#i was watching another teen supernatural drama that shall not be named and it's not like the lead actress or the writing is BAD

[justafriendofxanders]

frankly no other enemies-to-lovers, generic self-insert protagonist girl/bad boy, m/f ship will ever go as hard as spuffy. not because spike is too special to be reverse engineered (though he is) but because we will never have another buffy summers.

[itstimetowatch]

Like a Virgin

Sleazy Lawyer Guy! His name is Cliff McCormick, and he used to be Abel Koontz’s (Lilly’s confessed killer) lawyer. This is just an avalanche of information, all of a sudden. Apparently a parade of iconic defense lawyers wanted to defend Koontz but he chose Cliff, who is either an ambulance chaser or the public defender, and either way is a pretty terrible lawyer by his own admission. I mean, I really didn’t need any more convincing that this case was shady but okay.

Veronica wants to visit Koontz on death row… apparently. I don’t know what she hopes to gain by this. I mean, if the guy is taking the fall for someone, what makes her think she can flip him?

Remember how I said that someday I would get through at least one episode without recognizing someone from the guest cast? Well, less than three minutes in this episode decides not to be that to be that day. Helpful Cheerleader (haven’t picked up a name yet) is Jo Harville from Supernatural and Sonya from Burn Notice.

Apparently, there’s a debauchery quiz making the rounds at Neptune. I’m sure this will be entirely a minor thing and will have little or no bearing on the story at all… right? Yeah, I didn’t think so. Let’s enjoy as Dick regales us with all the awful, awful things he’s perpetrated upon members of the human race. (I state this in such a way because I don’t think he qualifies as a member.)

So a bunch of 09ers are sitting around talking a bunch of shit about Veronica to Meg the Helpful Cheerleader. If these girls are so gossipy, then shouldn’t all of this already be common knowledge by now? I mean, the bong in Logan’s locker was back in the Pilot. Maybe I’m being nitpicky, here. Anyway, moving along.

Hey! Wallace is back! He went on a date with Georgia and hasn’t been seen since. I was beginning to think she had harvested his organs and sold them on The Black Market, and we just weren’t ever going to see him ever again… which would have been sad.

Wallace’s mom is Erica Gimple from Profiler and, of course, from Fame, and speaking of Fame, she looks damned amazing for being 40+. I guess she really is going to live forever! (That joke is probably WAY too old for Tumblr.) I hope the fact that they are introducing Wallace’s family and their backstory means that Wallace won’t disappear for prolonged periods of time anymore.

Turns out Phase Two of The Purity Test is that you can buy other people’s test answers. Again, I feel certain that this is an entirely minor plot detail that will have little or no bearing on the remainder of the episode. Neptune High will definitely not devolve into chaos in minutes at this development. 

So earlier I was distracted by the all-consuming black hole of awful that is Dick so I managed to fail to comment on how much a wad Meg’s boyfriend seemed like to me. I’m happy to have that suspicion confirmed. I take it that Meg is going to be the center of this week’s mystery.

That was one hell of a long ass opening.

So the computer science teacher knows nothing about computers… fine, I guess… but shouldn’t that be something that Veronica already knows? I mean, she goes to this school; she almost certainly would have had to have taken one or more of his classes. Even 2004 was well past the point of computer classes being optional. 

(Also, for the record, it’s not fine that the computer science teacher knows nothing about computers. This is a town whose economic backbone is an IT company that invented streaming video. Someone like Jake Kane is going to be okay with his kids going to a school with such a poor computer science curriculum? Other parents in the town are okay with their children having a sub-standard CS education when the children’s best chance at a good job in Neptune is at Kane Software?)

“Look for the blue hair,” he says of the girl that has one very small streak of blue in an otherwise dark brown head of hair. That wouldn’t be extremely easy to miss. Apparently this guy either just generally sucks at life, or he knows he’s talking to Veronica Mars, Ace Teen Detective.

Said minority-blue-haired girl is Mac, played by Tina Majorino from Napoleon Dynamite and Big Love.

So this Kimmy girl? Was she cast specifically because she looks like so much like Amanda Seyfried? Or is that just a coincidence? Also, did they forget to give her and Bitchy Brunette (I’ve already forgotten her name) any personality?

So the teachers are just going to sit there and watch while the student body slut shames Meg during her audition? Good to know. No wonder Veronica has so much detective work in this school. 

Get his ass, Wallace! That guy needs a hurting put on him.

Not sure what Wallace’s mom has against the Mars’ though.

I assume that the kid who plays Wallace’s little brother is actually Percy Daggs’ little brother because if those two aren’t related then I suspect some Mini-Me style cloning.

Deputy Pornstache says that The Law can’t do anything about the Fennel’s tenant… this despite the fact that he has trespassed multiple times and now has tried to burn their house down. So this is Deputy Shithead, then, huh?

“Overstepping is your main form of transportation.”

Ah, Mama Fennel works at Kane Software. That goes towards her antipathy with the Mars Family, though I’m not sure why she would believe her co-workers over her own son, who actually knows them personally, but… whatever.

Keith is the king. Later, you fucking deadbeat.

Backup! I see you boy!

So what’s the French word for “Statutory Rate”?

Soooo… Mac gets a pass on setting all of this in motion, then? Like, she meant for more or less all of this to happen. She felt bad that good people got caught up in it, and she was minorly helpful is sussing out who was hacking them but mostly so she could stay close to Veronica to know if she was about to get busted. The massive amount of turmoil that happened this week at school was directly her fault. Veronica’s moral compass is, shall we say, interesting.

I can only assume that this means that Mac is going to be coming back, maybe? Recurring, even? She could be Veronica’s technical consultant. It would be nice if Veronica maybe had multiple friends… they might even be able to appear in the same episodes as one another, eventually.

With everything else going on this episode, I’d completely forgotten the Visiting Death Row thing. 

Abel Koontz is on TURN. 

*Sigh* No, she’s not Jake Kane’s daughter. No matter how much you try to convince me otherwise, I don’t buy it for one second. The “You Look Nothing Like Your Dad, So How Can He Be Your Dad?” reasoning is stupid, if for no other reason than she doesn’t look like Jake Kane either. She looks like her mom.

It’s weird. I had just come up with the thought that it was just something that Celeste Kane told Duncan to break up Duncan and Veronica. After all, Lilly did say Celeste would break them up if she could. It wouldn’t even really matter if Leanne and Jake were still carrying on or not, she could just lie about it if they weren’t. 

But now with Able repeating it… false drama, pointless manipulation.

Good character building/growth this episode. The standalone mystery was kind of weak because the antagonists were basically nothing. Like I sort of assumed Kimmy and Pam(?) were involved because who else was it going to be, and the Frog had to be the one supplying passwords because it’s not like either of them know how to hack. I didn’t work out the connections between them or the motivations because there was really nothing there for me to engage with.

I guess all that great Logan/Weevil stuff last episode necessitated their not appearing here at all.