Episode Report Card Joe R: B | 1 USERS: A YOU GRADE IT The Wood(s)man
By Joe R | Season 2 | Episode 21 | Aired on 05.01.2006
Mars Investigations. Keith is trying to reach a "Rick Pickett" ["Woo! Shout-out to the awesome art guy!" -- Couch Baron] through some sort of university personnel, and it looks like he gets hung up on. He calls out to Veronica, asking whether she feels like flying out to New York, hitting up NYU, finding Rick Pickett, and asking him whether he was one of the bat boys Woody molested. Veronica, off-screen: "You know I don't fly coach." Keith expositions that there were three other bat boys who worked for the Sharks when Lucky did -- two are in college and one is backpacking through Europe. Hope he stays away from the Vatican. But I kid the Catholics! Veronica is having some trouble making sense of Lucky's emails, and as Keith reads one aloud, it certainly seems quite...Abdul-ish. "'Time is the timeliness of the present,'" Keith reads. "'I've left you so many presents. If you don't find them they'll find you.'" Something clicks with Veronica at the word "presents." She recalls that, in the janitor's closet (The Janitor's Closet is the name of the blue-collar dive bar I'm opening in downtown Buffalo, by the way) with Gia, Lucky referred to the roadside bomb that gave him his scar as a "present." Keith's all, "Here we go. Gotta save the molester from his chickens coming home to roost."
Cut to Woody's office, where Keith barges in on the mayor at work, re-zoning all the Neptune Chuck E. Cheeses into his own backyard or whatever. Woody faux-nicely tells Keith that he's a little busy, but when Keith says that he'll just start talking if that's what Woody would rather, he dismisses his secretary. Keith tells Woody that he needs to get his family out of the Woodmanse and call the bomb squad. He explains about Lucky's "presents." Woody's face is a grotesque mask of frozen smile and seething disingenuousness as he "calmly" explains to Keith that "Tommy is dead. It's over." Then, and this is disgustingly awesome to watch, Woody pretends to not understand how Keith could have gotten his hands on Lucky's emails. "Wait...Veronica? Most adults don't have their children doing espionage work for them," Woody patronizes. "Most adults," Keith fires back, "keep their hands off of other people's children." The smile drops from Woody's face like lead weights were just clipped to corners of his mouth. Keith stares the stare of righteous anger. Woody thinks Keith should leave. Keith says that Lucky's emails were more than just the rantings of a disgruntled employee. Woody stands up and forces the smile back into its place on his awful plastic face. He says if Keith shares his "slander" with anyone, he'll ruin Keith. Veronica, too. Keith: "I'm not a fifteen-year-old boy, Woody. I'm not afraid of you." Yeah, I think it's safe to say Keith Mars doesn't have much of a problem risking his reputation at the hands of the Neptune muckity-mucks, historically.