VMI 2.18 I Am God transcript

Listen to this episode at VMIpod.com/2-18

Content note: Veronica Mars contains heavy themes, and this episode includes storylines concerning murder, violence, vehicular crash and offensive language. 

A LONG TIME AGO ON VERONICA MARS: 

• All that bus crash investigating and trying to win the Kane scholarship has left Veronica a very tired teen; she’s falling asleep in class!

• And having vivid dreams about the bus crash kids - now what’s worse, hearing all about someone else’s dreams, or that the show brought back Miss James to hear all about Veronica’s dreams?

• She’s not getting back together with Keith, though - he’s off on dates! Lots of dates. But the work always comes first.

• But there’s one lovely new couple: Wallace and Logan! They are paired together for a science experiment to keep an egg from breaking. Is that part a dream? 

JOY: I am God, and I’m Jenny Owen Youngs.

HZ: With love in my heart and chilli on the stove, I’m Helen Zaltzman.

You’re listening to Veronica Mars Investigations Season 2 Episode 18: I Am God.

HZ: Aarghh! Jenny! I had the weirdest dream that I watched this episode of Veronica Mars and it had all these dead kids that died in the bus crash and they were so much more interesting and entertaining than the living characters, and yet this is the only time we see them. 

JOY: Yeah, weird. That's so weird. It's such a weird dream you had, Helen. 

HZ: And the dreams were full of clues that helped speed this season along. 

JOY: Oh, how convenient. 

HZ: And maybe it was a nightmare as well, because it's the last episode featuring pissy Mrs Murphy... 

JOY: Noooooo! 

HZ: ....And Meg Manning!

JOY: Nooooooooo! 

HZ: That's the last you'll see of her. But, Miss James is back?! Of all the teachers they revive? 

JOY: Why? 

HZ: They couldn't bring us back Sydney Tamiia Poitier? They couldn't bring us back Jane Lynch? They couldn't bring back Joey Lauren Adams? 

JOY: Redistribute your budget!

HZ: Fuck you, subconscious. 

JOY: I like Mr Wu, though. I'm happy to see more of Mr Wu. 

HZ: Love Mr Wu. 

JOY: Helen, can I ask you a question? A personal question? What the fuck happens in this episode? 

HZ: Oh, well, Jenny, what happens is some dreams, and an egg, and the Kane scholarship, and Veronica's in a closet - but it's not a metaphor because you know that she's insistently heterosexual - and a lot happens off screen, evidently. 

JOY: When you're making your little private investigator resumé, is there a way to include that you have the power to receive clues in your dreams from dead teens? 

HZ: Would you put that as being ‘very intuitive’? ‘A real self-starter’? In that you just made shit up. 

JOY: Yeah, that works. 

HZ: It is extraordinary, because I don't tend to like dream sequences in fiction anyway, because they always feel like a cheat, and, in this as well, where it's like Veronica interpreting clues from the dreams -

JOY: Extreme cheat. 

HZ: Right. Do you ever have dreams that are so usefully linked to your real life concerns? 

JOY: Pretty much never. Although the... I'm so sorry, this is almost as bad as telling somebody about a dream you had, it's going to include me telling you about a dream I had but in order to do that I'm going to have to tell you about some dietary restrictions that I'm currently engaged in: I'm partying with something called the Whole30 right now, which is where you take just about every fun thing you could possibly imagine ever eating out of your diet for 30 days to like, whatever, assess what you have inflammatory reactions to, blah blah, it's very boring. 

HZ: To get back to your dinosaur past. 

JOY: Exactly. Getting back to my dinosaur past. And at the two week mark, which I just passed, Helen, I had the most vivid dream. I don't even eat cheese in my regular life, but I had the most incredibly vivid dream about the greatest slice of pizza I have ever seen, smelled, or tasted. I was eating it in, like, slo-mo, the crust was so crispy, the cheese was so gooey. It was a terribly cruel trick that my subconscious played on me. 

HZ: Or a great one, because you got the enjoyment of the pizza without breaking your Whole30. 

JOY: Oh, true, but I had in my dream the guilt and shame of breaking the Whole30. So there's that. 

HZ: I've had a lot of dream guilt and shame. I remember once in a dream I stabbed a pig. 

JOY: Oh my god!

HZ: I was like, "Wow, I really didn't want to stab that pig." And I woke up and I felt terrible about it all day. 

JOY: Oh, no. But have you ever solved a crime or mystery, in your real life, in your dream? 

HZ: No. I don't think, even abstractedly, my dreams have helped me solve an awake concern. They've never even presented me with some kind of metaphor to do that. 

JOY: Boo. 

HZ: I know, right? What's the point? 

JOY: Get your money back, Helen. 

HZ: I'll tell my subconscious that I want my money back. Have we seen Veronica draw? Maybe this is the first clue that everything is dreams. That, and the fact that there's a lot of dead people and a lot of smeary lens. 

JOY: So smeary. 

HZ: The episode opens with Veronica on the school bus that crashed, drawing a cartoon Grim Reaper, and she's sitting next to several dead students with their eyes open. It's really quite horrible. 

JOY: It is striking, yeah. Also, backing up just like 45 seconds, how many times have we listened to Krysten Ritter scream, "They're all dead!" in the "Previously on..." so far this season? Every single episode? 

HZ: Well, except for the episodes where they're ignoring the bus crash in favour of a plot about a missing cat or something. 

JOY: Sure, sure, sure, sure, sure. OK. Krysten Ritter screaming this phrase will haunt my dreams for all time. 

HZ: Veronica wakes up because she's in class, whoops! And she's been given instructions to see the guidance counsellor, who is Miss James. Fun fact, though, about Miss James that I didn't know before: she was in one episode of Switched At Birth! 

JOY: Oh my god! “It had to be you…”

HZ: And she was the female lead in Rob Thomas's earlier show, Cupid -

JOY: Oh, didn't know that was a thing. 

HZ: - if you want to fit her into the Rob Thomas-verse. Jeremy Piven was the star. So she goes to see Miss James and Veronica complains that the teacher had been reading The Golden Bowl aloud. 

JOY: What's The Golden Bowl? 

HZ: The Golden Bowl is a Henry James novel. It's like 500 pages long, all a metaphor about a crack in a bowl, Jenny. 

JOY: Oh, god. That does sound pretty boring. 

HZ: Well, it's not completely without merit, but it's not one to read aloud. 

JOY: With a, I'm sure you can appreciate, bad English accent. 

HZ: I know it's set in England, but Henry James was an American author, so claim him. And I didn't understand this: Veronica has been caught ripping down another student's poster, and that student wants her photos back. And it's just Veronica needed photos of the kids from the bus crash, even though Veronica seems to have photos of everyone in Neptune. 

JOY: Yeah. Surely she's already surveilled these children at some earlier point when they were still alive. You have a yearbook, my dear. 

HZ: Right, yep. 

JOY: You don't need to tear down the enormous colour portraits of each of them. 

HZ: There's cameraphones by this point. Take a photo of the photos on the wall, to attract less suspicion. 

JOY: Honestly. 

HZ: But also, why now? Like why, 18 episodes into the season, is Veronica suddenly haunted by these bus crash kids as if it was like two episodes after they'd all died? 

JOY: I don't know. 

HZ: But there's a recap about who they are. Cervando, who was in the PCHers. He has, also, three last names, but not together. It's just that he was Perez when he occurred in an earlier episode, and in this episode, they can't really decide whether his last name is Luna or Esparza, so... 

JOY: What the hell? 

HZ: There was Rhonda, who left a voicemail that was part of an earlier episode calling her friend a loser. There was Marcos, who did the pirate radio that we hate, and Veronica's been listening to that non-stop on headphones. Why now, Veronica? 

JOY: Why now indeed? 

HZ: What are you going to learn from that heap of shit? And Peter, who was on the Neptune Pirate S.H.I.P. Forum for LGBTQ students. 

JOY: Yep. 

HZ: And then Meg, and then she asks about a janitor called Lucky, and says, "Meg had a lot to say about him," but we never actually see Meg talking a lot about Lucky. 

JOY: No. 

HZ: Oh, and there was a student called Betina who apparently was someone who used to hook up with Dick. How many Betinas have you met in your life, Jenny? 

JOY: None. Have you ever met a Betina? 

HZ: I have met zero Betinas. Now, Dick Casablancas's mom is also called Betina. 

JOY: What??

HZ: What are the odds that Dick's booty call and his mom would have the same rare name? I know in real life people frequently have the same name, but in fiction it just seems, really, to make things seem unlikely to me. 

JOY: What? 

HZ: That's not even part of the dream sequence, though. "I dreamt that Dick was having booty calls with someone with the same name as his mom, what does it mean?" 

JOY: Ha!

HZ: But back in the dream, Jenny, Veronica and Meg are on the bus watching yellow fish through the windows. Meg's wearing a Baby On Board T-shirt. 

JOY: Meg is telling Veronica about Lucky, who's like this guy who went to church with her parents and they were trying to set her up, and then Meg is like, "Oh, you've been reading my emails. In Veronica-land, no pulse, no privacy." Honestly, who with a pulse has Veronica Mars ever left alone? No one is entitled to privacy in the Marsverse. 

HZ: No. In Neptune, everyone is just a vapour that Veronica can absorb through her skin. There's quite a lot of setup this episode for this guy Lucky, but we see him for about 30 seconds, so just don't peak too soon. 

JOY: Chekhov's... veteran? 

HZ: Chekhov's really saving him for another play. "You know what, I'll seed Lucky in the first act of Uncle Vanya, but I won't get on to him until Three Sisters."

JOY: I'm laughing like I have any idea what Chekhov wrote and in what order, but I don't. 

HZ: Anyone? Anyone? Then back in the present, at school, Veronica is like telling Miss James a lot of stuff, which I don't get, because Veronica... 

JOY: It seems very unVeronicalike, but maybe it's because she's so tired? 

HZ: Yeah, but that would make her so busy that she would be quite impatient during these things, rather than like, "Yeah, I'll tell you all these details of my fucking dreams like an absolute dullard."

JOY: It's almost as if Miss James were just a vessel for us to get Veronica's interior monologue situation out into the open so that we could know what's going on. 

HZ: It's the most I've liked Miss James, because she seems bored. Veronica sets up that someone she terms a ‘nutjob’, called Michelle, who was the friend of Rhonda that was voicemailed, is trying to raise money to buy a yearbook spread for every kid who died in the bus crash. How much is a yearbook spread, and how come a kid would need to buy it rather than it being just part of the yearbook? 

JOY: Oh, well, the thing - at least in my experience in the United States - is that yearbooks, you have all the pages with everybody's photos for each graduating class, and all the clubs and teachers, whatever, in the back. Parents usually can buy out like a page or a half page to be like, "We love you, Jojo! Congratulations on graduating! We believe in you, to the Moon!" Or whatever. So this Michelle seems to be trying to do that. 

HZ: It does feel like the school should probably just decide to do it for free. 

JOY: It would be the compassionate thing to do, probably. 

HZ: Veronica also makes a quip comparing Michelle to "Margot Kidder in the bushes", which is a reference to a very difficult mental health episode Margot Kidder had, so thank you very much, Veronica. Veronica also mentions that Michelle is wondering whether she can get a little audio chip in the yearbook so when you open it you can hear the kids laughing. 

JOY: Ew, no thanks. 

HZ: And Miss James gets kind of a bit interrogatey about it. 

REBECCA JAMES: What did Michelle mean about hearing everybody laughing?
VERONICA: Her friend Rhonda left a message for her right as she was going off the cliff. I knew about that one.
REBECCA JAMES: That one?
VERONICA: Turns out, Rhonda called Michelle's home first, left a message there too. When Michelle told me about it, she said she could hear all the kids laughing on the bus.

HZ: Veronica's smeary brain takes her back to the time when she listened to Michelle's voicemail from Rhonda, and she could hear kids laughing, and she could hear Dick's voice even though he wasn't on the bus because he was in the limo. 

JOY: Whaaat? 

HZ: Miss James asks if Veronica's told Keith all this, and Veronica's like, "Not now, Miss James, I've got another flashback coming on." And the flashback's of her dreaming on the bus with all the fish while Rhonda is leaving the "Michelle pick up, you big loser" voicemail that we've heard a bunch of times, and then there's a sudden bang and Veronica wakes up abruptly and Keith rushes in to do the saviour dad. 

JOY: I love that he says, "Did you watch House of Wax again? I know that Hilton girl gives you nightmares." As you all may remember, Paris Hilton, star of House of Wax, was in an early season 1 episode. Also, Helen, I don't know if I've screamed at you about this already, but I just watched Season One of The Simple Life. Just finished my watch of that, and I actually would highly recommend it. It is a chaotic time capsule from a simpler, more naive time. 

HZ: I don't know if I can go back, Jenny, to the early-mid-2000s. 

JOY: I don't know, there's something really endearing about fresh-out-of-the-box Paris Hilton. She really got under my skin. 

HZ: She seemed quite chill in it, relatively. 

JOY: Very chill. 

HZ: But put some respect on Veronica Mars's stunt casting. Honestly. We learn in this scene, though, Veronica has been on the bus - and that didn't happen on my watch, unless I was dreaming. 

JOY: Yeah, what the hell? 

HZ: What's been happening off screen? That seems like... Did they just cut an episode that they scripted, and then they were like, "Ah, fuck, there's no time, we need some more missing dog episodes before the end of the season, so..." 

JOY: Yeah, yeah, important to get all those dogs back to their Neptunian owners. 

HZ: Maybe at winter carnival she took a detour into the bus and then they cut it in favour of some carnival bollocks. So, when Veronica went on the bus she saw something Keith didn't, which was a drawing on the back of a seat that said ‘I Am God’ and then it had nine graves - but only eight kids died. What does it mean? 

JOY: What does it all mean, Helen?

KEITH: "I am God."
VERONICA: Because I have the power to put myself and my classmates in individual coffins.
KEITH: Do you think person who drew this is responsible for the crash?
VERONICA: I think it's possible. The bus was brand new. There was no other graffiti.
KEITH: Why nine tombstones? Eight people were killed in the crash.
VERONICA: I guess the artist wasn't expecting me to get off the bus.

HZ: Awake in the school hallways - or as I'm led to suppose - Veronica goes up to Logan, who's at his locker, and lightly kicks him in the back of the knee because she's not been sleeping. Makes her violent. Except she's been sleeping in class. 

JOY: Yeah, well, you know that sleeping at a desk is not the same as sleeping in a bed. You don't recover the same amount of health points. 

HZ: She quizzes Logan about Lucky. He's one of the night janitors. 

VERONICA: Why ‘Lucky’?
LOGAN: Well, he graduates. Then his parents file Chapter 11; he has to drop out of college. He signs up for Army Rangers. He gets sent to Iraq, and four months in, he gets shot.
VERONICA: And that makes him lucky?
LOGAN: Hey, they shot him in the butt. Could be worse.

HZ: Logan reminds Veronica that she has met Lucky. He goes into his own flashback. 

JOY: But I love Logan's way, I love his method of flashing back. He flashes back to them making out in his car, listening to Sia. It just goes on forever. Veronica, in realtime, interrupts, and then he's like, "Will you let me finish?" And they go back to making out in the car. 

HZ: This is some real Fleabag stuff, where someone is involved in someone else's reverie. 

JOY: Yeah, totally. So Dick and Lucky were knocking on the car door being all like, "Come on, man, we gotta go do a thing. Guy stuff.”

LUCKY: Okay, loverboy, that's enough face-sucking for now. We’ve got things to do.
LOGAN: And you're on a tight schedule of smoking pot and playing Halo. I can't wait to graduate.
LUCKY: Come on, man. We're done screwing around. The ball's in our court and someone's gotta pay. Veronica is puzzled and turns to look at Lucky.
DICK: But, after we make someone pay, we're gonna get high and play Halo, right?
LUCKY: Get it together, Dick.

HZ: Then in the present...

VERONICA: Remind me, why did we break up? 
LOGAN: Well, you thought the other guy had greener grass. Or was it something about me being too much man? No, wait, it was you! You were too much man.

HZ: What does that mean? 

JOY: Pfft. I think, in the heteronormative patriarchy, one of the best insults you can hurl at a woman has something to do with undercutting her femininity, just in the same way that the best way to insult a man is to undercut his masculinity. 

HZ: Aw, baby's first insults. 

JOY: Yes, exactly. Or was Veronica just pegging Logan the whole time? 

HZ: Now that's some dream sequences that I could raise some interest in. 

JOY: Ha! 

HZ: Maybe a problem with this episode is that there's not really a mystery of the week, and then the mysteries of the season are being dealt with in this really ridiculous way where they're like, "Hurry up, hurry up, we need to introduce some stuff, but quick, quick!"

JOY: Yeah, completely unearned. 

HZ: Put it in a dream. Retcon it. And then the mystery of the week is, I guess, Mr Wu's egg competition, which is my favourite part. 

JOY: Yeah, the only thing I don't like about this is Dick Casablancas first being racist, then being homophobic, just generally being Dick, you know? 

HZ: Mr Wu does get close to doing a rap, though, so that's not ideal either. 

JOY: Not ideal. 

MR WU: Each team will design a device to protect an egg dropped from increasing heights. The pair whose egg survives the highest drop will earn an A, plus the team will be excused from Mr Wu's notorious GPA-killing final exam. 
LOGAN: Boy, Mr Wu must really like his egg drop soup. 
DICK: Ah, does this assignment come with potsticker?
MR WU: Students! This experiment is a major test grade. For some of you, it means passing this class or not. 
DICK: Dude, is Mr Wu hitting on me?

HZ: Dick, by the way, is paired with a student called Angie Dahl, who is displeased by this because she doesn't want to fuck up her grade, for reasons. 

JOY: She sucks. I hate her. 

HZ: Well, I thought initially, like, "Oh, I have sympathy for this person being paired with Dick," but... 

JOY: That goes away pretty quick. 

HZ: Yeah. 

JOY: Oh, but, big bright spot, guess who have been assigned to one another to collaborate on this egg proj? it's Wallace and Logan!

HZ: Loved it. 

JOY: In their first collab. 

HZ: They mention that they haven't spoken since the pilot. Of course, they don't call it the pilot, they mention they haven't spoken since Logan smashed in Veronica's headlights with a crowbar. That was the pilot! 

JOY: Yeah, that's fucking crazy. 

HZ: Veronica's two main guys that aren't Keith don't interact. 

JOY: Well, because Veronica is like the Sun and all, every other character on the show, is like a planet orbiting her. It's very rare for them to align. 

HZ: Planets can never meet. 

JOY: Exactly. 

HZ: At the lunch tables, Veronica's laptop has been greeked with what I thought was a blob of red gum, but I think it's a fish sticker. 

JOY: Phish the band? 

HZ: No, I think just a little red fish. 

JOY: I see, OK. It's very unfortunate that we all have to listen to Dick say, "Just because you wiggle your finger doesn't mean Dick's going to come," to Veronica. I would like to be scrubbed and sanitised. 

HZ: When he refuses to go over, though, she just swivels her screen to him and she's written, "I know who you did last summer," in massive letters on a word document. Doesn't seem that nice when you're talking about a dead person. 

VERONICA: Tell me about you and Betina. 
DICK: Who? Uh, wait. What? Everybody has their secret shame, V. You get tanked at the wrong party, stumble a couple of rungs down the food chain. You know how it is; you dated that cop. 
VERONICA: Patience dwindling. 
DICK: Sometimes you don't need the prettiest horse, just one that let's you ride bareback.
VERONICA: Ever think, maybe, that was a little, I don't know, dangerous? 
DICK: What am I, stupid? She was on the pill. I don't know why you're in a bunch. I don't hear her complaining. 
VERONICA: You know she's dead, right?

JOY: He says, "Sometimes you don't need the prettiest horse, just one that lets you ride bareback." I have to excuse myself to go throw up. 

HZ: I regret eating corn before this. So what happened was, because he'd been sexpeopling with Betina, he'd left her a voicemail; she'd played it for everyone on the bus, that's why Dick's voice was audible on that voicemail over all the laughter - even though I think you could probably tell a voicemail played on phone speakers in 2006 from a voice of someone in the room. 

JOY: Yeah. 

HZ: Inside, Veronica's just standing around scoping the hallways, and she sees Keith. Whaaat? 

JOY: Yeah, what the hell? 

HZ: Shouts after him, but to no avail, and she doesn't pursue, which I guess she could have. Instead, she collars a student named Maureen, who's a friend of Betina's, and she doesn't have any Betina-related material to put in the yearbook but she does have goss. 

JOY: She also does say, "Dick Casablancas is the bastard child of Satan," which is a nice thing to hear in this episode in particular. 

HZ: Maureen seems cool. More of her. Less of Dick, less of terrible Angie. She mentions that what Betina wanted was for Dick to knock her up so she could shout it from the rooftops. Now, perhaps this is anecdotal experience, but based on all the heterosexual teenage girls I knew, we were terrified of getting pregnant. 

JOY: Yeah, that seems like a scary thing, although I guess if you were somehow, for some reason, like really into Dick, that you might think he would find himself suddenly tethered to you and changing his commitment or something? 

HZ: Seems an unlikely way... 

JOY: Seems like a really big inconvenience to just to snag your man. 

HZ: It's also not really a plot point that bears any fruit this episode, is it? 

JOY: No. 

HZ: It's just character assassination. But goody, Jenny, another dream! More gravestone cartoons. 

JOY: Hey, and here's an "I ♥ Dick Casablancas" shirt. What we were all hoping would appear next. 

HZ: Meg looks annoyed, which, legit. 

JOY: Fair. 

HZ: Peter talks about a "rhinestone rainbow". Veronica wakes up before the bus crashes, this time, to the infernal sound of that fucking radio show Ahoy Mateys announcing Logan as the winner of the Cock of the Walk Countdown for the 40th week running. Doesn't seem like that spiky satire, to have a Cock of the Walk competition. 

JOY: Yeah. 

HZ: They could have at least kept to the aquatic theme. 

JOY: Yeah! Seahorse... 

HZ: Big fish wanker. 

JOY: Yes, there it is. 

HZ: Disappointingly, all of the eggs-perimentation has happened off screen. 

JOY: Boo! 

HZ: We go to the Neptune Grand, and Wallace and Logan are testing their egg protection box, dropping it from four feet, and they're like, "Oh, cool. Well, we've sorted that out." Would have loved to have seen a bit of Wallace and Logan collaborating on egg physics, wouldn't you? 

JOY: Yeah, yes! But no. No, we had to make room for all the fucking dream sequences. 

HZ: Is it because they can't write for this pairing?

JOY: Maybe? Maybe they just assume nobody wants to see Logan and Wallace talking to each other... 

HZ: ...about eggs. 

JOY: I mean, the whole point of Logan and Wallace working together in this episode is so that Logan can sort of like accidentally reveal to Wallace that he cares about Veronica. Because they're trying to beat Angie so hard to help propel Veronica to remain in... How is somebody who is asleep in literally every class still the top contender for the Kane scholarship?

HZ: Fantastic question, Jenny. 

JOY: Thank you. 

HZ: Logan being Logan has to make a gross joke about fluffers when a maid comes in, and I thought, is this a safe working environment for the maid? It seems inappropriate. 

JOY: Oh, god. Imagine working in a hotel where a very wealthy teen sleaze is occupying the presidential suite, and you have to deal with him on a regular basis. 

HZ: Boo. 

JOY: Yeah, not good. 

HZ: Veronica gets home and ask Keith if he's rekindling stuff with Miss James, and he doesn't answer, but he sidetracks her with a letter from Stanford. She got in! 

JOY: Of course she did, Helen. She's very special. 

HZ: She does some good ecstatic acting. It's nice to see her awake and happy for a moment. 

JOY: For one second. 

HZ: But the happiness is short-lived, because then in Clemmons's office there's some bullshit about class rankings that only effects Veronica and awful Angie, who are the two remaining in the Kane scholarship running; and the upshot of the bullshit is that Angie is ahead, and the implication is that Angie is only ahead because she was rich enough to buy extra credit by doing extra classes. 

JOY: Yeah, I know that this quote has been debunked from it's like sort of like popularised attribution, but Angie's got a real "let them eat cake" kind of vibe. She's really vile, so very vile, and so very rich, and so vile about being rich. The end. 

HZ: I wasn't sure she was vile at this stage because when Veronica then goes to Miss James to slag off Angie, she's like, "She's a demon." I thought, well, that's all about Veronica, and Miss James seemed to be like, "Oh, got to get her off this, what's less bad than her talking about this? Dreams?" And I was like, no, that's a real self-own, Miss James, thinking dreams are less bad than her talking about anything. 

JOY: Anybody could have done the Semester at Sea or whatever, and Veronica was like, "How much did it cost?" and Angie, as heinously as possible, responding, "How should I know?" Like, "Money has literally never been any concern, and the many benefits that come from having it are just a natural part of my life," kind of vibe. 

HZ: Why does she need the Kane scholarship, then? 

JOY: Now that's a really good question. It might just be for bragging rights?

HZ: Seems like a bit of a misappropriation of a scholarship, but also it seems truly strange that Veronica is still in the running when they hate her. 

JOY: Yeah. 

HZ: Veronica says to Miss James, "The only silver lining is that Keith seems happy." Is she saying that to hurt Miss James? Miss James says they're not in touch, which puts paid to Veronica's theory that he's a-romancing. 

JOY: No, she thinks that he was at the school to visit Miss James, wearing his date outfit. She's just trying to get some confirmation since Keith has been so squirrelly, but seemed kind of like happy, but no, Miss James has no response, no personalised response to this because they are not in touch. 

HZ: Having exhausted Miss James with her dreams chat, she goes to complain to Wallace about Angie purchasing the grades, and Wallace is so cheerful. 

JOY: He's too nice. Wallace!

HZ: He has some information as well, when they start staring at the bus tribute on the wall of the hallways. 

WALLACE: Would you look at that? The most innocent-looking picture is the girl who was hell on wheels. That girl, Rhonda, and her sister Natalie were in Clemmons' office all the time. Always in trouble, for huffing paint, stealing, fighting, anything to reinforce the P.W.T. stereotype. 
VERONICA: There's a Pretty Young Thing stereotype? Do I fit it? 
WALLACE: P.W.T. Poor White Trash.

HZ: "Poor white trash."

JOY: Yeah. 

HZ: Don't like this. 

JOY: Ugh. 

HZ: Wallace is going to point out Natalie. 

JOY: Then we see Keith on the first of several cursed dates. 

HZ: At the Neptune Only Place. 

JOY: Get me out of here. The only place for dates. 

HZ: In front of a display of white ceramics. I would love a bit of background on why Keith is suddenly dating. We see him on three dates this episode, and presumably he's been on more because Veronica had already seen him in his date outfit at the school. 

JOY: He's on the hunt. He's only going on dates with women who work in doctors' offices, we later learn. 

HZ: Ah, so they're all strategic dates. 

JOY: Yes, yes, yes. He's only swiping right on ladies whose Tinder pics have them like wearing scrubs or some shit. 

HZ: Is there a special dating site for women who work in doctors' offices? 

JOY: Oh my god, Helen! I don't know about that, but did you - are you aware - oh, god, please let me be about to fucking blow your mind: are you familiar with a little website called FarmersOnly.com? 

HZ: I've not been on it, Jenny, but I can imagine what it does. 

JOY: Yeah, it's pretty self-explanatory. It's a dating site for farm folk. 

HZ: Is it farmers for farmers, or is it farmers and people into farmers? 

JOY: I think it's farmers for farmers. Hence FarmersOnly, not FarmersAndFarmerFansOnly. 

HZ: But that'd be so difficult, because if you both had a farm, then it would be very difficult to combine farms. Whereas if one of you was farmless but farmcurious, then it'd be easier to match you with a farmer. 

JOY: Helen, let me lay it down for you. "FarmersOnly.com was founded in 2005 to help single farmers, ranchers, and other country-minded folks" - oh, OK - "with down-to-earth values to find love in the United States and Canada."

HZ: "Down-to-earth values." I mean that's a very broad statement. 

JOY: It's scary. "Country-minded folks." There's more, but that's kind of like everything you need to know. 

HZ: I could see the point because farming is a very specific lifestyle and you need someone who understands it. 

JOY: Totally. Somebody else who will get up at 5am, or won't mind that you do. 

HZ: Exactly. I can imagine Miss James actually being like, "You know what? Fuck it, I'm going to find myself a farmer, go off and live in Montana."

JOY: Hell yeah. Or like, go raise some poinsettias at the Mooncalf Collective. 

HZ: Yes, Miss James is an obvious candidate for the Mooncalf Collective. 

JOY: Mm-hmm. 

HZ: At Mr Wu's class, Logan and Wallace are dressed in a simpatico way. Logan is wearing a jaunty yellow and red combo, Wallace has a yellow T-shirt with red writing. They are aligned. 

JOY: Yep. Team ketchup and mustard. 

LOGAN: I could rub your head for luck.
WALLACE: You could try.

JOY: Ooh. 

HZ: They've made like a cute little cardboard cabin or something for their egg with little decorations on it. Wallace goes to the front with the egg cabin and tips it on the ground, but, ugh, a scream! Something terrifying? No, worse. It's Angie, bursting through the door holding a big bunch of balloons because she got into Stanford, and nobody celebrates at all. So Dick fills the void. 

JOY: Um, phrasing? 

HZ: Uh... Dick... I can't. That's the only phrase I'm willing to submit to this. 

JOY: Nice, very nice Helen. 

ANGIE: I got into Stanford!
DICK: Alright!! You can be roomies with Veronica Mars. There's a pillow-fight I'd like to see. ANGIE: Veronica Mars got into Stanford? 
WALLACE: Yeah. Veronica Mars. Stanford. 
ANGIE: Well, I guess somebody has to do the football team.

HZ: So this is where I was convinced Angie was the spawn of Satan and, OK, Veronica was right. I also noticed that the door through which she burst has a big yellow sign on it saying "Caution: Do Not Peer Into Laser With Remaining Good Eye".

JOY: Oh my god. 

HZ: What a story. Mr Wu interrupts to say that Wallace and Logan have a passing grade, and then Dick is gross at Angie again. 

JOY: Great, great, great. 

HZ: But then Dick can't pick their project out of the lineup, so he's off to summer school. Fuck him. 

JOY: Yeah. 

HZ: Angie says to Logan, "Enjoy trade school." Logan is very rich, so is trade school a concept for him? 

JOY: She seems all turned around about stuff. And then, interesting, Logan and Wallace passed, their eggs survived, but they can just keep going to try to compete to be the the people who drop their egg from the highest point, in order to avoid having to take the final. This is a weird system. 

HZ: Is this a real thing? 

JOY: Not in my experience. 

HZ: Is it allowed? Do you think Mr Wu's just like, "Ah, fuck it, I don't care."

JOY: Yes, yes, Mr Wu definitely seems like he has a strong "fuck it" vibe. Like, one streak. 

HZ: "In two years I'm going to retire to run my menswear store of matching ties and shirts."

JOY: Yes! Sweater vests. 

HZ: I thought it was quite sweet that Wallace and Logan decide to carry on working this project together. Wallace wants to do well, and do you think Logan just enjoys the company? I mean, who wouldn't? 

JOY: I think the whole point, though, of Wallace and Logan continuing to do this is to try to beat out Angie, because if Angie gets the best score, that will help her continue to nose out Veronica for the Kane scholarship. Based on a conversation that Wallace and Logan have a little bit later, I think that's Logan's motivation. 

HZ: Out in the parking lot, Veronica and Wallace wait to see Rhonda's sister Natalie, and success, because a very blonde, very pink-dressed girl struts to a car, opens it with a blippy flourish, and Veronica questions that she was ever poor, because she drives a Corvette, and Wallace says, "Last year, she offered to make out with me for cigarette money."

JOY: Dear lord. 

HZ: Just trying to picture Wallace in that situation. 

JOY: I'd make out with Wallace for free, so. Veronica has a quick exchange with her. 

VERONICA: Hey, is this your car? 
NATALIE: No, it's my roller skate.
VERONICA: This is so cool. I was thinking about moving up to a sweeter ride myself. How's she handle? 
NATALIE: Better than the bus.

JOY: And then says... 

VERONICA: You can take the girl out of the trash, but you can't take the trash out of the girl. 

JOY: And this just seems like another case of Veronica hating women, right? 

HZ: Yeah. Although Natalie does say that her car is better than the bus, which seems quite morbid given her sister died on the bus. 

JOY: Yeah, that is... OK, that's very true. But like, we all grieve in our own ways. 

HZ: That's true. Veronica calls Keith, who is back in the Onlyplace but with a different date, and asks him to run the financial records of the families bereaved by the crash, and he agrees and hangs up, back to the date. 

JOY: Oh my god, this woman is wretched. 

BLIND DATE: You know who you remind me of? That guy on Seinfeld, George. 
KEITH: Oh? How so? 
BLIND DATE: Well, he's a nice guy, like you. But there's so much unrealized potential. A guy who really wants to meet women goes for it, you know? He dresses to impress, a little cologne, a gym membership. You -
KEITH: Should make more of an effort? 
BLIND DATE: My ex-husband went for a hair transplant. He looked fantastic afterwards. 
KEITH: Cologne, new suit, hair - I should probably write this stuff down.

JOY: This is not something I would ever say to somebody I was on a date with. 

HZ: Respect the Keith Mars. He's perfect. 

JOY: He is perfect. 

HZ: He's got the light on him just right, like he's glowing from within like a Sistine Chapel cherub. 

JOY: This lady should be so lucky. He is very cherubic. He's got that, like, apple cheek-y thing going on. 

HZ: Who are these people that are this confident on blind dates that you can makeover the person? Do you think she's just been torn down so much by her dates that she's like, "Well, this is how it goes, negging." 

JOY: Oh well, yes, Negtune, here we are. 

HZ: Of course. I love this next bit, though. Also coffee-themed, but at the Neptune Grand Wallace is very hyper and spouting some science and Logan's like, "OK, I'm going to take away your coffee now, you've had too many coffees."

JOY: Yeah. Wallace going hard on the engineering. 

HZ: It's sweet. Wallace asks Logan why he wants to help Veronica, and Logan's like, "Not for Veronica, but for the spirit of competition." Wallace is rightly incredulous. 

JOY: I'm telling you, Logan's doing it for Veronica, damn it. 

HZ: And he goes off to see a man about a horse. 

JOY: Now, this is a misfire. Wallace is flipping through the channels and that frickin' episode of Tinseltown Diaries is rerunning again about the Echolls family. Wallace, you're a sensitive guy. Why would you not change the channel immediately? 

HZ: Well, it doesn't seem like Wallace's sort of show, but if a documentary came up about someone you knew, you would look at it, wouldn't you, Jenny? 

JOY: I just assume it's been on for a while. I assume that Wallace has already seen this episode a couple of times. 

HZ: Well, Logan says they rerun it twice a day, but Wallace is a very busy Wallace because he's got his Sac-n-Pac job, he's got the sports. 

JOY: He's got a lot of favours to do for Veronica. 

HZ: He's got all the favours, yeah, he's got his sideline in unpaid detective work. And also, I can imagine Alicia not letting him watch much TV because of studying. 

JOY: True. 

HZ: Did you notice that the voiceover for Tinseltown Diaries is Harry Hamlin slightly slowed down? 

JOY: I did notice that. 

HZ: It's funny. 

TINSELTOWN DIARIES: Husband. Father. Adulterer. Cradle-robber. Murderer.

JOY: Cut to a very dim Mars kitchen. Could somebody turn a fucking light on in here? 

HZ: What are they trying to hide? 

JOY: Indeed. 

HZ: Keith's ladling some chilli. 

VERONICA: Got something for me? 
KEITH: Love in my heart. Chili on the stove. Oh, and I ran those financial records. I am a great father. None of the families of the crash victims made money on insurance. They basically got enough just to pay for the, uh, funerals. However, Rhonda's family won a separate lawsuit with a two million dollar payout. And you'll never guess who from. 
VERONICA: You're right. I won't. 
KEITH: Woody Goodman. Woody's Burgers paid Rhonda's family a secret two million dollar payout. Apparently, her mom found a finger in her ribwich.

HZ: After that revelation, Keith eats heartily but Veronica's appetite is gone. It's so weird, all this complex stuff that is just dealt with very swiftly. It's like Natalie, there's a lot of build-up but we only see her for a second, and all we need to see her for is to show that the family made some money. So it feels like a weird sort of chain to sow, just to find out that Woody Goodman paid them off for some reason. 

JOY: Yeah. 

HZ: Like maybe there could have been a bit more of a plot-integral way of finding that information out. 

JOY: Nope! It's just all chaos, random chaos. This episode is like stone soup. 

HZ: Well, more chaos coming right up at school. Veronica breaks into Clemmons's office, tries to get into Marcos's files, but here's Clemmons and Keith coming in. 

JOY: Oh dear, oh god. 

HZ: Uh! Uh! Hide! Hide in the closet! This is a real nightmare, Jenny, but it's not a dream sequence, it's real. Did we know that Keith was working for the school, until this moment? 

JOY: No, I think this is where it all starts to come together. 

HZ: I don't think it's very realistic of Clemmons to expect Keith to solve anxiety. 

JOY: Well, when all your students come down with the same generalised anxiety diagnosis from the same doctor right before finals and they're all requesting extensions, I guess it could cause a raised eyebrow or two. 

HZ: Mm-hmm. 

JOY: And Keith's just looking for, you know, any sort of shady dealings with regard to that. Maybe he won't find any. Who knows? Because anxiety is, of course, real. Probably especially around finals time, and especially in the wake of a big, big bus crash. 

HZ: Right. You're a teenager. That is a challenging time anyway. 

JOY: Yes. 

HZ: People you know have been murdered. There's a lot going on. There's always crimes at your school. 

JOY: Always. 

HZ: You live in a horrifically sexist society. 

JOY: Half the time you might have to pee, the fucking bathroom is locked because someone's using it as an office. 

HZ: Just diagnose them all with anxiety and give them an extension, then it's fair. 

JOY: Yes, yes! 

HZ: Keith goes to get his coat from the closet, which is somehow already there, even though they seem to have just started this conversation. 

JOY: Right? 

HZ: And, whoops, that means Veronica's rumbled. Keith doesn't seem bothered, though. He seems all right with it. 

JOY: He kind of mugs at her and is like, "Yep, that's mine," meaning to Clemmons, his coat, but to Veronica, his daughter. 

HZ: Splendid. Seems very late in the episode to suddenly start on this generalised anxiety thing. 

JOY: Yeah. And then we cut right to yet another date at the Onlyplace and we learn, aha, that this woman that Keith is on a date with works for a doctor. 

BLIND DATE: I was one of those people saying Keith Mars should be run out of town. Going after that sweet Jake Kane? Making our nice little town look like Bozoville? And then when I found out what really happened, I was so embarrassed. I confess, I never vote in the local elections, but I went out this year just so I could vote for you. 
KEITH: I totally carried the pity vote. But enough about me, tell me about you. 
BLIND DATE : Oh, it's dull, trust me. I'm the office manager for a local doctor. 
KEITH: Really? I'd love to hear about it.

HZ: "Making Neptune look like Bozoville"? I thought, has she been dating Woody Goodman? 

JOY: Yeah, what does that mean? I mean, does it mean something specific or does it just kind of mean - what? 

HZ: Is it like a local slang? Or local fear? Where it's like when you're a child they whisper at you, "You have to be good or you have to go and live in Bozoville."

JOY: Yeah, it's a village over which Bozo the Clown presides. Clowntown. 

HZ: Oh god. I walked past someone's van today and hooked over the headrest of the front seat they had an IT mask. 

JOY: Helen, no. 

HZ: Why? Why? 

JOY: “We all float in shotgun, Timmy,” or whatever the fuck... 

HZ: Was it to mess with speed cameras? I don't know.

JOY: Oh, maybe. 

HZ: How do you feel about Keith dating people just to get access to patient files? 

JOY: It's no worse than what we've seen, like, every other character, pretty much, on the show do, so it doesn't seem like a particularly noble or righteous way to go about your life. But I think in order to do a good job of being a private investigator, you have to be willing to stretch the bounds of your moral compass. 

HZ: Maybe he's thinking, "Well, I might as well make use of the fact of being a prime Neptune bachelor."

JOY: I mean, he is a hot single dad. Ladies love a hot single dad. 

HZ: Also, I do not approve of the offscreen demise of Keithlicia. 

JOY: Yeah, it's a bunch of bullshit. 

HZ: Maybe they didn't show it on screen so that we could keep on believing. 

JOY: Yeah, secretly they're still canoodling. It's just none of our business. Please respect their privacy at this time. 

HZ: I do respect their privacy, Jenny. At school, Veronica's voiceover watches Mr Wu speculating horribly and racistly.

VERONICA VOICEOVER: Peter, as I have learned from his postings, had, in his words, "yellow fever," and was extremely hot for a certain teacher. There was one incident in Peter's permanent file. It didn't say what happened, only that it involved Mr Wu. Can't help but wonder if teacher decided to take a pet.

JOY: Oh god. 

HZ: She asks Mr Wu if he'd like to donate to the yearbook spread, of course. And she asks about his Peter connection, and Mr Wu seems to be on to her bullshit pretty instantaneously. 

JOY: Oh, right away. Detective Wu for sure. 

VERONICA: Peter was a friend of mine. I know the two of you had a connection.
MR WU: I'm sorry for your loss, you must miss him.
VERONICA: Do you miss him?
MR WU: As a bright and dedicated student, yes. In the way I think you're implying, no.
VERONICA: Peter was gearing up for what he called "the outing of all outings." I was wondering if he was pulling his favorite teacher out of the closet.
MR WU: Veronica, I think that when you get out in the world a little more, you'll discover that not all well-dressed, articulate, detail-oriented men are gay. Many of them are just Asian.

HZ: Help me, I'm dying, Jenny. 

JOY: Yeah, who... Gosh. Do you think a straight white person wrote this line of dialogue, perhaps? Do you think that's a possibility? So Peter had a crush on Mr Wu. He ran into Mr Wu at Possibilities, a local gay bar. File that away, there are gays in Neptune, we just never see them unless they're already dead. 

HZ: Maybe it's Thursday night at River Styx. They put up some disco lights. 

JOY: The River Dicks. 

HZ: Ah, that is some possibilities. 

JOY: So Mr Wu was there for what? His cousin's birthday? He's just being a supportive.

HZ: Yeah. He said "being supportive". Supportive of birthdays? Supportive of his cousin having a birthday at a gay bar?

JOY: Oh, right, I see what you're saying. 

HZ: Couldn't he have just ended the sentence at, "I was there for my cousin's birthday"? That's all he needed to say. 

JOY: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I guess such was the time that we could not conceive of a reality in which a straight person would go to a gay place without it being sort of like contextualised as like a personal sacrifice. 

HZ: It was alright, because he documented all of this for Clemmons. 

JOY: Oh, yeah. 

HZ: I don't know what the procedure is when you know that a student has a crush on you, but it sounds like he's being above board. And then Veronica asks whether Peter had any hobbies like drawing or painting. Mr Wu says, "I thought he was your friend," so he's sharper than Veronica. 

JOY: Shoot, busted. 

HZ: Love it. And then we see Peter, Peter actually gets a scene. Of course a dream scene, but the bus has been converted into a nightclub, because he's a gay character. 

JOY: It's a gay bus now, because Daft Punk is playing and there are flashing coloured lights. Wow, so gay. 

HZ: It's the first remotely positive portrayal of a gay character, Jenny, that we've had on this show in nearly two seasons. 

JOY: Just by virtue of not being negative. 

HZ: By virtue of making the bus seem quite fun. 

JOY: Yeah. 

HZ: Even though it's a dream and he's dead. 

PETER: So do you believe him? Mr Wuuuuuuu! 
VERONICA: Yes. And, I hate to disappoint you, but even if he were gay, I don't think it would qualify as "the outing of all outings." 
PETER: You think you know me because you read my postings? 
VERONICA: Every line of your postings, like eighty times. I know you like the back of my -
[Veronica sees her name is written on her hand in big black letters.] 
PETER: What's wrong? 
VERONICA: Nothing. 
PETER: You're asking the wrong question. All right. Maybe a better question is why was I even on the bus? Why would I even be interested in going to a baseball stadium? 

HZ: In Veronicaverse, though, I'm afraid men can't be gay and into sports. It's just not possible. 

JOY: No, that doesn't work. Helen, don't be ridiculous. Dude, I have a question. When Veronica looks at her own hand and sees "Veronica Mars" written on her own palm...

HZ: [Abel Koontz impression] "Verrrronica Marsssss…" 

JOY: ...do you drink, or no? 

HZ: Yes. You drink some sea water. 

JOY: Nice. 

HZ: She says, "I know you like the back of my hand," but the letters are on the front of her hand, which diminished the effect slightly for me, but I know that they have to do it that way for the Curly Moran hand-pen tribute. But back in the present, she's walking around with a lunch tray wondering about Cervando while she's walking up to Cassidy. Cassidy doesn't really acknowledge Veronica, but he flashes back to a very smeary time, while Cervando bangs on about pool hustling the Fitzpatricks and shows off the $200 jeans he got, courtesy of Liam Fitzpatrick's idiocy. 

JOY: Just as he's kind of finished up his bit, Dick pops in the door and squirts him with a squirt gun, which is apparently full of bleach. What? 

HZ: And Dick just happened to be carrying it around in case he saw someone excited about their new jeans? 

JOY: Yeah, this strains my suspension of disbelief. It just seems really bonkers. But also, Dick is a horrifying monster, so maybe? 

HZ: But it's a very smeary flashback, Jenny, so maybe it's not fully accurate because the smears make it so hard to see. 

JOY: Got to really squint to see what's going on. Yeah, then Cervando apparently came after Cassidy for a replacement pair of jeans. 

HZ: Gives him a piece of paper with the size and make. 

JOY: Apparently this happened to Cassidy all the time. People would come to him to settle grievances against his brother. 

HZ: Well, you're a younger sibling as well, Jenny, as am I. Sure this happens all the time, right? Having to buy people jeans that your brother bleached. 

JOY: Non-stop. 

HZ: Clemmons's office. How convenient Keith went on that date. 

JOY: Yep, yep. Keith has now a tape of Veronica being offered a diagnosis of generalised anxiety disorder for the low, low price of $1000. 

HZ: And we didn't see this scene! 

JOY: Yeah. Do you think they filmed it and cut it, or do you think they never wrote it? Too many dream sequences to fit in. 

HZ: All this off-screen work, so much more interesting than the on-screen work. Outside, Mr Wu is wearing an incredible beige striped shirt, and beige striped tie on the diagonal. Iconic. 

JOY: How does he do it? Speaking of what people are wearing outside, did you notice that Logan was wearing like a teal T-shirt with, like, pink wings on it or something? 

HZ: Very out of character.

JOY: Yeah. 

HZ: I noticed a lot of large but indistinct T-shirt motifs throughout this episode. What could it mean? Smeared by dreams? It's like when you're trying to read a book in a dream and you can just never really get to the bottom of the page, but T-shirts. 

JOY: And Angie wins the stupid egg drop contest. 

HZ: Angie struts through the hallway with her golden egg trophy, telling a friend she'll get an extension because of her generalised anxiety disorder. 

JOY: Aha! 

HZ: Which would be so useful because Veronica is right behind her, but she's not eavesdropping because she's listening to fucking Ahoy Mateys, still. 

JOY: The turnaround on this Checkov's generalised anxiety disorder payoff is lightning fast. I have whiplash. 

HZ: And then bumps into Logan. 

LOGAN: You look like Steve Buscemi. 
VERONICA: You...are such...a catch. How has Hannah been able to keep away? 
WALLACE: Maybe you should cut him some slack sometimes.

HZ: What a shitty thing Veronica says to Logan about Hannah. She sees Wallace defending Logan. That's probably not something she had considered would ever happen. 

JOY: Yes, exactly. She's like, "You guys know each other? I've never seen you talk." And it's because Wallace knows that Logan cares about her! It's all coming together, Helen. 

HZ: In the classroom with Angie in it, Clemmons is on the tannoy. No more exemptions for general anxiety diagnosis. 

JOY: Aha! 

HZ: People with actual mental health needs are being fucked up by the people abusing the system and casting doubts. 

JOY: This is maybe the worst thing about Angie. 

HZ: Boo. Mrs Murphy seems quite smug about it, so maybe Mrs Murphy also does not like Angie. In physics class, Veronica drops off listening to the radio show. Why? Just stop listening. Why? 

JOY: Yeah, maybe just stop listening. So Mr Wu invites her to the front of a class to do a little math, and while she's up there she has another dream, I guess, and is talking to Cervando, who talks about the driver dying from the explosion, everyone else dying from the rocks, but he survived the fall and drowned. 

HZ: It's so grim what he says. 

JOY: Yeah. Cervando kind of implies it was Weevil. 

HZ: Yeah, what the fuck? All or least Veronica interprets it as Weevil. 

JOY: Yeah. 

HZ: Cervando draws some chalk diagrams pointing out that in order to kill everyone, not just the driver, they would have had to detonate the bomb when it was close to the edge, and how would they know that unless they were right by there. 

JOY: Right, right. 

HZ: Weevil on the bike. The music, by the way, is the song ‘I Am God’ by The Wannabes, and Veronica wakes up having written in huge letters ‘I Am God’ on the board instead of the physics, and everyone is laughing. 

JOY: Yeah, you know how this always happens to you in physics class. 

HZ: It's OK though, because it's all a dream! Phew. But a dream within a dream, come on. If I'd wanted to watch Inception again, I would have. 

JOY: Yeah, oh my god. Fucking seriously. 

HZ: But she's still listening to that fucking show, but goes over to the computer and finds a song search engine and searches for ‘I Am God’. 

JOY: Oh yeah, and finds the fucking cover art which is a grim reaper and a bunch of tombstones. Aha! Chekhov's graveyard doodle paid off. 

HZ: Miss James expresses the disappointment I feel that this is the culmination of this whole dream bullshit. 

JOY: Seriously. 

MISS JAMES: So that's it? The tombstone art work was just an album cover?
VERONICA: And Rosebud was just a sled. I didn't just ruin Citizen Kane for you, did I?
MISS JAMES: No, no.
VERONICA: Good. So, are we done?
MISS JAMES: Well that depends. Do you think you're through being haunted?
VERONICA: I better be.

HZ: Keith gets home. Veronica's lying on the sofa. Keith tells her that Richard Casablancas took out an insurance policy on the boys three days after he married Kendall. They're worth more dead than alive. But it would have been plenty easy for him to kill them if he had wanted to, rather than this way, when they were not even in that vehicle. 

JOY: Yeah. 

HZ: Another fucking dream, though, just to send you off Jenny. On the bus, it's light. Veronica, Marcos. He explains, "Oh, all I did was just draw some band artwork I liked it, it didn't mean anything."

JOY: Kind of like this episode. 

MARCOS: Kind of disappointing, huh? Not a suicide thing, just a song I liked. That brings us back to you.
VERONICA: To me?
MARCOS: It's a fun exercise. Probably a little comforting for a while, thinking it's someone else's fault. But it's not, is it? We died because of you. 

HZ: All these dream sequences just brought it back to Veronica's idea that it's all about her. Great. 

JOY: Perfect. The thesis statement of the show once again stated firmly. 

HZ: He hands Veronica her ringing phone, it's Rhonda saying, "Where are you loser?" We see Veronica's bag contains C4. That's it. 

JOY: Helen, I'm tired. Why did they do it to us? 

HZ: Ah, I was having the weirdest dream, Jenny. You were there, and Lo Dodds was there, explaining the crimes perpetrated in this episode for the LoDown.

THE LODOWN

JOY: Lo. 

HZ: Lo, how admissible is evidence obtained via dreams?

LO DODDS: Admissible versus credible? So if Veronica got on a stand and said, "Hey, this is what happened in my dream, and therefore I think so and so did it," I don't think a jury is going to buy that. But in this case, Veronica is dreaming about stuff that she actually knows through reading Meg's emails, right? So the question of whether Meg's emails are admissible, whether she can do that, I think Meg's computer would be admissible because the police get a search warrant for it if they had probable cause to believe that there was evidence of a crime on there. Or, is it Lizzie, her sister, who handed over the laptop? She would have authority over that laptop and could hand it over to the police and say, "I think you need to look at this." Or Duncan now, since he has it. So that kind of thing could be admissible. 

JOY: Lo, you're kind of turning me around a little bit on the dream sequence aspect of this episode... 

HZ: Nope. Hard no! Because it's retconning, because we didn't see this stuff. 

JOY: OK, but but Lo makes a great point about the fact that Veronica's brain is doing what all of our brains do when we sleep, sifting through information that's already absorbed and making connections. 

LO DODDS: Exactly. 

JOY: Like sometimes, I'll be trying to learn a guitar part and I'll just be playing it over and over again and being like, "Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, I can't do this, I'm an idiot." And then I'll sleep and wake up and be able to play it like 50 percent better. Like my brain just kind of like rearranges all of the connectors and muscle memory.

HZ: That's not because of the dream, that's because you had a sleep! Stop it! 

JOY: Hmm. 

HZ: We learn in this episode that the bus crash families received such a tiny amount of insurance payout that it barely covered the funerals. Is that plausible? Their children have been murdered. 

LO DODDS: Yeah, well, the insurance is gonna be a finite amount. So whatever insurance the bus company has, the school district, it's going to be a certain amount, and if it's going to be divided between eight families... $80,000 would be way too low for an insurance policy for a school district, so that doesn't make any sense. It's unlikely that the families had insurance on their kids. Usually people don't have life insurance policies or anything on their kids, except for apparently Dick Senior, but it is, again, it wouldn't be the kind of payout you'd expect from, like, the lawsuit for the finger in a rib sort of situation. 

HZ: How much would you get for a finger in a ribwich? 

LO DODDS: Oh, I think millions, yeah. 

HZ: Really? 

LO DODDS: Unless... I mean, if she signed an NDA and said she wouldn't tell anyone she found a finger in her ribwich, like that's gonna be worth a lot of money. 

HZ: My dad found a piece of metal in one of his sausages and got £40 in vouchers from the supermarket, but not millions. 

JOY: Wow. 

LO DODDS: He didn't make enough of a case about that. 

HZ: No. Dammit. He could've been set for life. 

JOY: Lo, not that I'm planning anything, but... 

HZ: That's just what someone planning something would say. 

JOY: I don't know, I clearly said I'm not planning anything, but what crime is it to squirt bleach on someone else's jeans? 

LO DODDS: It's just vandalism. Misdemeanour vandalism, because he said, helpfully, that the jeans were $200. So it would be a misdemeanour. But honestly, in that sort of situation, you're probably not gonna get charged by the police, but he could take Dick to small claims, and that would be an easier probable way to get the money than trying to get the police involved and trying to get restitution, etc. 

HZ: Yeah, but it's much easier just to get the money by shaking Cassidy. 

LO DODDS: Yeah. Pushing Cassidy up against a locker seems to be the way people get money. 

HZ: That's the school's small claims court. 

JOY: Ha! 

HZ: So it's a misdemeanour because the jeans are worth, what was it, less than $800? 

LO DODDS: I think it's less than $400. 

HZ: OK, but say he'd been wearing $1,000 jeans, then what charge would that be? 

LO DODDS: Felony vandalism. 

HZ: That sounds more serious. 

LO DODDS: Yeah, I mean, again, like if you're gonna destroy something of someone's that's priceless, they could probably, depending on how you destroyed it, they could charge you with theft, but vandalism, that's what it would be in this case. 

HZ: What crime is it if you own a burger joint and someone gets a finger in their ribwich? 

LO DODDS: It's not gonna be a crime. The idea of damages is what you're going for there. So somebody finds something in their sandwich that injures them, you're still going to end up dealing with civil stuff like, I mean, you're going to get a lawsuit. That's where the money is. So people probably are unlikely to involve the police. 

HZ: Is it a different crime if it's a middle finger? 

LO DODDS: Yeah, I don't know if that makes it any better or any worse. 

HZ: Then we've got the plot where Keith is investigating anxiety diagnoses. 

LO DODDS: I have so many thoughts about this. 

HZ: I would love to hear them. Please. 

LO DODDS: I don't understand this on so many levels. So, first of all, I don't mean to cast aspersions on the realisticness of this show, but a general anxiety disorder is not going to get you out of tests. Like it's not get you out of the test completely, especially if you are, up until this point, a senior who is performing at the level of getting into Stanford. Like, that's not going to happen. You're going to have an IEP, individualised education programme, where it's a massive undertaking between the school and the teachers and the parents and there's meetings involved and there's aids and that's all for kids who need extra care with their learning. Maybe need a little bit more time, maybe they're on the spectrum, maybe they have some sort of learning disability. This is not to me at all realistic. So from that standpoint, I'm just blaming Clemmons for not doing a better job with this whole programme. The doctor is also going to be in trouble with the state licencing board, but what doctors normally... I wouldn't say normally, obviously most doctors don't do this, would be to get charged for prescribing drugs without seeing the patient. So let's assume he never saw any kids. Somebody comes in and says, "I want a prescription for Adderall." The doctor doesn't see them, says, "Oh, that'll be $1,000, here's your prescription." That's where you see doctors going to prison for decades, for doing shit like that and getting charged with distribution. But this is just a diagnosis, and if you're saying the kid, you know, even spoke to the doctor and the doctor said, "Fine, here's a diagnosis of general anxiety disorder," and these are all the rich kids, right? So they go to a private doctor. It doesn't take insurance. So $1,000 is plausible. Like I said, this whole situation doesn't make any sense to me. 

HZ: What if the generalised anxiety disorder excuse for school was another dream sequence that is less explicitly defined as one? 

HZ: Wake up, wake up, Jenny wake up, wake up, wake up... 

JOY: Huh? Helen, I had a terrible dream. It was an episode of Veronica Mars. 

HZ: Amidst all the dreams and smears, where there any lines that you enjoyed? 

JOY: I did like when Veronica first comes up to Logan and they're chatting, he implies that she's been thinking about him, and then he says, "I get it, sometimes I'm up all night just thinking about myself." Which I loved. And you? 

HZ: I suppose I like it when Veronica goes up to Natalie in her flashy car and says, "Hey, is this your car?" And Natalie says, "No, it's my rollerskate," which is about as much Veronica deserves. 

JOY: I'm going to tell you what I have to say about this episode as a whole, Helen. I'm going to rate it for you right now. It's a chaotic slop. It's a huge mess. It's like a fucking gutter that is filled with rain water, and then like some, you know, like stuff has been flowing downhill and all the trash is collecting at a bend in the road or whatever where this gutter is running, and fucking... It's just like a bunch of chaotic bullshit all smooshed together, for what? Helen, I'm giving this episode 0.5 fingers in a McRib sandwich. 

HZ: Ha! Is a half finger worse than a whole one? 

JOY: Yeah. Because I think if you get a half finger than you have to wonder if you are already ate the other half. 

HZ: Ugh. Jenny, I wish I could make you feel better about this episode. There was Keith doing some scheming and being on dates. I love to see Keith romancing. 

JOY: Hmm. But it was fake, it was all a lie, Helen. 

HZ: It's true, he didn't make anyone coffee. That's how you can tell. 

JOY: Exactly. 

HZ: He outsourced the coffee. And the mystery of the week was just the anxiety test. That's it. Like two scenes. I have a long-held prejudice against dream sequences so maybe I'm being unfair on this episode, but the fact that it didn't really have a single episode plot, and it bullshat around the season-long plot, I'm gonna give it one gay party bus. And that is generous. 

JOY: I'll eat my McRib sandwich with half a finger in it onboard your Daft Punk party bus. 

HZ: Well, Jenny, dreams can come true because that is this episode of Veronica Mars investigated. 

JOY: Case closed.

HZ: That was Veronica Mars Investigations Season 2 Episode 18 I Am God. 

JOY: Watch Season 2 Episode 19 and join us next time to investigate it. 

HZ: Find the show on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook at @VMIpod. 

JOY: The website where the show hides amongst the coats is VMIpod.com. 

HZ: And on there you can not only hear every episode, but you can also read transcripts of every episode, and see the cards that Jenny Owen Youngs has designed to help distinguish all the awful white boys of Neptune from one another. 

JOY: I'm Jenny Owen Youngs. I talk at length about another petite blonde protagonist over on my other podcast Buffering the Vampire Slayer. I also spend a lot of time singing, and I'll tell you what, Helen. I just put out a brand new song called Sunfish exclusively on Bandcamp last Friday. And I also have a brand new single coming out September 9th, very soon, on all digital platforms, so keep an ear out for that. 

HZ: Very exciting. I love sunfish as well, as a big sad fish. 

JOY: They're, yeah, I mean, you've got your lake sunfish that are like kind of small, cute, and spiny. Then you've got your big ocean sunfish, which just go on forever. 

HZ: Which kind is the song about?

JOY: The song specifically refers to the small freshwater kind that populated the stream next to the house that I grew up in in New Jersey. 

HZ: Aw. Well, I really look forward to hearing it on the 9th of September, and thereafter. I'm Helen Zaltzman and you can hear my other podcasts Answer Me This and the Allusionist at the pod places. Both entertainment shows with facts in them. 

JOY: So many facts. So many answers. 

HZ: Yeah. Give us a sense of order in this reckless world. 

JOY: Indeed. Speaking of order, this episode was edited and mixed by the relentless, unsparing Helen Zaltzman. Thanks to Ian Steadman for the transcripts. 

HZ: The music is by Martin Austwick and Jenny Sunfish Youngs. 

JOY: The sheriff of this town is Hrishikesh Hirway. 

HZ: The show is distributed by PRX. 

JOY: Until next time, hey, who's your daddy? 

HZ: Who's your daddy? 

JOY: He's that guy on FarmersOnly.com.