doing an article about Marcos. I figure you probably didn't get much information, so I wanted to send a note so at least you had one thing to quote. Marcos was great. Kinda shy, but really interesting once you got to know him. Sorry not to sign this, but I've got a jealous boyfriend who knew I liked him, so..."
JOY: Jealous boyfriend, who thought they liked Marcos, so just file that away Helen.
HZ: Maybe their boyfriend skated across their dream about Marcos, wearing a mesh shirt and a push-up bra.
JOY: Entirely possible.
HZ: That's how subconscious works. In the other room, Keith is shouting into the phone at some kind of customer service person. It's an act. He's been finding out who purchased an MP3 player he found taped under Mrs Oliveres's car seat, playing looped voice recordings over her radio.
JOY: Would we be remiss if we didn't say that, kids, an MP3 player was like a phone without a phone or any apps - like a phone, but it only has the function of the Apple Music app and that's it.
HZ: Or, it's like that record player that you bought at Urban Outfitters, but a lot smaller and you didn't need to put records on it.
JOY: Yes, OK. Tight.
HZ: It was paid for by the Neptune School District. Veronica's got to investigate at school tomorrow, and we see Vice Principal Clemmons! How long has it been?
JOY: Your buddy, your old pal.
HZ: I love that Clemmons acknowledges his own powerlessness.
JOY: Yeah, I mean, I think he'd rather just deflect Veronica all day, even if it means being like, "Sure, yeah, I'm powerless, yep, whatever you need to think or you need me to say for you to just not entangle me in whatever the fuck you're cooking right now."
HZ: But they were such good pals for a while, sort of, when he was kind of hiring her to do his business.
JOY: Sure. Sure. On his terms, he wants to be involved, fine.
HZ: Yeah. But he deflects her off to Principal Moorehead. Have we met Principal Moorehead before?
JOY: I don't recall seeing him previously.
HZ: We know that he's a serious old type of guy because he's got a bust behind him, and then an antique-style globe on the desk, and a bronze ornament that looks like a mushroom cloud. Serious dude from the 20th century.
JOY: Not enough globes and busts in offices these days, in my opinion.
HZ: It seems like a bit of an unnecessary detour, to Principal Moorehead, but he does give her the card of the school district's lawyers.
JOY: Yeah, that seems to be the whole point of the scene.
HZ: Was it Simon and...
JOY: Simon and Stern?
HZ: So probably Clemmons could have given her that and saved us a minute, but maybe they were like, "Well, we got this globe at the thrift store, I want to use it." Then we cut to the computer room, and there's a slow pan across the computer screen with some kind of photo-editing software open and it's a picture of the pyramids at Giza, except one of them has had the top removed and then there's a scrawled eye above it. What?
JOY: This looks like I drew it with my finger on my iPhone in the mark-up section of editing photos. Hey look, it's Mac! What a delight to see Mac.
HZ: It's only a brief delight for me, because Mac very soon shits on my good opinion of her.
JOY: Oh, can't wait to find out what that's all about.
HZ: Veronica asks if Mac can identify this recording that Keith removed from the car and the MP3 player. Mac immediately recognises it as the pirate radio show Ahoy Mateys!, in which Cap’n Krunk and Imitation Crab talk smack about Neptune High. It's like a very early localised podcast. Initially we hear Marcos's voice saying, "I'm just telling it like it is," so I was like, "Oh no, we've got a shock jock type." But it gets so much worse.
JOY: Yeah.
HZ: Also, Ahoy Matey's!'s graphic has a misplaced apostrophe.
JOY: That's a bit of a bummer.
HZ: It's hard for me.
JOY: But I need to give points for their names, Cap'n Krunk and Imitation Crab.
HZ: Cap'n Krunk is a cereal reference, right? Another cereal reference for this episode.
JOY: Do you guys have Captain Crunch in the UK? Hopefully not. It'll rot your teeth right out of your head. Oh, I bet you loved it when this guy said, "Listen, or walk my enormous plank." That's a dick reference.
HZ: It certainly seemed that way, Jenny. And Mac makes an excuse for it, and she's like, "It's not all crotch-grabbing scatological man humour, there's a little something for everyone," except -
JOY: We never hear anything except that.
HZ: No. We just hear the toxic masc. I was wondering: does Mac like this show solely because she considers it countercultural or underground? Because when we went to her home last series in the baby switch episode, she was set up as being a very erudite person with quite lofty taste in culture. But is she actually a bro? Because all we hear about this show is gross, and we see this list of episodes and some of them seem like the titles adults would have thought up that teens would come up with to demonstrate their hate for school: "Reason Neptune Equals Hades", "Van Clemmons Torture: 101", "Why Cafeteria Food Must Be Banned", "Nerds: Get Laid Or Get Lost". But then it slides to more vile, like "Who's Our Hottest Prostitute?", "Bully Attacks: Why They Rock", and "Peers Show Downsides Of Incest".
JOY: Hah-argh.
HZ: So I don't know why Mac likes this show, and to keep making excuses for it suggests that it's not one to recommend to people. The more you have to apologise for something you're recommending...
JOY: Yeah, but maybe it is just purely a counterculture, underground appeal.
HZ: It feels like they're going for a Howard Stern thing, but it doesn't feel like Mac would listen to that, or Opie and Anthony, or such...
JOY: Well maybe it's because it's localised, and because they spend so much time shitting on, well, the 09ers, but also everyone else, maybe she just likes to hear them voice opinions that she herself feels maybe too even-keeled to express herself?
HZ: There was a month-long gap in the show's schedule over the summer, after which Marcos was no longer in it, so Mac was like, "It went to shit and I stopped listening." She doesn't know that he's dead, because she doesn't know who he is. What she can do is find out where they're broadcasting from, but she wants money.
JOY: She wants RadioShack goods. RadioShack was a store that used to exist...
HZ: And radios were like podcasts coming out of a brick.
JOY: So Veronica does a little research and listens to some episodes of Ahoy Mateys, and in one of them she hears the hosts saying something like, "You name your daughter Roxie, it's guaranteed at some point she's gonna be showing her cans for cash," and I would like to say: hey, that's my mom, fuck you.
HZ: Your mum's called Roxie?
JOY: That's right.
HZ: What a cool name. It's a sassy name.
JOY: It's sassy, and not short for anything.
HZ: Wow. Amazing.
JOY: And so far as I know, she's never showed anyone her cans for cash.
HZ: I feel like maybe these guys are not the skilled broadcasters that Mac has teed them up to be.
JOY: No.
HZ: They also lob in a few suicide and rape jokes, so...
JOY: Oh, hooray.
HZ: Something else for Mac to love.
MAC: Listen and love, my friend.
CAP'N KRUNK: And here it comes, Imitation Crab. The winner of this week's cock of the walk countdown.
IMITATION CRAB: Don't leave ’em hanging, Cap'n.
CAP'N KRUNK: It's Logan Echolls! That's forty weeks running. Rosemary's Baby: the Teen Years. If I was his mother, I'd kill myself too.
IMITATION CRAB: Seriously, Cap'n, you name your daughter Roxie, it's guaranteed at some point she'll be showing her cans for cash.
CAP'N KRUNK: I'm saving up for that very day.
IMITATION CRAB: Or get a varsity jacket and four litres of wine cooler and you can see 'em for free! ...Yeah, Becker's a date rapist, but in his defence, he's hideous and stupid, so meeting girls is hard!
CAP'N KRUNK: So it seems Taylor read the fine print on her abstinence pledge and found a few loop...something? Oh right, holes.
JOY: They assert also that Duncan Kane “can't be that rich and pleasant without hiding a dark secret,” and just, Duncan Kane, "rich and pleasant"? That's about as bland as it gets, it feels very appropriate.
HZ: It feels like he would be too pleasant to really attract their interest.
JOY: Also true.
HZ: Veronica wonders if someone might have wanted revenge on Cap'n Krunk, but it seems like a bit of an extreme revenge to go to, crashing a bus with multiple people on it.
JOY: Yeah.
HZ: At the lockers, Logan turns up and he and Veronica are both wearing pond. What does it mean? They're aligned! They're a pair! And some more rape jokes.
JOY: Hooray.
HZ: On the opposite wall leans Weevil. Jenny loves the way he leans.
JOY: He looks great.
HZ: Another weird bit of information for Weevil to receive, though: Veronica accuses him of working with the Fitzpatricks.
JOY: And at this point he's got to be wondering, what the hell? What's happening? What's going on?
HZ: Well, he sure is fucking wondering, because while Veronica and Mac that night go around tracing the signal of the radio, Weevil is in a clearing surrounded by the PCHers and theatrically holding forth about all these things he's learned about the PCHer connection to the Fitzpatricks.
Whom they call "micks". Do we think that is a slur?
JOY: I think so, right?
HZ: And there's some potato references as well.
JOY: Ugh. Why?
HZ: Although I guess usually the PCHers are the targets of racism and rarely get to dole out slurs.
JOY: Hurt people hurt people.
WEEVIL: Did the rules change? Huh? Are we in business with these potatoheads and I just don't know about it? Did somebody here try to make some extra cash?
HZ: And a conversation that, I think, is maybe a bit overdue between Weevil and Thumper, where Weevil is like, "Didn't you see the witness to the murder? Because you were supposed to be there." And then we get a flashback, back to the murder bridge. Because Weevil's out cold, Felix is in charge, being quite efficient and managerial.
JOY: Yeah, Felix is lording over the group until he gets stabbed by a prone Logan. Now, do we think this is real? Is this real memory?
HZ: Then it's suggested it's not real because Thumper wasn't there, according to Thumper's narrative. So it's confusing.
JOY: This is very... I had a hard time sort of assessing what exactly was going on and what we're supposed to be taking as fact, or as a second-hand flashback.
HZ: I think it's a speculative flashback, like we saw in Season 1 to all the possibilities for Kanes murdering Lilly. Do you remember those?
JOY: Yes, of course. Yes, of course.
HZ: Weevil says, "One way or another I'm getting to the bottom of this, I'm going to find out what's true." Detective Weevil, Jenny!
JOY: I wrote it down too! Detective Weevil! Love to see it.
HZ: Wouldn't it be great if he and Veronica could team up? But she's really oversubscribed. She's in nearly every scene this episode, and the whole episode I was watching it just imagining how exhausted Kristen Bell must have been filming so much stuff, including stunty sequences. She's like Jack Bauer in this. Always on.
JOY: Yes.
HZ: At least she's having some fun with Mac. The bleeps lead them to a house.
JOY: That feeling when the call is coming from inside the Vice Principal's house.
HZ: Bit of a shocker for Clemmons.
JOY: Bit of a shocker for Veronica and Mac - he's wearing a robe.
HZ: Yeah, but he's wearing a T-shirt as well. You don't see any Clemmons skin on display. Veronica, quick-thinkingly, pretends that they are there to see Vincent. Remember him? He was the jerk from episode 1 of this season.
JOY: She throws Mac directly under the Vincent heart-eyes bus. Brutal. And Clemmons is clearly like, "Oh thank god, a girl is here to see my son."
HZ: He takes them to Vincent's special private basement and Vincent doesn't want to let them in. But as soon as he opens the door a crack, Veronica blithely Marses in using a technique that Keith has done before, so it must run in the family. You're just like, "Oh, hey, how you doing?" But like vam through there like a battering ram.
JOY: We must mention that Mac in this scene has like classic late-1990s, mid-2000s hacker hair. It's worked up into tiny balls all over the cap of her skull, basically. That's how you know she can hack.
HZ: Veronica suggests a theory to Vincent, and I was wondering whether it was deliberately bad to shake him out, because it suggests some very non-Clemmonsy behaviour.
JOY: She's grasping at straws, and while she's grasping at straws, she's also making little claw hand gestures at Vincent to indicate that he is Imitation Crab.
VERONICA: I have a theory. Wanna hear it? Here it goes. You and Marcos were buds, and then your dad found out about the radio show you two did together. And when the Oliveres family decided to sue, your dad made you a deal. He'd let you keep pumping up the volume, but he'd need recordings of Marcos, and a key to his house, and your radio knowledge -
VINCENT: What? My dad doesn't know anything about the show. A vice-principal's kid ragging on the school? He would kill me.
HZ: Jenny, you and I make a show together. I don't have a key to your house.
JOY: But if you asked...
HZ: Give me a key to the house, please?
JOY: Yeah.
HZ: No.
JOY: Sure?
HZ: No!
JOY: I shouldn't? I shouldn't.
HZ: No.
JOY: OK, then no. I refuse to give you a key to my house.
HZ: So then she wants to know why Marcos quit the show a month before the bus crash, and we learn he went to camp and then came back a changed person, and didn't want to do it.
VINCENT: It was out of the blue. He must've gotten tossed off by a pony, cos he came back all weird. He called and said he wasn't doing the show anymore.
VERONICA: Well, did you ask him why?
VINCENT: Yeah, we got together for hot cocoa and cinnamon toast and talked all about his feelings.
MAC: Oh! Like girls! Cap'n Krunk really elevated the comedy.
JOY: Yeah, I don't think any of the comedy could be considered elevated, at least from the samples we're given.
HZ: Get it together, Mac. You can do better.
JOY: So, Keith has a little conversation with Mr. Oliveres, who is not really interested in the info that he's been gathering, and while that's happening Veronica is checking his credit card records, where she discovers he paid for Camp SelfQuest, which, as she googles and discovers, is a sort of like de-gayification camp? Un-gay yourself?
HZ: Unfortunately so. One of the show's rare acknowledgements of the existence of gayness, and the only form of gayness the show acknowledges is miserable or problematic.
JOY: And also, now, in this case, dead. Already dead. We will never see this character.
HZ: Strange cut to a burglar alarm making some bleeps, and a hand switching it off. And then the person who owns the hand being grabbed by Keith and forced against a table face down.
JOY: This is a neighbour whose wife won't let him keep beer in his house, so he keeps it at their house and he just like slips in periodically to drink a beer? I'm so confused.
HZ: Wouldn't it be easier to keep it in the garage?
JOY: Yeah. And also, why isn't this guy like, "Who the fuck are you?"
HZ: Ned, he's Ned.
JOY: Why is this guy just like, "Oh, it's just a fucking dude attacking me when I enter the house where I store my beer. I'm not going to question it, I'm just gonna leave."
HZ: Keith then calls up Mr Oliveres to confirm the legitimacy of Ned and his beer plot, and you think, well, if Mr Oliveres was leaving Keith to stake out his home, he would be like, "Oh, and by the way, if someone called Ned comes round, it's not weird."
JOY: Yeah, just like a simple heads-up.
HZ: He goes off minus beer, whereupon Keith spies a toy yellow school bus in the fish tank. And furthermore, he sees a crumpled corner of paper in the trash bin next to it with a Simon and Stern letterhead, and the alarm code number jotted on the back.
JOY: Now, if you were breaking into somebody's house to harass them...
HZ: If!
JOY: When you break into people's houses to harass them, Helen, do you leave crumpled up pieces of paper with the security code on them, just like in the trash can on top, when you're done?
HZ: Love to clue. Love to clue with letterheads. It's an extra little prank for me, Jenny; and it's subtle, you know, they might not notice it, or they might notice it subconsciously and then wake up in the middle of the night, heart pounding, panicking about what the fuck it meant and who put it there and when, how long - are they being watched right now from the bed??
JOY: Yes. OK.
HZ: But yeah, I don't fully understand what all this means, even when it is explained shortly. But over to Logan, who's getting punched, thrown into a van, and driven off. He comes to with his head on what looks like a pond-green pillow, and I thought that's very considerate of them, to get the decor in shades that he likes.
JOY: “We want you to be comfortable for the examination.”
MASKED MAN: Wake up, sleeping beauty.
LOGAN: What the hell is this?
MASKED MAN: It's the people's court, junior. You're on trial for the murder of Felix Toombs. That's your judge and jury. I'm the prosecution. And you? You get to represent yourself.
HZ: There's two masked guys here, and they're PCHers, and I'm assuming that at least one of them is Thumper given that he's been getting occasional lines and most of them aren't allowed to speak. Or aren't paid to speak.
JOY: And there's this horrifying Russian roulette sequence where they're trying to get info out of Logan and aiming the gun at his hand and firing it. Oh, no, thank god, it's on a blank - or an empty chamber, and then ultimately relocating the gun to his dick, and then, when he still swears that he doesn't remember anything...
HZ: Like Kristen Bell, he does some very good acting suggesting he's pissing himself in fear. And then for some reason they just stop tormenting him. Abruptly.
JOY: Right. Well, this is my theory about what goes on in this scene, and tell me if you think I am right or wrong: I think the gun was empty the whole time, like completely empty. Their instructions from Weevil were like, "Ask him, and then like, ask him again, and then like really raise the stakes, and if he still says he doesn't know anything when you're aiming a gun at his dick, then he probably doesn't know anything, and you can go like dump him in a ditch."
HZ: He's tossed out of the van onto a sandy bank.
JOY: But not before he steals the phone they were calling the mysterious instruction giver, and hey, does that little redial move, and it's Weevil on the other end. Hurray! I mean, of course it's Weevil, who else would it be?
WEEVIL: Is it done?
LOGAN: It's just getting started, Weevs. You have no idea the hell you've just brought on yourself.
HZ: What's Logan going to do - evict Weevil's grandma again?
JOY: Oh my god, right. The only thing I can think of that would be worse than Logan evicting Weevil's grandma again is somebody getting fish sticks and chocolate milk for lunch, Helen. Helen! Fish sticks and chocolate milk at the same time!
HZ: I suppose it's to demonstrate that Vincent is a truly terrifying character, deep down - albeit not really guilty of anything at any point except being a bit of an arse. I like that Veronica mocks him, and then steals his french fries. Audacious. Would you steal the french fries of someone you don't even like? I feel like that's only a move you can do with people that like you, and you like.
JOY: Yeah. I don't want to touch the food of somebody I don't like, I think.
HZ: She interrogates him about Camp SelfQuest.
JOY: And he's like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa - just like Jenny Owen Youngs, my friend Marcos was a Playboy-loving booty hound." His line!
VINCENT: Marcos wasn't gay.
VERONICA: Sure about that?
VINCENT: Positive. He talked about chicks all the time. I mean, he wasn't a fairy, he was a Playboy-loving booty hound.
VERONICA: Do me a favour: never describe me.
VINCENT: He was all about girls, all the time.
JOY: Vincent tells us that Marcos was so all about girls that he once almost got his ass kicked by Chekhov's jealous boyfriend! Aha!
HZ: But again, Neptune doesn't have any positive portrayals of gay people, and maybe Vincent has never learned to understand or recognise what that would be like.
JOY: Sure. Sure, sure, sure, sure. Or maybe Marcos was just working overtime to beard himself.
HZ: Yeah, exactly, because of the hostile environment. Veronica immediately goes to the computer room to cook up one of those schemes she comes up with that seem like very haphazard ways to track down someone, like the Ibiza thing the other day, or like her letters to John Smith's parent. But there's only five minutes left of this episode, so it's probably going to work. Then we go to the Sheriff's Department and get a good look at the mural in the corridor there.
JOY: What's on that mural?
HZ: I can't remember it, I was too busy looking at Keith's serious face. Because he's caught between knowing that he's been played a bit by Mr Oliveros, but also feeling sympathetic to the grieving parents of a recently deceased child.
KEITH: Before I'm deposed, there's something I need cleared up.
CARLOS: What's that, Keith?
KEITH: I found fish food floating in the aquarium. For the life of me, I can't make sense out of it.
CARLOS: I suppose the guy who broke in decided to… feed the fish?
KEITH: I know this harassment, whatever the cause, must have been terrible for you. And I feel bad I didn't catch him red-handed. But I can't help but wonder if someone left that last toy bus and that scrap of paper for me to find.
JOY: Now, I have a question: why is the fact that there was fish food on top of the water an indicator that Mr Oliveros left the piece of paper, and the bus, himself?
HZ: I suppose it's that it suggested the fish food had been put in fairly recently in order to be still floating, and therefore wouldn't you have seen the bus in the fish tank? And if you'd put the bus in after the fish food, then it probably would have sunk some of the fish food or created a hole in the top of the water where the fish food was no longer congregating.
JOY: I don't know about the physics of fish food a hundred percent, but this just seems a little thin to me - but hey, the episode is almost over and we've really got to wrap this up, so I guess I'll buy it.
HZ: Veronica's scheme that she only just hatched is already bearing fruit: she answers her phone as the Radio Broadcast Alliance, and even though whoever phones hangs up immediately, she can just track that number in an instant.
JOY: Sure, why not?
HZ: She turns up outside the house of...
JOY: Roxie!
HZ: Briefly mentioned in that montage of shock jock targets. And if you're thinking, “How am I supposed to care about someone who is very fleetingly mentioned and is basically an extra rather than an actual character?” Don't worry, because she's just a distraction. The real person who called is the guy with one line from the scene earlier, who says that Marcos didn't really speak to anyone at school. That is Roxy's brother Ryan, who's just getting home with some food.
JOY: He lets us know that he was in love with Marcos. He says that Marcos signed out a reverb mic from like the AV lab, and I was like, what that hell is a... And guess what, Helen? A cursory googling revealed to me that, at least in the 1980s, some microphones were produced that had built in spring reverb. Can you imagine it?
HZ: I can imagine it in a kind of 1950s slightly ghostly slow pop song.
JOY: Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh.
HZ: I have a toy reverb mic. It cost £1. It's made of red and yellow plastic because it's for children.
JOY: That sounds awesome. Bring it over the next time you're in Los Angeles.
HZ: I'll try. I don't know if it will still reverb, because £1 might not buy you a reliable toy microphone.
JOY: A lifetime's worth of reverb.
HZ: It doesn't plug in or anything, it's not an XLR, Jenny.
JOY: Ah, OK.
HZ: Couldn't use it for your shock jock show.
JOY: Nooo! My shock jock show, though!
HZ: But Ryan says that Marcos was not necessarily gay, he was on the fence sexually.
RYAN: I kept trying to subtly push him over. I was giving him a back rub this one time, and his parents came home. For some reason, seeing their shirtless son with a boy straddling him was upsetting. They shipped him off to Camp Homophobee and made him promise to never see me again.
HZ: So Ryan is so upset at the parents' homophobia that he's been pranking the parents of a dead person. Seems a little insensitive.
JOY: Yeah, this is where this character doesn't seem so great to me, because two wrongs do not make a right.
HZ: And one final visit to Duncan, who's in bed.
JOY: Duncan's subconcious.
HZ: Yeah. Well, it looks like he's conscious at the time, because it's not all like white and glowing. There's just a blonde head resting on Duncan's bare breast.
JOY: Tits out!
HZ: Tits out. There's that moment where you're like, oh, that's Veronica, and then you realise no! It's Meg!
JOY: Oh my god. Two blondes do make a right.
HZ: It doesn't look like a dream, but we realise it is one when Duncan springs awake, tits in, and then he goes to sit next to his little model scooter and, at last, after a million-week-long episode, goes and opens the letter, and registers as much surprise as his face can do.
JOY: You know what I'm just realising, Helen? I feel like a lot of the time Duncan Kane is like right on par with Keanu Reeves's portrayal of Jonathan Harker in Bram Stoker's Dracula. Barely happening.
HZ: Make Dracula's coffin out of him. And then the end credits, we have a plug for some of the songs on the soundtrack, just to really take the shock and emotional edge out of it. Well, a hectic episode, as Season 2 seems keen to provide, but let us run through the backyard and open the door into the bar run by legal expert and southern Californian marshmallow Lo Dodds, where she will give us this week's LoDown.
THE LODOWN
HZ: Lo, is there a charge for trying to tattoo someone against their will, and, subquestion, is it a crime to tattoo someone with an unsterilized needle?
LO DODDS: Yeah, you would definitely get some charges for that. It's definitely going to be assault. Possibly assault, aggravated battery. There's also a crime in California that's specific for torturing, or for hazing actually, called mayhem or aggravated mayhem. So he'd get charged with that, and that would really put him away for a while - but he would had to have injured her or disfigured her in a noticeable way. It seems like such a whimsical thing, mayhem, so it's weird to hear it, but yeah, it's a bad crime.
JOY: Speaking of how the River Stix is a bar: surely it's not legal for this teen high school girl to be hanging out? What if her family owns the River Stix? Does that change it? Tell us everything about being 18 and being in a bar.
LO DODDS: No, she should not be in the bar. She should not be in the bar. It would be different if the River Stix served food; obviously, you can bring kids and people under 18 into establishments that serve food. But it's clear, based on all the signs that the camera zooms in on, that it's a bar, because there's no one under the age of 21 allowed in that bar. So you have to assume it is just a bar, and Molly should not be there. I don't know that you'd get in that much trouble for her being there, they'd probably fine or something. Depending on how many times it would happen, they might have lost their licence. She's not drinking, that would probably contribute if she is a family member.
HZ: To what extent would they need to serve food to get around that? Would like one peanut suffice?
JOY: It can't be snacks. It has to serve food like a restaurant, so if you go in like a Buffalo Wild Wings you can go to a bar and sit at the bar, or you can sit in the restaurant area, and that's where kids are allowed. You can't sit near the bar, and that includes bar tables.
HZ: Then Logan turns up with his gun, and he's out on bail and he's ankle-tagged. Would he be allowed to have a firearm?
LO DODDS: No. No, it seems unlikely. It's generally, it doesn't have to be a condition of your bail, but since he's on trial for murder, I would find it perfectly reasonable that his bail condition prohibits him from owning firearms or carrying firearms.
JOY: He tells Veronica he can't move out of Neptune because of his ankle tag. How far would the range on his ankle tag allow him to move about? What's the deal there?
LO DODDS: He's got a GPS ankle monitor. Ankle monitors I think in the previous technology operated more like leashes with a range, like so many thousands of feet or whatever, but now, because with the advent of GPS, they're generally going to track him. Either the county is going to do it or they're going to licence it out to a private company that's going to track Logan. Those GPS monitors have to be charged; they have a very short battery life, as does anything with a GPS tracer on it. So Logan would have to probably go back home and charge it, and if it loses charge, he's gonna get dinged. If he accidentally tampers with it, he's going to get dinged. It's also not waterproof, so no surfing Logan, either.
HZ: How does he shower? Does he have to put a plastic bag over his leg?
LO DODDS: Yeah, it'd be like having a cast on your entire life that you have to cover with a plastic bag and make sure that you never get it wet and it never malfunctions, and it's always charged.
HZ: It's like a Mogwai crossed with a Tamagotchi.
LO DODDS: Except it keeps you alive, keeps you from going back to prison. And it's also a pain because you have to pay for it yourself, sometimes.
HZ: Wow. How much is an ankle monitor? Not that I want one. I'm just wondering.
LO DODDS: It depends on where you're getting it from. Like you could be talking like $30.
JOY: OK, like Spencer's Gifts.
HZ: Or Costco.
JOY: Ooh, Costco. Get a family pack.
LO DODDS: But it's like a daily fee. So if you're someone who's been charged with a crime, and maybe you are not in the best of circumstances, paying $30 a day could really eat into your otherwise nonexistent income.
HZ: That is shocking! We were a little confused as to what it actually was that Dr Griffith got reprimanded for.
LO DODDS: I am not certain of that either. They don't really make it clear. I would think any doctor can perform an operation if it is for lifesaving purposes, no matter what. So if he was in the bar and there was a bar fight and he stopped the bleeding, I don't think he could possibly be reprimanded for that. But if, say, it was not a lifesaving procedure and he elected to do the procedure there at the Fitzpatricks’ request, because they didn't want to go to a hospital or they didn't want to call an ambulance or something, he could have gotten censured for that.
HZ: Right. So if he had stitched up this enormous wound right across the front of Danny Boyd, that would be lifesaving; but if at the same time he gave him lipo…? Did we miss any criming in this episode? Presumably the PCHers abducting Logan was not above board.
LO DODDS: There was kidnapping. There was assault. There was battery. There are some definite intentional infliction of emotional distress. Yeah, there was a lot of extra crimes there: Weevil commits assault, and actually battery, against the kid with the crappy shirt and the fancy rims trying to buy the eightball.
HZ: What?
LO DODDS: He rips his shirt, so -
HZ: That's battery? Losing buttons?
LO DODDS: He touches him. The minute he touches him in sort of a harmful way, like obviously he didn't suffer any injuries, so that's why that probably would come to nothing, but you're not really allowed to hurt people just intentionally.
JOY: Lo, forgive me if I'm making you repeat yourself, but I'm a slow learner. Can you use a taser for fun, for protection, for just casually? Is that legal in California?
LO DODDS: Totes. Go get yourself a taser.
JOY: OK, yeah, I've got to go guys, I'll talk to you later.
HZ: Also from Costco?
LO DODDS: Yes. You don't even need a permit.
JOY: Oh my god.
HZ: But then if you actually tase someone, you could get charged with assault or something, surely?
LO DODDS: Yeah. It's just like a gun. So if you're using a weapon and you're using it legitimately in self-defence or defence of others, you know, you're going to face less consequences than if you are just using it to hurt people for fun.
HZ: Wow, Jenny, this was a rough episode to watch, I felt. There's a lot of violence. It's kind of exhausting. And then at the end, there's this homophobic sting in the tail to go home with.
JOY: Wheeeee! Yeah. Have you ever ridden a ride called the Zipper?
HZ: No. Where's that?
JOY: Well, it's at every county and state fair across the United States all summer long, and maybe at carnivals in the UK, I'm uncertain. I've only ever seen Ferris wheels over there. You all seem to have them in like every fucking city and they're really big.
HZ: But that's not for the funfair, Jenny.
JOY: No, no, I know, they're year-round fixtures, they're very serious Ferris wheels. But the Zipper is a ride where there's a bunch of cars that fit two people, and they're all suspended on a long elliptical kind of thing, and all the cars shift around on the elliptical while the elliptical thing turns and turns and the cars are spinning on their own axes and whipping around. Basically, it's nausea-inducing and you think you're gonna die, and you get whiplash, and you're like pulled in every direction all at once, and then you get off and you're like, "Oof, that was a doozy." And I feel like that's what this episode kind of feels like.
HZ: I do appreciate that this is another single episode mystery that is tied to a longer plot arc, although I still feel a little bit less invested in the kids who died on the bus than I should be because we had never met them before they died.
JOY: Yeah. The only person we knew on the bus is still alive.
HZ: So I don't think it's a vintage episode for wonderful lines, but were there any that you're going to write on a bumper sticker?
JOY: What if I told you... Hah! What if I told you my line pick was, "Listen, or walk my enormous plank"?
HZ: Wow. Really leaning into this fuckboi thing, Jenny. Sorry, fuckjoi.
JOY: Well, it's just the commitment to the pirate theme and the absolute absurdity of this trash radio show.
HZ: I liked it when Logan comes into the River Stix bar and is like, "Who can give me the address here?" And then says down the phone to the 911 person, "I've got one those ankle monitors on, does that help?" Way to make use of a tricky situation.
JOY: He's so resourceful. I demand to know how you rate this episode.
HZ: Oh, fuck. I don't think it was bad, but it wasn't fun, and I really hated seeing Veronica suddenly subjected to such harsh violence. And I usually don't find adversaries that are just straight-out violent to be that interesting, because they can just win by beating up or killing you, and I like it when Veronica has to defeat someone with the tools at her disposal, which is her amazing brain.
JOY: Yes.
HZ: So I'm apprehensive as to what the Fitzpatricks hold for us. I will give this episodes 3.7 small Vespas.
JOY: Excellent. I'm like pretty much in line with you, but I do like to keep it to straight quarters, so I'm going to go with 3.75 long-sleeve mesh shirts over a push-up bra.
HZ: Maybe I should deduct half a point for Mac going toxic masc.
JOY: Indeed. Toxic Mac.
HZ: Woof. I think we both need to go and have a lie down.
JOY: Yeah, I need a nap.
HZ: So let's call this episode of Veronica Mars investigated.
JOY: Case closed.
