Lots of stuff happened in this episode, which is good because it’s the penultimate episode of the season.
Wow, for a second I thought they were going to kill Wallace. Holy crap! Now that’s a teaser!
Would Veronica’s confidential medical records be admissable evidence in court? I’m not sure the defense should have been able to announce she was being treated for chlamydia, and they shouldn’t have known in the first place.
I totally called Aaron’s “not guilty” verdict. Bastard. But an interesting bastard, and I’m sure he can stir up plenty of good drama next season.
There’s got to be more to the bus crash than we already know. Given the introduction of Beaver’s sexual issues to the story, I can’t help thinking he’s the third person deleted from the recording Lucky sent in the email. It also makes me wonder if there’s a twist coming where Beaver was involved in blowing up the bus to cover up his molestation. If the other two guys wanted to go public with it and take Woody down, would Beaver be on board with everyone knowing what happened to him? Is he really psycho enough to kill everyone on the bus to keep the secret? That’s my wild, sleep-deprived theory for tonight.
Aaron Echolls needs to be assassinated. Preferably in next week’s episode.
So Woody’s a pedophile. Not a big surpise there. I don’t think he’s directly responsible for the bus crash though. It’s too obvious, and we still have another episode left for the Surprise Twist ™.
I’m not even going to bother to guess the real culprit, because it still could be just about anyone. That’s why this show is pure genius!
I hope it’s not Beaver though, because I really like the poor guy, plus he’s just starting to warm up to Mac again! Those two are made for each other (assuming Beaver isn’t an evil mastermind).
Oh, one other thing – Keith Mars: coolest dad ever – right up there with Atticus Finch. I love how he goes ballistic on the witness stand when the defence tries to discredit Veronica. I also like his line about putting Veronica in a giant hamster ball.
I haven’t had a lot of sleep, so at the moment my chief reaction to last night’s episode is this:
Harry Hamlin’s back to be the villain for season three!
:: does happy dance like Snoopy ::
Yay!
Assuming that Aaron didn’t cause the bus crash via Curly (I doubt it) and that there will, in fact, be a season three (pleasepleaseplease).
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.
It does seem a little obvious to have the washed-up '80s guest star be the big bad two years in a row, which is one of the main reasons I’m looking for alternate theories.
That said, would any of you ever have thought you’d feel afraid of or intimidated by Steve Guttenberg? He genuinely menaced Veronica last night and it was creepy.
I too was bothered by Veronica’s medical history being tossed around the court room. How would they even have that info? She was just testifying, and only found out herself last week.
I guess the trial really did end the only way it could. As in real life, pretty people can get away with anything. However, I suspect that Aaron is not too long from meeting a bad end. Don’t know why; just a hunch.
I’m a little confused about who were Woody’s dillydallying victims. One was Lucky, and at one point I think Veronica or Keith said there were three voices on the recording (one edited out). Later, Veronica points out two members of the little league Sharks who died in the bus crash. Two from the bus, plus Lucky–that makes the three right there. Right? So Beaver wouldn’t have been the third kid. Plus the two boys from the bus were seniors, no? Beav is a year or two behind the seniors, so probably wouldn’t have been on the same little league team as them (certainly not with Lucky, who’s a year or two out of high school. I mean, was a year or two…). And the two boys who died on the bus were both Mexican, I think. An '09er would not likely have been on the same little league team with kids from the PCH part of town. So it doesn’t make sense to me that Beav would be one of the molestos. Unless he achieved that status independently.
Lots of thinking there. I have to go lie down now.
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?
That’s assuming the defense got the info from Veronica’s medical records (which they can subpoena, by the way). What if Kendall was hired by Aaron to sleep with Duncan so Veronica would contract it, thus "discrediting’ her? We know Kendall planted the oscar statue, so why not the chlamydia too?
I guess it’s more the compressed time frame that bugs me. Even given we’re dealing with “TV time” it doesn’t seem like Veronica learned about her chlamydia until last week, or only a few days ago. That news tidbit sure traveled quickly to the ears of the defense attorneys. And Roni said (to the doctor) that she and Duncan were “safe” (presumably, using condoms, which should have kept her clean). Seems like a longshot plan at best, trying to infect someone indirectly.
I’m wondering how Kendall advertised that service. An ad in the paper? “Infected skank for hire, transmission guaranteed. Call today!” Plus it seems pretty odd, keeping yourself untreated in order to inflict STDs on other folks. Not that it’s unprecedented.
How do we know Kendall planted the Oscar? I missed that.
She would have known about the field trip well in advance. She must have known Lucky and could have made him put the bomb and rat on the bus or have gotten access to the bus through him. She tried to implicate the Fitzpatricks by saying she saw them at the scene of the crime. She was close enough to the bus to have detonated the bomb. She could easily have planted the other bomb under Woody’s car. She may have known the boys were going to (ahem) finger her dad.
Do we know Lucky was molested? Even if he were, his association with Woody was through the adult Sharks team, so it could have been a separate incident from the molestation of the kids on the Little League Sharks team.
We saw Kendall collecting hair out of Duncan’s shower drain (which, since he’d been in Mexico for weeks at that point, big ew to the cleaning staff at the Neptune Grand) and the Oscar was later found with Duncan’s hair on it.
I finally got to see this (it’s hard to watch a show that doesn’t even air in your country!), and was surprised that Veronica’s STD didn’t seem to solve any aspect of the case.
I wonder if the bit with Eli murdering Thumper is going to end up being cleaned up over the summer for next season or feature in next season’s recurring plot line? Given that we know who actually did it, it’s not much of a mystery to carry forward. But if they have to resolve that, and everything else next week, it’s gonna be a busy episode.
Eli didn’t (directly) murder Thumper. He set him up but didn’t actually lash him up in the stadium. The Fitzpatricks did. Of course in a normal court of law he could be nailed for his reckless disregard of human life but we’re talking about Neptune courts. Unless Veronica’s on his jury he’s walking.
Weevil didn’t kill Thumper. In fact, all he did was jump him and leave him on the Fitzpatricks’ doorstep, misdemeanor at best. They’ve got nothing on Weevil. He’ll get hauled off in cuffs, and it will ruin his graduation for his grandma, but he’ll walk soon enough.
