Date of airing: October 10, 2006 (The CW)
Nielsen ratings information: 2.96 million viewers, 2.0/3 in Households, 1.3/3 with Adults 18-49
written by: Diane Ruggiero
directed by: John T. Kretchmer
Veronica is about to get a couple more enemies in her new college life,
which could be an intriguing premise for the next few episodes, as she
is investigating the rapes at Hearst College, enraging all the men she is accusing of being the rapist. Having to question
students who do not like her is going to block her from making advances
in the case, which could also mean the rapist will probably strike again until Veronica can stop him, simply because the students
will inadvertently obstruct Veronica’s investigation and make life a
little harder for her. That makes for an interesting story in general, because Veronica is the biggest help Hearst College can get in that regard, but she is also the greatest enemy of all the women on campus.
Then again, I do not think that will ever be the case in the show, since Veronica was in similar circumstances during the first season, after the Lilly Kane murder and after Keith lost his job as Sheriff – the 09ers ignored her, and she did not have a lot of friends at Neptune High, yet she still managed to solve all the cases that were brought to her by the high school student body (they liked her enough to have her solve all their problems), sometimes with ease, and sometimes with the one or two new friends she made throughout the past two years. That could only mean Veronica is about to make a few new friends over the course of the next episodes, just so the writers would not have to try and explain why Veronica cannot get forward in her own investigation into the rapes.
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| The college life starts in Hell for Parker. |
The episode happened to be a bit weird, considering it was dealing
with the aftermath of Parker’s rape. One could think that she would hide
in her room, become destructive, develop a fear of anything and everything, and maybe go back home where she does not
have to deal with the fear of ever meeting her rapist again. Maybe she
would get into an adversary relationship with people and those who would
consider her a friend (especially Mac and Veronica, who were unable to
prevent her rape from happening). But here she was, trying out a couple of ugly wigs,
introducing her mother to the audience and making that mother look as
Celeste Kane-ish as possible (which I assume was intended). And then she decides to stay at Hearst
after all, because why not remain at the place that just created a deep trauma for you and will most likely give you nightmares? Not that I mind, since
Parker kind of has to stick around for the sake of an emotional and
dramatic storyline (and because she is credited as a regular character, so she obviously sticks around for a while), but realistically speaking, I do not see any reasoning
behind Parker’s decision to stay, making things a little weirder. But
hey, Mac is now making a few new friends at Hearst. Yeah, why actually is she at Hearst? MIT would not have her?
Veronica’s first investigative steps into the rape cases were okay. The entrance into the Theta Beta sorority could have been interesting, and while I appreciated that Veronica was all wrong about a case for once and needed to fix her mistakes before they went public, the story happened to be a little lame. Annoying college girls who could easily team up and sing for a church choir, a den mother who is battling cancer with homegrown weed, and absolutely nothing substantial in connection with Parker’s rape, which means Veronica will start at square one again by the beginning of the next week. It was one of those episodic plots again, but this time around, the show made you believe it was part of the show’s overall mystery arc that Veronica needed to solve, yet could not move forward on it and instead got stuck doing an assignment she was not interested in by a school paper adviser who figured that Veronica was hot and blond enough to fit right in at Theta Beta. Way to stereotype the freshman there, college newspaper adviser – thank the heavens that Veronica was out of the newspaper business by the end of the episode, because I probably would not be standing for that as well. Besides that, there might be better resource material in the library for Veronica to discover. Finding out by accident that the rapist finds his victims in the library? Yeah, no credit card could pay for that.
In the meantime, VERONICA MARS tried their hands at adapting the Stanford prison experiment of 1971 for television, making this episode essentially the second scripted attempt at creating the tense drama of the experiment (after 2001’s German adaptation/inspiration of the experiment, aptly titled "The Experiment" – itself remade in 2010 with Adrien Brody and Forest Whitaker, before an actual movie adaptation of the experiment was released in 2015). It was a fun little story, with Logan and Wallace becoming an unbeatable duo full of fun and intrigue, but because I knew about the origins already and watched three films about it, there were not a lot of surprises in there.
Of course, one of the guards would be a dick and realize the taste of power is too good to give up, and of course, one of the prisoners will have to suffer under the rules of the experiment. That is why it was such a good idea to get Logan and Wallace into the experiment and have it start with a side bet just between the two. Oh boy, I do like it that the two are given screentime together and are essentially becoming best friends. It was a fun premise during the egg drop episode in the previous episode, and it was a fun story for them here, as Logan became the lead prisoner hitching out this plan to give the guards false information, while Wallace became the silent mastermind among the guards, who managed to outwit the prisoners and win the experiment and the side bet. I am pretty sure Logan and Wallace will have a lot more respect for each other by the end of this episode, and I can only hope they will become friends and support Veronica wherever and whenever possible.
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| The fraternity life is Hell for Veronica. |
Finally, Keith was walking through the desert and I did not know what was going on. Why would Liam’s brother play a game with Keith like that and pretty much have the P.I. drop dead in the desert heat, instead of just having him killed? And why would Liam be in contact with Vinnie Van Lowe in the first place? I know that it was a pretty cool sight of Liam killing his brother over Kendall, but Keith using Vincent’s pen bug that was established in the previous episode seemed a little too much to lead to another appearance of Liam and his pistol. Was Vinnie part of the situation in the background, or did Keith just hope that Vincent would still track and listen to his pen, with Keith telling the story about Liam’s brother, so that his P.I. competition would tell Liam, and Liam would take revenge? This sounds like a convoluted plot to me, but I do not think it is quite over yet. And I do hope that Keith will not just having to deal with the emotions of having someone get killed because of his mistakes – the whole thing should be his own little case, although I have no idea how to even develop that into a bigger story arc.
