[QUOTE=Otto]
Yet another TV trial that ended as it had to, but for stupid reasons. Grr.
Who blew up the bus? I haven’t the first goddamn idea, and I’m trying to decide whether that’s a fault with the show. I just started re-watching the S1 DVDs and found that I’d sort of forgotten quite a bit of detail, so maybe I’m mis-remembering, but I thought that in S1 there were enough clues so that we could at least make some sort of educated guess at the “Who Killed Lilly Kane” mystery. This season we’ve had so many red herrings and alternate suspects thrown at us that it could plausibly be any number of people.
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Well, one of the “rules” for mystery writing is that the reader/viewer should have access to all of the clues needed to solve the mystery before the detective does (the cleverness in the plotting is measured by how cleverly the clues are disguised). By that metric, VM cheated in season 1 (until the very last episode anyway), since we knew nothing about the tapes or Lilly’s affair until the finale, so we had no reason to suspect Aaron. IIRC, before the finale, Duncan was the primary suspect, and the Kane family and Logan had possible motives as well. There were probably a few more leads, but my brain is fuzzy at the moment.
Depending on how season 2 ends, the show may pull the same trick twice – i.e. a surprise motive and culprit will be discovered at the last minute. But if you you remember last season, many of the loose ends did tie into the main mystery, so you can’t call them red herrings. Similarly, I think Woody’s child molesting, Curly’s death, the explosives in Terrence’s hangar, the incorporation scheme, and a most of other season 2 mysteries will ultimately be connected with the bus crash, even though they point to multiple suspects. I would be really pissed if they all turned out to be red herrings, and I’ve stated before that I think (hope) that Rob Thomas and the VM writers are a little more skilled than that.
Here’s my theory implicating Beaver (I hope it’s not true!): Beaver was among those molested by Woody. He gets together with the other victims and they decide to expose Woody, but Beaver, being smart, decides to wait. He realizes that impending incorporation will cause property values outside of Neptune to plummet, so he wants to buy as much of it as possible before exposing Woody so he can cash in when incorporation “unnexcpectedly” fails and the property values rebound. Lucky goes along with the plan but the other victims do not, so Beaver contracts Curly and the Fitzpatrics (whom he knows through Kendall) to build a bomb to kill the bus driver and silence the potential squealers. The dead rat is planted to give Beaver an excuse to get off the bus and ride in the limo, where he can safely detonate the bomb as the bus approaches a cliff. Curly feels guilty for his role in the crash and threatens to rat on Beaver, so Beaver kills him and writes the words “Veronica Mars” to throw the authorities off track.
The main hole in my theory is that Beaver didn’t expose Woody before the incorporation vote . Also, what’s the deal with the Fitzpatricks mooning the limo right before the bus crash?
