Date of airing: November 23, 2005 (UPN)
Nielsen ratings information: 2.50 million viewers, 1.7/3 in Households, 1.0/3 rating with Adults 18-49
written by: John Enbom, Cathy Belben
directed by: Steve Gomer
It was 2005 on UPN, and apparently, there was only room for one gay
storyline per season, at least on VERONICA MARS. I do not know about the
major rest of UPN’s programming, but I do get the sense there were not a
lot of gay characters in them – BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER does not count,
because Tara and Willow’s relationship was taken over from The WB,
although it has to be mentioned that Willow at least stayed gay with the
network change and the writers and producers were not forced to change that. VERONICA MARS is a nice example of mid-2000s television
in how writers were potentially trying to be more inclusive and diverse
with their characters and stories, but maybe the network was not fully allowing
it. Although it is clear that the show wanted to be inclusive (it had a transgender character for a first-season episode, even if she was portrayed by a cis actor), but could not fully play with that due to its setting and pool of characters (almost all of them are wannabe-Republicans who are homophobes behind closed doors – as evident in this episode).
In the meantime, the story of Carlos Oliveres was good enough to keep me engaged throughout the entire hour. I liked the idea of a kid so shy that almost all of his classmates did not know anything bout him, yet he was a popular radio DJ mouthing off about all the other kids at school. That kind of makes Carlos the perfect choice for being the guy who insults everyone else around him, since it is the quiet ones who see and hear everything and therefore know the most. And it made the notion of Carlos’ parents hearing his voice a little less creepy, since it was part of Carlos’ radio shows the parents have been hearing, instead of a message specifically created for the parents to freak them out and let them think they are in the middle of their own performance of POLTERGEIST.
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| This is the face of someone who does not know what a script coordinator is or does. |
Besides that, I
appreciated that Carlos’ love interest was behind it all, and that
Ryan’s actions to “torment” Carlos’ parents were connected with the
parents trying to extort money from the school district in a sort of
intriguing way. Or at least that is how I understood it. The “haunting” of
Carlos by an actual person was used by the parents to ramp up the
harassment and sue the school district and get some money for the loss of their son – although I
did not understand why the alarm code was in the trash and why Keith was supposed to find it, and what he was supposed to do with it. Either I am wrong with my understanding of the episode, or there were a couple of scenes missing.
Meanwhile, Veronica was in some serious danger again, and I have to say again that I love it when she is facing actual danger and cannot talk herself out of it with her wit and charm. For once, she is facing actual killers instead of dumb kids or parents trying to make some money out of other fools. Facing Aaron Echolls, an actual killer, in the first season finale might have been a traumatic experience for Veronica (yet she does not seem to have PTSD after getting locked in a burning fridge), but getting choked to almost unconsciousness by someone who is being considered a low-class criminal who likes to do high-class murdering was exciting in a tense way.
It was a nice reminder that, every once in a while, Veronica can step in deep and real crap, and she might not even realize it until she is actually kissing death or at least violence against her. And Logan coming to her rescue (with a gun, no less) only serves the potential re-emergence of their romance, now that they sort of had each other’s backs in this episode (and with Duncan distancing himself from his girlfriend). Veronica was still interested in following up on Logan’s case (maybe less so now than during the beginning of the episode), and Logan did not mind putting himself in danger to save Veronica. At least he has something in common with Duncan, who did not hesitate to step between danger and Veronica in the previous episode. Two guys love her, and both are ready to defend her honor and save her life.
Maybe Veronica should return the favor at some point, now that Logan is on a real war path with the PCHers. While I did not understand why Weevil would threaten Logan and get answers out of him that way, as he was dealing with the potential of being pushed from the top position in the PCH gang, the writers finally managed to give Weevil a story that has actual meaning not just for him as a character, but also another main character. For the first time in the show, Weevil is portrayed as the villain, which is a nice change from the way he was portrayed in the previous season. For the first time, there was a sense of a regular character getting murdered by another regular, which pushed VERONICA MARS not only into dark and darker regions, but also leveled up the potential violence. The show has not been there during the first season, and the only dark themes back then were rape (Veronica and her upstairs neighbor played by Jessica Chastain), a murder here and there, a serial killer, and eventually a fight between Veronica and Aaron, followed by a fight between Aaron and Keith. But a gang member threatening a high school student with bullet holes in their hands or the nether region, and then the high school student returning the favor? Yeah, that is a different level of darkness and violence. It is an ongoing level of darkness. This season of VERONICA MARS knew how to make its story arcs much darker and more threatening.
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| Duncan has wet dreams about girls in comas. |
And finally, there was the tiny story Duncan was trapped in, and it
did not say much. Okay, he has dreams about Meg, which might mean he is
still in love with her (it would help to break him off from Veronica, so
she can get back in Logan's arms), and he read a confidential letter that is
going to freak him out in the next episode, but there was not a lot of any of it here. The fact that Duncan was getting less screentime in this
episode than Logan does tell one fact: Not only is Logan’s story more
interesting for the writers, and it has been continuously expanded (now
with a potential war between Logan and Weevil’s gang), but Duncan’s
story has always been this low-key, and he has never talked about it to
anyone, keeping it a secret and therefore his own problem. As if the writers lost interest in writing for Duncan because maybe the actor was not good enough in his performance.
