Date of airing: March 15, 2006 (UPN)
Nielsen ratings information: 2.73 million viewers, 1.8/3 in Households, 1.2 rating with Adults 18-49
written by: Phil Klemmer
directed by: Sarah Pia Anderson
Things are getting more intriguing for Logan, who finds himself in a story that could go two ways: One, he found a girlfriend he loves, and one who loves him, and they have a relationship that re-develops his emotional connection to himself and the people around him. Two, he is only dating Hannah to stay close to her father, to find out why her father is with the Fitzpatricks, and to ruin the father's life by starting to break apart the connection Hannah and her father have, which would make all of this a plot of revenge.
I enjoyed the notion of Logan maybe just dating Hannah because he wanted to be as close as possible to her father. Logan may have lied when he told her that he did not know her father was the witness, but he also could have spoken the truth and everything was just a happy accident and coincidence (even if their romance is going to become a bit more difficult, now that Hannah knows the truth). The fact is that Logan is dating the daughter of the witness who could bring him to jail for the rest of his life – that will not look good in case Logan decides to take on the Fitzpatricks by himself, without the help of either Veronica, Weevil, or the police. By the way, I loved how Logan held Hannah’s hand at the end of the episode while walking down the school hallway – it was reminiscent of the earlier moment when Kylee was holding her girlfriend’s hand and walking down the school hallway. There were two people who really wanted their current romantic relationships to be out in the open, and they did everything to do so, even if it meant lying and deceiving the romantic partner.
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| The new It-couple has hit the hallways of Neptune High. |
The episode was solid enough. I loved Veronica’s case, and I very much liked that UPN had yet another episode of television promoting tolerance of the LGBTQ+ community, even if the series itself was not that talented in dismantling the homophobia it depicted (because this episode was as homophobic as the previous attempts). I do not know UPN’s program that much, and most of the shows I can remember having watched on that network did not have any LGBTQ+ elements in them, but here is VERONICA MARS, putting LGBTQ+-themed stories into their high school cases every once in a while, which can only mean Rob Thomas and his writers had a few issues with how fictional lesbians and gays were treated by their peers.
I even have to say that I like the conclusion to the case, and Kylee’s wishes to be upfront with her sexuality and her relationship. She might have been a bit bitchy and evil when she forced her girlfriend to come out on Neptune High television by mentioning her name (that should be grounds for a break-up), but I am hazarding a guess and saying how hard it must have been for Kylee to stay in the closet all this time when the only thing she really wanted was to come out and be herself in public. But yeah, doing it within a scheme that assaults and electrocutes pizza delivery people, just to blackmail closeted Neptune High students was a bit much, especially since it was just about the money for Kylee. She just wanted to get out of Neptune (understandable), and decided that breaking the law was the way to do so.
When Kylee came out on the Navigator high school show, I was amused by how everyone was celebrating that twist of fate. The anchor on the Navigator show almost lost his eyes and dropped his jaw after Kylee came out on live TV – I never even knew that VERONICA MARS could also be a funny show, and there were quite a few funny moments included in the episode, most notably the mention of “Rick Santorum” being the anonymous person behind one of the blackmail letters. I remember the good old times during the Trump administration when Santorum was a panelist on the CNN current-affairs show STATE OF THE UNION WITH JAKE TAPPER, reminding me every time that he was the most hated man in America around 2005 and 2006, and that his name's inclusion in this episode may have been fitting, considering its homophobic nature.
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| Ah, the good-old times of internet messageboards... |
Meanwhile, I find the whole Terence Cook plot quite convenient. I get
that the writers wanted to bring a little mystery into the plot and
give Keith a hard nut to crack, and it seems logical that Terence would
continue lying, after he kept some obvious twists that Keith already
knew about in the previous episode a secret. But the writers really
tried hard to make Terence the most obvious suspect in the bus crash
right now, as well as give Jackie a story this way, too. Now that she
and Veronica have finally become real friends (what an absence of about a
quarter of a season can do to a relationship between two characters),
all the writers could do here was include Jackie in one of Veronica’s
cases and give her importance that way, because Jackie was not
ready to be part of Veronica’s life any other way.
Besides that, it is
pretty easy to frame Terence in the bombing with a couple of explosives in a locker like that, considering news has been out
about his potential involvement in the bus crash for a while now. It
only took the real bomber (if it really wasn’t Terence) those few weeks
to stash explosives and chargers in one of Terence’s lockers, and voila,
you have a pretty good case against Terence. And no one is going to ask themselves why Terrence, in all this time he was the prime suspect, did not get rid of the evidence in his garage.
