VMI 2.10 One Angry Veronica transcript
Hear this episode at VMIpod.com/2-10
Content note: Veronica Mars contains heavy themes, and this episode contains storylines concerning assault, death, sex tapes,
A LONG TIME AGO ON VERONICA MARS:
OMG, Meg gives birth to Duncan’s baby and then DIES!?
And Wallace comes back from Chicago!
But that’s all in the last couple of minutes of the show!
Before that, we’ve got Veronica doing jury duty and ruining everyone else’s holidays in her pursuit of The Truth...
The sex tapes that implicate Aaron Echolls in Lilly Kane’s murder have been stolen from the evidence locker, and TWO of Veronica’s ex-boyfriends are involved….
And Lamb is shirtless and sweaty and loving himself, merry Christmas everyone.
JOY: A dense little turkey, I’m Jenny Owen Youngs.
HZ: And running a tight ship and looking good doing it, I’m Helen Zaltzman.
You’re listening to Veronica Mars Investigations season 2 episode 10: One Angry Veronica.
JOY: Helen.
HZ: Mm-hmm. Should we just score this episode now and then call it?
JOY: Ha, yeah, that would do. Here's the thing: why make an episode of television made mostly out of the worst thing that can happen to you, as a citizen of the United States?
HZ: Why is it so bad in the States? Because I loved jury service; I had a very good time, and all of my friends were so jealous when I got the letter.
JOY: What the hell?
HZ: They were like, "Grr, I've been dying to do it."
JOY: Really?
HZ: Why do Americans hate it? Have you done it?
JOY: I've done it. I think it's kind of dark, in the sense that they're losing money. They should be at work, probably, like they would normally otherwise be at work.
HZ: Because here your work is obliged to pay for you.
JOY: That's amazing.
HZ: And because I'm freelance, I was actually getting paid by the state for doing the jury service, which was, depending on the week, slightly better than my usual freelance existence at the time.
JOY: Well, I think that the security of knowing that you're not losing your livelihood by doing your public service might help people have a better attitude. So it just felt like a lot of people who were there were just pissed. I would be pretty stressed out about knowing a jury of your peers are going to hear your case and decide, but every single one of them is pissed off that they have to be there.
HZ: And did you have some heated deliberation, like is depicted in this episode of Veronica Mars? Because we did. We had several days in the deliberating room. And it was quite a lot like this, except no one was as much of a shit as the main guy in this episode.
JOY: Dude, that guy sucks. Yeah, he's pretty bad.
HZ: He's credited as ‘Captain of Industry’. He immediately takes charge, but then he nominates Veronica to be the foreman of the jury and you're like, well, why are you doing that? Because I assumed he'd done that as a kind of conspiratorial touch or something to get his way, because he was like, "This is a stupid little 18-year-old girl and I'm going to call her 'Barbie'."
JOY: Oh, for sure.
HZ: Yet it came to nought, and he's just an arsehole. But an arsehole who has also acted in... Can you guess which show, Jenny?
JOY: Oh my god, is it Switched At Birth?
HZ: And also, can you guess which show the juror who is always knitting has been in?
JOY: Oh my god, she is the grandma on Jane The Virgin, of course. Was she also on Switched At Birth?
HZ: And Switched At Birth! Of course! Two jurors from Switched At Birth, so I call this a fix.
JOY: Can we just run down the credited jurors? They are Captain of Industry -
HZ: Dislike.
JOY: Sports Guy.
HZ: Sports Guy, who is from Scrubs. He plays The Todd in Scrubs.
JOY: Then we've got Women's Studies Professor.
HZ: Aah, she's played by Michael Hyatt, who I love. She's Dr Akopian in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and she's in The West Wing and The Wire and stuff. But she only gets like one line at the very end.
JOY: A waste.
HZ: More! Michael Hyatt! Less! Of! The shit guy!
JOY: We've got Knitting Grandmother, who we already mentioned.
HZ: Yes, from Switched At Birth.
JOY: From Switched At Birth and Jane The Virgin. Then there's Ned Flanders Type.
HZ: He's nothing like Ned Flanders, except he has a moustache and is judgemental.
JOY: Yeah. Then there's Nurse and Single Mother Waitress.
HZ: Yes. They just get to express frustration at being on the jury. How many jurors is that now?
JOY: Including Veronica, that's eight, so four uncredited jurors who have no lines and no distinguishing characteristics, I guess.
HZ: They probably get to make some off-camera lines so they didn't have to get paid as speaking extras. So this is effectively the mystery of the week plot, isn't it? Or one of two mysteries of the week, but the one that is occupying Veronica. But it's really hard to care about it because the mystery is all happening with people we never meet off-screen, and the mystery really is why are these jurors arseholes?
JOY: That is the biggest, true mystery of the ep.
HZ: There seem to be like some dodgy attitudes about sex work, about pimps, about these two nice boys from -
JOY: From good families.
HZ: White families. It's them versus a Latinx woman and an African-American man. Which one do the jury dislike the most? And to be honest, after a point, I just started tuning out when they were arguing over the details of the case that slanted it towards or away from particular people, and the whole point was just to keep the jury going over the holiday so everyone's like, "Ugh, Veronica's making us vote again, oh no, but it's like three-nine." But I don't really understand what the charge was, what the verdict was, and don't make me care. It's ultimately immaterial.
JOY: Yeah, I hate it.
HZ: Why is this plot, Jenny?
JOY: Why is this plot? Well, there is a 1957 film called 12 Angry Men.
HZ: Yes.
JOY: And it is similar to this in that people are doing jury duty, right?
HZ: Yes. There's also an Amy Schumer sketch based on that film, which is actually very good. It's certainly better than this riff on 12 Angry Men. There's a lot about a bad knee, that's a critical piece of evidence.
JOY: Feels like some real Encyclopedia Brown shit. Like, I feel like the fun thing of a mystery in a TV show is when you have the ability to help solve it along with the people solving it.
HZ: Yes.
JOY: But because we're being fed these pieces of evidence and revelations in real time, as Veronica is doing her own deducing, it's just not very fun.
HZ: No. Also, I get really pissed off at unrealistic depictions of juries on television. And maybe this is irrational, because I know that television has to dramatise stuff, but I found just the reality of jury exciting enough without the theatrics. But there's certain points where like, firstly, there's a bit where Veronica goes out the room because the judge calls her in as the foreperson, and with our jury they were like, "You all have to be together all the time. If you're called to the courtroom, you will have to come together. If you need to ask a question of the judge, you all have to come." And then there's this bit where Veronica is like, "But aah! What if the gun was blah, blah, blah and actually belonged to blah, blah, blah? Ooh!" And that kind of speculation is for the courtroom. That is not for the jury room. The jury room, you just have to assess what you have been given. Right? You're not supposed to be doing conjecture in the jury room.
JOY: Yeah. Also, I can't really fathom that Wall Street guy would ever, under any circumstances, actually end up serving on a jury.
HZ: Right, because he could just get out of it because people manage that?
JOY: Yeah. People manage that, I feel like especially people who make shit tons of money.
HZ: Here, it's harder to get out of juries. Also that guy, he makes Veronica be foreperson because no one else volunteers, and he's like, "Oh, 18-year-old girly, you'll learn something about civics for school." It's just before Christmas, and so then when she's like, "Well, I think we should examine the facts," and he's like, "But I'm supposed to be lap dancing for my shareholders, how dare you keep me here?" I was like, well, fuck you dude.
JOY: Yeah.
HZ: Anyway, spent too much time in the company of this arsehole this episode.
JOY: Much too much. The one thing about this part of the plot that I wanted to highlight is that when Keith has to break the news to Veronica that she has jury duty, he offers to get her my two favourite flavours of ice cream, and they are mint chocolate chip and butter pecan. Have you ever had the pleasure, Helen?
HZ: I've had the one, but not the other.
JOY: Not butter pecan?
HZ: Right.
JOY: I'm going to guess that's a strictly perhaps United States flavour.
HZ: Yeah, I think in Britain butter is not considered a flavour in the same way.
JOY: Well, it's not that the ice cream is butter-flavoured, although I understand the name is misleading.
HZ: Yes. How dare.
JOY: Many moons from now, the next time you're here, I will hunt down some butter pecan ice cream and show you the way, the truth, and the light.
HZ: To take the edge off me getting some annoying news in the post?
JOY: Yes. And I just felt very seen in this moment, that's all, Helen.
HZ: My favourite thing about this jury plot was the end, mostly because it meant it was over.
JOY: Yeah.
HZ: But because the awful man is really, really awful, calling Veronica "Barbie". I was seriously like, "Gasp!"
CAPTAIN OF INDUSTRY: Look Barbie, I've had a bellyful of your snide little digs. Here's my final word: I'll never, ever, send two boys from good families to jail on the word of that Mexican whore.
HZ: And then Ned Flanders is like, "Fuck you, I'm going to change my vote." The awful man is like, "Well, we shouldn't have trusted a cheerleader," and I was like, well, this is all your fault.
CAPTAIN OF INDUSTRY: You know what? I'm changing my vote too. Even lying hookers deserve a little holiday cheer, don't they?
KNITTING GRANDMOTHER: Are you serious?
CAPTAIN OF INDUSTRY: Of course I'm serious. Light the yule log, crank the Manheim steamroller, it's Christmas! Those boys will appeal, and they'll win. I'll sleep with visions of sugarplums, trusting their fate in a jury that doesn't kowtow to a high school cheerleader.
VERONICA: Yay!
HZ: Was Veronica ever a cheerleader? Or just has the look?
JOY: My sympathies to all petite blondes out there. Just being perky, living your life, day-to-day.
HZ: Yeah.
JOY: Getting called "Barbie" and "cheerleader".
HZ: Yeah. But I suppose it made their expectations low and then she fucking Veronica Marsed them, which is what we're all here to see.
JOY: Oh my god, they've been Marsed!
HZ: But then after that, and they get their guilty verdict, Michael Hyatt gets her line and gets to congratulate Veronica on doing a superb job, and she's like, "You know, you'd fit in great at Hearst College, where it says in the credits I'm a women's studies professor." Veronica was like, "Well, I want to get the fuck out of Neptune, but also it's very expensive," but, you know, file away Hearst College.
JOY: Chekhov's Hearst College.
HZ: She leaves and she goes out to her car, which has "muchos gracias bitch" written across the screen, but it was parked outside that retro-style diner that Nathan Woods was seen going out of to go to the phone booth to look up the Fennel family in the phone book, and I was like, is the courthouse next to that diner? Not sure. Or did Veronica go there on the way home to pick up dinner, which is intimated in the voiceover, and someone from the courthouse followed her there to deface her car rather than just doing it in the first location? That's the mystery I want solved, get the twelve jurors back in.
JOY: Hmm. Hmm. The court where I served in Brooklyn was right next to Shake Shack. Not that you asked, but since we're talking about a post-court diner now.
HZ: The other thing I remember about jury service is that we all got sent home for a day because they cannot work simple technology like DVD players.
JOY: Oh my god.
HZ: We had to watch some CCTV evidence and they couldn't do it. It delayed the trial by some time.
JOY: Holy shit. Your tax dollars at work. Sorry, your tax pounds at work.
HZ: Still, the main plot this episode is Keith busy investigating, and he's in what I imagine to be Keith sheriffy mode, but we we haven't often got to see that, like Keith operating on the publicly-accepted side of the law rather than being an ingenious private investigator and bail jumper-catcher.
JOY: Sometimes in a young man's life, he's just trying to do his job, he's just trying to do what the mayor has asked him, and figure out who stole the tapes of Lilly Kane and Aaron Echolls engaged in naked activities.
HZ: Remember season one? Bit of that.
JOY: Right, I do dimly recall season one.
HZ: Woody has called him into his office for one scene. Everything is beige and brown except for Keith's purple tie and green shirt. Woody's office is full of sports trophies so that you know he's a Sports Guy, ornamental balls and stuff - but also on the front of his desk there's one of those old-fashioned pen holders with two really, really long brass pens sticking out of it like antennae.
JOY: Ah, yeah.
HZ: I bet he never uses those. Just a Sharpie.
JOY: Just a Sharpie.
HZ: And all that Woody's there to do is to explain to Keith that the sex tapes have been stolen, and it must have been an inside job. So that's really saving Keith a bit of time finding that out himself.
JOY: Right, right, right.
KEITH: This is goning to put a huge dent in the prosecution's case. It's not the kind of thing that's going to stay secret long.
WOODY: No, it isn't. And when it does come out, Neptune is officially Bozoville. A national laughing stock. I need you to get those tapes back.
HZ: "Bozoville. A national laughing stock."
JOY: Yeah, I'm always saying that, I'm always saying what town is about to be the next Bozoville.
HZ: God, did you hear about that evidence that was lost or destroyed or compromised in a town that, if it's incorporated, will have a whole nine thousand residents?
JOY: Over in Bozoville? Why, yes I did.
HZ: Have you been to the Bozoville Outlet Mall? Got some really cheap Vans.
JOY: Wow.
HZ: But the good thing about this is we get to see quite a lot of Keith this episode.
JOY: And you're just trying to do your goddamn job, and somehow you end up in the Neptune Sheriff's Department's weight room watching Sheriff Lamb, the only dude on this show I don't want to see doing reps, doing reps.
HZ: Well, even worse than that, it opens for quite a long time with just a shot of his face. It looks like he could be lifting weights, or dealing with a difficult shit.
JOY: Helen!
HZ: And as he explains to Keith that they've changed the lock system of the Sheriff's Department so it's now keycards, and then he's like, "Oh, Keith, can you spot me?" And Keith seems to be like, "I don't know what that is." But then this scene is mostly Lamb standing topless, looking at himself in the mirror, lifting weights.
JOY: If you thought your opinion of Lamb could go no lower, this is the episode that was made to correct that idea in your mind, that wrong idea.
HZ: I think the backstory that I've created for Lamb is that he had a very unpleasant childhood, and then at a pretty young age, like before finishing high school, he was cast in an O-Town-esque boy band with an evil manager. He would have got out of that at like 21 or 22, and then he's filled his adulthood with abs and malevolence.
JOY: Abs and malevolence. The Sheriff Lamb story. You know, he doesn't look entirely dissimilar from Dan Miller of O-Town.
HZ: Wow. My theory really works.
JOY: It really does.
HZ: I think even if the full line up of O-Town walked past me, I would not be able to identify them as O-Town. Keith spends a lot of time this episode in the interrogation room just talking to different police officers. Sacks gets a turn: he says Inga's got the door codes if you have clearance. But then we see Leo for the first time since the very beginning of the season. His hair - he needs a bit of a haircut at the back.
JOY: Yeah, his hair's a little long.
HZ: It's like mine in quarantine. It's got that Frasier Crane loaf of bread thing going on at the neck.
JOY: Oh god. Ha! Yeah, we see Sacks slip up, he's very apparently been given some talking points by Lamb and we see him kind of fumble them, and Keith can tell immediately, like his bullshit detector is going off. But once he's talking to Leo, Leo's like, "Security is a joke, and somebody must want to sell the tapes, that's why they stole them, and oh, also, would you mind saying hi to Veronica for me?" Yeah.
HZ: Yeah. It is Leo that has stolen the tapes, so why does Leo tell Keith that someone must have stolen the tapes to sell to the tabloids, which -
JOY: - is exactly what somebody who didn't steal the tapes would say.
HZ: Keith gets on the phone to that journalist we saw towards the end of season one, Lloyd Blankenship. He calls his tabloid contacts to find out if anyone has been offered the tapes for sale, and they have, and the current price is $500,000.
JOY: Yo.
HZ: Because I guess at the time celebrity sex tapes were doing pretty well.
JOY: Yeah.
HZ: You had the whole wake of Paris Hilton, the early-mid-2000s. There was a lot of this, but then that is mostly young women and not middle-aged Aaron Echolls, hot as he is in a evil murderer way. I still wonder if people actually would have clamoured to watch that.
JOY: Well, there was so little video on the internet at that point. Now, the internet's overrun with video content, of all kinds of people having sex with all kinds of other people. But at this time, they were still just trying to get that off the ground.
HZ: This is set in the first year of YouTube's existence, after all. But - Kane Software has already had streaming video in the town for quite some time.
JOY: Oh, of course.
HZ: So Neptune, and Veronica Mars, should be way ahead.
JOY: I unfortunately fell down a Wikipedia rabbit hole a couple of months ago and learned, among other things, that at the very beginning of the Paris Hilton sex tape - which evidence strongly suggests was made and the release was signed while Paris was not probably legally able to consent to anything, which really sucks - that the first thing that happens when you press play on that sex tape is a title card comes up that says, "9/11, we will never forget," and then the sex tape goes forward. Can you imagine?
HZ: What are they hoping to achieve there? Is it like a commentary on, like, "You came here for arousal, but I'm going to slap your boner right back into your body"?
JOY: I don't think so.
HZ: Or do they think this is where people get their news? Amongst the people that Keith meets to chat with about this is Logan; and it's funny, really, that Logan coming into the interrogation room, where he's been many times before, and seeing Keith - who typically, they're not on the same side - they kind of seem like pals in this. Keith seems quite warm towards him, Logan seems quite comfortable to see Keith. Well, maybe it's just the interrogation room again is his second home.
JOY: It's so cosy.
LOGAN: I adore what your designer's done with the men's room. That Hefty bag over the busted urinal adds a delicious wabi-sabi feel.
KEITH: It's Don's thing. We went more mid-century modern back in my day.
HZ: Logan's got a classic tie-dyed pond t-shirt.
JOY: Dude, it's like alternating tie-dye stripes of green and brown, somehow, and then on top a beige motorcycle jacket with bright neon green accents. I feel like he has a lot of jackets that are similar to this?
HZ: Yes.
JOY: This one feels new to me. He has just like a full closet of different brown and green and orange motorcycle jackets.
HZ: It's fun to see them chat. Logan appears shocked, though, to hear about the missing tapes. Inga interrupts to take Keith out to the phone because Lloyd has called to say a tabloid's bidding $500,000 for the sex tapes. Therefore, when Deputy Sacks comes into the room with a file, he doesn't notice Logan because he's wearing pond green and brown, so he blends into wherever, and also he has that always lounging thing, so Sacks is like, "There's no one here because it's so still," drops off a big file, of course Logan gets right in it, and then steals a list of people's email addresses from the Sheriff's Department.
JOY: It's so fucking bonkers to watch Sacks, who was just like, "Yeah, security's so tight, I'll repeat all that stuff about how our security is really tight," just like strolls into this occupied fucking room and drives off this file of shit, it's just, it's a lot.
HZ: Another wonderful thing about this:
KEITH: I asked you whether you heard anything unusual from your father. Did he ever mention the tapes when you were locked up with him?
LOGAN: Can you seriously imagine me conspiring to save Daddy dearest? Lilly's killer?
KEITH: I'm just making sure I have every pertinent bit of information.
LOGAN: I'll tell you what, dude: if I hear anything pertinent, I'll get back to you.
KEITH: The name's not ‘dude’, it's Mr Mars.
JOY: Chekhov's dude, Helen. File this away.
HZ: Logan gets these email addresses, and off-screen he manages to obtain the tapes. He pays Leo for the tapes so that he can destroy them. And this probably would have been a lot more interesting than seeing this amount of jury shit. The little bits we get are quite interesting. We get this scene at the Neptune Grand where Logan is watching the sex tapes and he looks absolutely anguished, and do you think it's worse for him watching his dad have sex with his ex-girlfriend, or was it worse for Duncan when he had to see the tapes of his sister having sex with his friend's dad? It's bad for both. It's not a contest, really.
JOY: Yeah, it's hard to say. It's hard to measure the pain of these two boys watching this tape. But I will say, I will highlight once more, that when Duncan saw it for the first time he was standing next to Veronica, who he currently believed might be his half-sister and who he knew he had had sex with at some earlier point. So, I mean, both of these boys are just rolling around in their own tanks of shit.
HZ: And Duncan went, "Mr Echolls!" Whereas Logan's reaction... Logan seems extremely upset and traumatised, and he's also looking extra young this episode, which makes him seem more vulnerable.
JOY: He does look extra young. He looks extra boyish.
HZ: Maybe because he's not being a sexperson this episode. Taken years off him.
JOY: I was thinking the same thing.
HZ: He takes the tapes out of the camcorder through which he is watching them, and he happens to have a degausser, which he waves over the tapes to destroy them with magnetism, and then he burns the labels in the bin whilst crying, at which point Keith turns up. Great timing.
JOY: What's a degausser usually used for? Is it just used for this?
HZ: I've never had the pleasure of degaussing a single thing. It was originally applied to reduce ship's magnetic signatures during World War Two. Of course. Oh, so it's to destroy data held on magnetic storage.
JOY: Right, right, right.
HZ: But although Keith immediately realises Logan has destroyed vital evidence, he's quite nice about it, and then he's also quite nice about the fact that it's Leo who must have done it.
JOY: Helen, you also neglected to touch upon what gets us to Keith's conclusion, which is that Logan says, "You know, they'll never end up on the internet now, blah blah blah." Keith's like, "How did you get somebody to sell the tapes for, you know, ten percent of their market value?" and Logan says, "I've always depended upon the kindness of strangers."
HZ: It's so weird. He's doing a Blanche DuBois to just, what, cover up what could be ten minutes of plot?
JOY: Uh-huh. And Keith is like, "Well, there's only one kind person who works at the Sheriff's Department." Maybe two, Inga and Leo; but Leo has maybe more to gain, Inga's more of a lifer.
HZ: Well, given that Leo was dumped for Logan by Veronica, why would he be going to Logan?
JOY: Leo has been shown to be a guy who has enough space in his heart to be bummed that he was dumped by Veronica for Logan, but also simultaneously put himself in Logan's position in terms of, what would it be like if my dead girlfriend and my dad made a video of themselves having sex that was about to be sold to tabloids, I feel like?
HZ: The reason Leo's done it is because this show has to stigmatise difference. And in this case, it's Leo's sister.
LEO: Tina? What can I say, she's a great kid. She's ten years old; she's totally nuts about the 49ers; she challenges me at crazy eights every night, she always wins. She's got Down Syndrome, though, so learning is kind of a struggle.
HZ: By the tenets of this show, it must be a disaster. So Leo stole the tapes so they could afford private school for her special care. Although if he sold the tapes to Logan for $50,000, then that's not a lot of private school, is it?
JOY: Maybe in 2005 that was OK? The evidence that we have that Tina might really benefit from private school is that if the Neptune public schools are anything like the Neptune Sheriff's Department, they are shoddily-run and done so by idiot hacks.
HZ: But Keith is quite kind to him, even though this is going to really fuck the evidence for the trial and possibly ruin the possibility of a guilty verdict. But I guess he can't be too judgemental, given that he's compromised evidence for the bus crash case already in the last few episodes.
JOY: Oh, true.
HZ: Anyway, Leo has to hand in his badge and his gun. So Deputy Leo no more.
JOY: I hate it.
HZ: Yeah. Sorry, Jenny. Shitty Christmas for you.
JOY: Shitty Christmas for me.
HZ: But then I suppose last Christmas on the show someone got stopped by an aggrieved pumpkin carver, so...
JOY: There are no good Christmases in Neptune. Also, fuck the police. Defund the police. All police resign. Go, Leo.
HZ: One way in which Veronica Mars seems to speak to the moment we're in, in a way that it doesn't with sexual politics and so on, is the All Cops Are Bastards thing. Even Leo, who's a nice cop, does something bad that favours a privileged white man. The rest of them are corrupt and stupid and careless. People keep tweeting me going, "All cops are bastards, except Keith Mars." I mean, he's a good guy...
JOY: But he's not a cop right now.
HZ: He's not a cop right now - and he just destroyed some evidence, so some people are not going to get justice for their murdered children.
JOY: Mm-hmm.
HZ: As to what else happens this episode: Christmas is occurring this episode, and the Marses have really gone all out. Last year, they had their little Christmas tree with her weird Blair Witch Project reindeer, but this year sumptuous Christmas decorations, and she's got a very fancy lady outfit.
JOY: Sequins, right? She's got a sequinned dress.
HZ: And a hat and some tiny game hens.
JOY: Hey, I'm here to say that Cornish game hens are delicious. Just in case you haven't had the pleasure and you're feeling like this show presented them in a way that made you feel sceptical of them: they rock.
HZ: Veronica has also drunk three energy drinks to give her the boost to cook this fancy Cornish game hen Christmas dinner.
JOY: Veronica, no.
HZ: They're drinking what looks like - well, it looks like grape juice, but I think, is it supposed to be wine? There's a little conversation about whether Veronica drinks wine now and I can't work out whether they're like, "No, it's alright, it's not wine," or whether it is wine.
JOY: Unclear.
HZ: We were given wine from the age of four in my household, so I'm not scandalised, I was just curious to what point they were trying to make.
JOY: Wow.
HZ: I grew up in Europe, Jenny. And also, you have to do the the Friday night Jewish ceremonies. It demystifies wine. But they don't show them eating the game hens because Kristen Bell's vegetarian, so they just show the aftermath of Keith going, "Mmm, my belly,” all very excited, and I love excited Keith. He's got a gift. Is another waterbed?
JOY: No, it's a new computer inside the husk of her old computer. It has 512 gigawatts of RAM!
HZ: It's got 4MB of storage!
JOY: Hee-hee-hee-hee! Yeah, he's just saying a bunch of shit.
HZ: It's got two news stories on it that are relevant to Veronica's jury service case, even though you're not supposed to talk about that, and also if this was valid evidence, why was it not presented at the trial? Ugh. Can't even escape this bloody awful jury plot at Christmas dinner.
JOY: It is unfortunate.
HZ: The other thing that happens to Veronica this episode: there was a very fleeting glance of Duncan at the beginning where she is sadly picking at a supposedly festive cake that is green with a little red tree iced on.
JOY: Dude, that is some neon-ass cake.
HZ: Nasty-looking. So at the end of the previous episode, Veronica discovered Meg is pregnant. So this is, I guess, the first time she and Duncan have seen each other since she discovered this. And Duncan implies immediately that it's his, and registers as much kind of shock and surprise as his face can do, which is...
JOY: Slim to none. Are we missing the opportunity just to start saying "Megnant"? She's Megnant.
HZ: This awkward conversation is interrupted by Dick, and I thought, "Oh, were we supposed be pleased to see Dick at least?" And then he starts talking about this big New Year's Eve party he's having, and glad to say we don't see it in the episode.
JOY: Thank god.
HZ: We don't see what he calls "the crazy Chinese pyro guy". But he's the one to drop the news to Duncan that Meg has woken up. How does Dick know? Because he's like, "Maybe she'll come to my party next week", and you're like, "She's still in intensive care."
JOY: Yeah.
HZ: Veronica makes a conciliatory gesture of a fake pass to get Duncan into the ICU. So that's generous, considering she's very upset.
JOY: Yeah. We see her metabolise very quickly in this scene. She goes from being super taken aback, and maybe upset, to helping. And then she says, "I know, I'm amazing," and then we remember that, oh right, it's Veronica's world and we're all just living in it.
HZ: She's the cool girl.
JOY: Mm-hmm. She's not like those other girls, Helen. When Duncan goes to visit Meg and she wakes up and Veronica is also there, you know, she like talks about how her parents want the baby to get put up for hyper-Christian adoption. And Meg asks Veronica to promise her that if anything happens to her, she will not let her parents send the baby away or keep the baby.
HZ: Yes, it's really sad and upsetting, isn't it?
JOY: That is a hell of a burden for a young teen detective to take on.
HZ: Yeah. She has borne a lot of burdens, though. And also she saw what the Manning parents are like.
JOY: Oh yeah.
HZ: Pretty close too. Meg just wants to go and move in with her Aunt Chris in Seattle, who wrote the envelope with big handwriting the other episode, and raise the baby there.
JOY: Would it be worthwhile to mention that, I know we all maybe were inclined to feel some sympathy or understanding towards Sheriff Lamb, but it seems like the Manning parents are just out there doing whatever the fuck they want. Doesn't seem like anything happened to them, except maybe a sheriff sat outside their house for a night.
HZ: What could be worse retribution than that for middle class white people?
JOY: Well, if he took his shirt and started doing maybe some reps outside their house would be worse.
HZ: But at the end of the episode, Keith receives a call and has to tell Veronica that Meg has died from a blood clot to the heart, but the baby, who is a girl, survived. I'm very upset to hear Meg's died, because I think Alona Tal has done a really good job of making her an interesting character, even though she's a bit of a goody-goody on paper. And also someone who is a friend to Veronica that didn't put up with her shit, like she made Veronica better.
JOY: Yeah.
HZ: But of course, a teenager has sex, so they must both get pregnant and be dead. That's what television does.
JOY: Yeah. This sucks, the sucks a lot. There's so many people I would rather kill off of this show than Meg.
HZ: But one thing to cheer you up just after this awful news, Jenny, is Veronica is watching the New Year's Eve ball drop programme alone, there's a knock at the door -
JOY: And it's Wallace!
HZ: He's back!
JOY: Happy New Year to all of us.
HZ: Maybe it won't be so shit in 2006 after all.
JOY: And they cuddle!
HZ: And we haven't actually seen Keithlicia together since the episode where they had a horrible argument. So I'm assuming that that is over off-screen as well.
JOY: Yeah.
HZ: There's all this stuff I'd rather see than the stuff they show us: police auction; Keithlicia; Logan doing a deal with Leo. No.
JOY: Should we just start our own show, Helen?
HZ: Yeah. Like the Rosencrantz & Guildenstern of Veronica Mars.
JOY: Yes!
HZ: What does Deputy Sacks get up to on his date with Ms. Hauser?
JOY: Oh my god.
HZ: Did she honour his safeword? I bet not. By the standards of this show, almost certainly not.
JOY: Yeah.
HZ: Well, I am guessing that a number of crimes have been perpetrated in the course of this episode, and a number of liberties taken with the depiction of the legal process, and I would like to know what all these things are, so I'm going to refer to our resident legal expert and southern Californian marshmallow Lo Dodds for today's LoDown.
JOY: Thank god.
THE LODOWN
LO DODDS: So much unnecessary criming.
HZ: Always. But first: Meg is dead. But it's been several months since the bomb went off on the bus, which precipitated her death - would that still be seen as whoever did that bomb murdering Meg, by the legal eyes?
LO DODDS: Yes. So presuming that the person who bombed the bus intended to kill everybody on it, the fact that Meg succumbs to her injuries later wouldn't change anything. They'd still be charged with murder. And even if that person didn't intend to kill everyone, California, at this time - they did just revamp this law - had the felony murder rule, which is if you commit a felony and someone dies during that felony, they can still be convicted of first degree murder; not just any murder, first degree murder.
JOY: Oh wow.
LO DODDS: So all of the felonies that that person would have committed - just possessing the materials to make a bomb is a felony - can be charged as a felony. So they would have been charged with first degree murder anyway.
JOY: Is it legal for this episode to be so boring?
LO DODDS: How can you find juries boring?? This is what bugs me about jury duty, is because the people that really would love to be on juries, lawyers like myself, never, ever get picked to go on juries. It's very realistic that Veronica would get a jury summons, but the likelihood of her being picked for a jury is very low. The likelihood that it would be over the Christmas holidays is pretty much nonexistent. The court is technically open, but when you schedule a jury trial you have to take into account the judge's schedule, the lawyers' schedule, the witnesses' schedule. And so that is ridiculous. Them being forced to stay after hours in the court house is ridiculous; obviously the court staff has to go home, so they're not going to pay a bailiff time and a half to watch them. If they really wanted to, they could sequester them, but that would be in a hotel. That would not be like just stuck in the room.
HZ: And to me, a lot of it looked like bollocks, but I was wondering whether it was just because the US and the UK have different judicial systems.
JOY: Helen, were you alarmed by the lack of powdered wigs?
HZ: You don't have wigs on the jury, Jenny; that's for the other people! That's for everyone else.
LO DODDS: You do have wigs on the lawyers, though, which is just awesome.
JOY: Wigs all around. You can't enter the courthouse without a powdered wig. I have it on good authority.
LO DODDS: Those wigs are expensive, too.
HZ: They are, they're like £400.
JOY: Oh my god.
HZ: What do you think happens if, in the British legal system, you have hair that looks exactly like one of those wigs - can you get away with not wearing a wig?
LO DODDS: Ooh. Ha! I don't know. To answer your question: Veronica would be communicating through the bailiff, not going into the judge's chambers. So whenever the jury wants to communicate with either lawyers or the judge, they will send a note to the bailiff, the bailiff goes and says, "Hey, the jury has a question or the jury wants some clarification on this instruction that you've given them," they wouldn't just be hauling Veronica away now. OK, so the absolute bullshit is, once again, Keith: what the fuck? It is absolutely against the rules to research a case outside of the jury room. So Keith putting that up on her computer, somehow knowing that that's the trial she's on, Veronica doing her background research - and then you can tell she kind of knows the rule because she slides it in and makes the sports guy, token sports guy, answer the question of, "Ooh, this guy looks familiar." So they both understand that they're not supposed to be doing this, and if the judge finds out there's going to be a mistrial and they'll have to do a do over. So that's ridiculous. However, in theory, there should have been some information on the alleged pimp. I cannot believe that any defence counsel wouldn't have done just a basic Google search to figure out who that was, and one of the first things that any attorney tries to do with witnesses is try to figure out if they have some sort of bias or motivation; and the fact that this guy is employed by, or at least owes something to, this sports agent would definitely come up.
JOY: Was this trial like five minutes long? Did they cover anything at all?
LO DODDS: It doesn't sound like it.
HZ: And this guy, the Captain of Industry, at the end, he's like, "Oh, I'll change my vote, sure, but these rich white boys are going to win on appeal anyway." Is that right?
LO DODDS: They might, because Veronica tainted the jury.
JOY: Oh my god.
HZ: Veronica!
LO DODDS: But on appeal, they don't just win. They can have a new trial. They could make a motion for a new trial. But it depends on what the appeal is based on. If there was a crappy jury instruction, or the judge didn't sustain an objection that they should have sustained, or overruled an objection they shouldn't have overruled, it depends on what that standard is as to what they get from their appeal.
JOY: Speaking of fucking shit up for everybody else -
LO DODDS: Argh. Fucking Leo!
JOY: Proving that, in fact, yes, what we've already been in the process of learning and relearning, particularly recently, there are no good cops. Not even Leo. Not even Leo is a good cop.
LO DODDS: Oh, he's such a good cop that he's made it really hard to prosecute a paedophile murderer.
HZ: And attempted Veronica-murderer.
LO DODDS: And I appreciate that your sister has Down syndrome, but they don't make a great connection like she needs special services, and you want to go, "Um, you're in California, you know, you can get an IEP." I don't know how hard it is to get people IEPs, but it sounds like they made that connection very tenuously, that Leo was willing to throw away his whole career and compromised this case for $50,000.
JOY: They just had to fill up the whole episode with this riveting jury deliberation, so they didn't have time to get into any kind of deeper reason for Leo to be risking his career.
LO DODDS: I also don't understand about how Keith's report is like, "It will be very difficult to get a conviction." Why? He confessed! And presumably, if security is as lax as it made it sound like, Leo was like, "The security's lax," and everyone else was faking the tight security.
HZ: Well, if Inga is the tight security...
LO DODDS: Wouldn't there be some sort of trial? This doesn't make any sense.
HZ: So if he didn't have Keith deliberately obfuscating to save him, would Leo be prosecuted for this?
LO DODDS: I would find it more believable if they had made this about Lamb, like him saying, "I'm going to fire him, I'm not going to prosecute him, because I don't want anyone looking into the security of this department," because as we all know you can just walk into any old evidence locker and look for rats, so it seems like Lamb has problems everywhere and he probably just doesn't want a close eye on this.
HZ: He's too busy with his reps.
LO DODDS: Yeah, but there were a lot of reps.
JOY: Those curls aren't going to curl themselves.
LO DODDS: I know.
HZ: Wow, Jenny, what a gift-wrapped turd of an episode.
JOY: Mmm. Not my favourite.
HZ: Looked like it might be good…
JOY: But once you get in there, you're like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, who did I hurt? And how can I fix it?"
HZ: Did any lines give you a temporary pickup? Like a little chocolate coin slipped into the packaged turd?
JOY: Oh, I'm hating all of these images.
HZ: Sorry. I've ruined Christmas.
JOY: I love Leo saying, "You mind giving my best to your daughter?" And Keith saying, "A little. But I'll do it." Nice, Keith.
HZ: It says it all, doesn't it, about the relationship between Keith and Leo.
JOY: It really does.
HZ: I'm also going to give Keith my line of the week: "The name's not ‘dude’. It's Mr Mars."
JOY: That's how he deduces later that the email sent around to the police station was from Logan, because he hits it up and gets a response that says, "Dude, I already sold the tapes." Chekhov's dude!
HZ: And Logan is the only person that uses the word ‘dude’.
JOY: Definitely. The only person that Keith knows anyway.
HZ: He's obviously never had to sit through The Big Lebowski with Veronica. Doesn't know his daughter that well after all. And then, dare I ask Jenny, how you rate this episode overall? You did get to see Leo.
JOY: I did get to see Leo. There were shirtless reps, even though they weren't performed by a person I wanted to see performing them. We got to see, we got confirmation that Veronica still works at Java the Hut, so I feels like at least some questions have been answered.
HZ: Got a brief glimpse of Wallace; we've got the prospect of Wallace ahead of us, and it's good to have hope.
JOY: Prospects of future Wallace, that is good. So for those reasons there's hope in my heart, and I will give this episode one green tie-dye stripe on a long-sleeved tee, and one brown tie-dye stripe on a long-sleeved tee.
HZ: So is that a total of 2?
JOY: I think it's a total of 1½.
HZ: OK.
JOY: And how would you rank this very special episode?
HZ: I'm going to give it 1.8 rather assertive pen holders. It is all I can muster.
JOY: Very fair. Very fair. That's this episode of Veronica Mars investigated.
HZ: Case closed.
JOY: That was Veronica Mars Investigations Season 2 Episode 10: One Angry Veronica.
HZ: Watch season 2 episode 11 and join us next time to investigate it.
JOY: Find the show on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @VMIpod.
HZ: The website, where the show lives until it’s wiped with the degausser, is vmipod.com.
JOY: I'm Jenny Owen Youngs, and when I'm not making this podcast with Helen, I'm making another podcast called Buffering the Vampire Slayer, where I discuss in detail yet another petite blonde protagonist. I also make music, which you can check out at jennyowenyoungs.com.
HZ: I'm Helen Zaltzman, and my other podcasts include Answer Me This, which you can hear at answermethispodcast.com, and the Allusionist, which is at theallusionist.org.
JOY: This episode was edited and mixed by Helen Zaltzman.
HZ: The music is by Martin Austwick and Jenny Owen Youngs.
JOY: The sheriff of this town is Hrishikesh Hirway.
HZ: Doing reps.
JOY: Ha. Yeah, I saw Hrishi over Facetime recently and he was looking jacked. The show is distributed by PRX.
HZ: Until next time, who’s your daddy?
JOY: Who’s your daddy, Helen, and does he like Cornish game hens?
HZ: Probably would. I mean he'll eat like whatever's put in front of him as long as he doesn't want to cook it himself.
JOY: Nice. Big dad energy.