Date of airing: April 11, 2006 (UPN)
Nielsen ratings information: 1.76 million viewers, 1.1/2 in Households, 0.8/2 rating with Adults 18-49
written by: Diane Ruggiero, Cathy Belben
directed by: Martha Mitchell
I have a couple of problems with the premise of characters solving
difficult cases with the help of their dreams. Maybe it can be an
exciting premise, as Kyle Killen proved in 2012 with the short-lived, but excellent AWAKE (it demands a rewatch at this point), but every
once in a while, the idea happens to be a little dumb, as depicted in
SPARTACUS: BLOOD AND SAND, when the titular character realizes that his
beloved wife was killed by John Hannah, and all he needed to do to realize
this was having a bunch of fever dreams. It was a conveniently dumb idea back then, it is a conveniently dumb idea now, and it will forever be a conveniently dumb idea.
It is a good thing that Veronica was not solving the entire bus crash in her dreams, although something can
be said about the weirdness of it all, how the dreams came to haunt her
right now (and not in the days and weeks after the bus crash, or when she feared that the bus crash happened because of her), and how each of the segments in her dreams seemed to have
been leading Veronica to a whole new angle to investigate the case from,
let alone giving each of the dead students (minus the teacher, because
who cares about the dead teacher?) an opportunity to be front and center
as to why the bus might have crashed. By the way, after Meg and Marcos
have gotten their stories and character backstories when the writers
were interested in introducing the few victims to the viewers, I was
hoping that the other victims would also get some attention. After all, it is only eight people, and you could definitely spend a third of the season
on the victims and tease that they had all reasons to die on the bus, with the suspects' pool growing with each of the victims' backstories. But now it is too late.
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| Veronica has the right messaging to lure people in. |
Yes, that makes this episode another one I could not really get into, though I am happy that the bus crash gets a lot more attention now – okay, maybe I should not be surprised about that, since there are only four episodes left until the season finale, which means there is not enough time left to conclude the story, but when Keith came with the revelation that the insurance put out on Dick and Beaver makes them far more valuable dead than alive. It looked like the writers did not like any of the previous clues they have left for the viewers and decided to come with a whole different angle of why the bus crashed, and that is something I really do not like about television shows.
Yes, the Dick/Beaver angle could just
be another red herring, or who knows, maybe there are tens of people who were
thinking about having that bus crash for whatever reason and only the
person or persons with the bomb on the bus managed to actually do it (or
they came first), but we are this close to the season finale and the
conclusion of the story, and suddenly, there are so many new angles to
investigate. Everything that came before is meaningless, and everything that counts and will be useful is about to be delivered. In a way, Veronica's fears of the bus crash happening because of her were useless for the narrative, right?
Meanwhile, consider me wowed that Veronica was still in the running for the Kane scholarship. It has often been mentioned ever since it was mentioned first (and I cannot remember anymore when that happened), but I never believed that Veronica would even have the time to get her GPA average up enough to still be considered not only one of the brightest students of Neptune High, but also be a frontrunner for a scholarship. She investigates petty high school cases, she was helping her boyfriend to kidnap a baby girl and flee the country, sometimes she deals with murder, and during all this, she manages to learn for exams and executing homework perfectly. To quote someone who was asking that question to Supergirl once (when she was still airing on CBS in 2015): “How does she do it?”
However, I did love that in the most indirect way imaginable, Logan and Wallace teamed up to “support” Veronica in getting that scholarship, simply because they do not want a pretty white trash bitch with money to get that scholarship, and ruining the grade for Angie might be a way to get Veronica up front in the race for the scholarship. So that was nice, and it is obviously a way to slowly bring Veronica and Logan together again. After all, Duncan has been gone for a while and Veronica has been single for way too long. She needs a boyfriend right this minute and there is only one suitable candidate.
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| Keith discovers his daughter in a closet. |
The rest of the episode was okay. Keith’s little investigation into rich white kids from Neptune High paying cash to the doctor who writes their excuses for staying away from completing their homework seemed okay, but it looked more like a filler story than anything else. Maybe it was another attempt at guaranteeing that the poor kids in Neptune High hate the rich kids even more, but for that to have been part of the narrative, the writers could have found a better way to depict it by somehow throwing Angie and Veronica together in a story. But then again, Logan and Wallace were thrown together for the very first time, and it is like they became best friends immediately. The world definitely is not normal.
