Episode Report Card Couch Baron: B | 8 USERS: B+ YOU GRADE IT Ask Not For Whom The Bell Tolls...
By Couch Baron | Season 3 | Episode 15 | Aired on 02.26.2007
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Small stuff first: Logan and Parker are hanging out, but Parker pulls back when she feels weird about the Veronica factor. Logan then asks Veronica's permission to ask Parker out, and Veronica's reasonably convincing in giving him her blessing. Landry tells Veronica that he doesn't want the whole dad-thinking-he's-a-murderer thing to get in the way of Landry's relationship with her. Sure. I mean, why would it? Keith tells Mindy to call him "Sheriff," and she tells him, in flashback, what happened when her husband came to the hotel: Dean Ed threatened to make sure Landry never worked in academia again. It turns out that the person who came to the office at the time of the egging was Mindy, in an attempt to convince Dean Ed to be merciful. Also, she gave him the Xanax, and Landry called her to see how it went, but when she got back to the Grand, Landry was gone. Keith arrests Landry on this new evidence combined with the bloody clothes. Landry informs Keith that Dean Ed also threatened Mindy with financial ruin, and her version of the whole story doesn't exactly match his. He can't explain his clothes covered in the Dean's blood, but he did stop at a convenience store to buy cigarettes. Lucky Tim goes to see Landry in jail, and Landry asks him to find out who bugged his phone, and one other thing, in search of which he ineptly breaks into Mars Investigations. Veronica catches Lucky Tim in the act, and they end up teaming up to try to prove Landry's innocence. Mindy gets her life insurance check, buys a boat, and skips town. Veronica and Tim manage to track down a woman who bummed a smoke off Landry on the night in question, forcing Keith to release Landry. Veronica and Tim keep digging at Richard Grieco's house, speculating that he's the one that bugged Landry's phone. They find a recording of the phone call between Landry and Mindy, but also come upon another call on which Landry slagged Tim off to a potential Lucky Tim employer at Pepperdine. Landry, thinking Mindy set him up, tracks her down. Meantime, Veronica, continuing to listen to Landry's calls, hears a reference to "Papa's Cabin." Before she gets to investigate that, though, she discovers that Landry's witness was coerced into giving him that alibi. Keith realizes that Papa's Cabin is a Hemingway reference, showing up the kids. Heh. Keith and his team go to Cabo, where the Cabin is located, and find the boat and a distraught Landry, who confesses to being behind the attempt to frame Grieco, in an effort ot throw the scent off Mindy. In a fit of passion (by accident, he claims), Landry killed his onetime lover. With Landry in custody, Tim gets Landry's job, and hires Veronica as his TA. Unfortunately for him, her first classroom act is to figure out that Tim actually set Landry up, and that he's the murderer, just as I thought. She takes him down in a tense standoff in front of the class, and I only wonder if she's going to make Professor by the end of the semester at this rate. Give it up for James Jordan in this episode, by the way, because he was fricking awesome in every way. Tying up the loose ends, Landry will be tried for manslaughter, there will be a special election at some point in the near-sounding future, and I will get some time off after the full recap goes up. Want more? The full recap starts right below!
Veronica enters Landry's class as VMVO equivocates over where she should sit in light of her dad's suspicion that Landry murdered Dean Ed. Maybe my GPA didn't mean as much to me as Veronica's does to her, but I think my vote would have been anywhere but in the classroom. Landry notices Veronica's discomfort, so he approaches and tells her that her dad's investigation won't affect their relationship one bit, and that a student like her comes along "once, maybe twice," in a career. When I first heard that, I thought it was kind of a slap in the face to treat Lucky Tim as such an afterthought. Without giving too much away, I think you'll agree that I was getting ahead of myself. Veronica's touched in spite of her misgivings, and takes her normal apple-polisher seat as Tim appears. Someone's ears are burning! He'll just want to be careful of the wig.
Interrogation room. Keith, repeating his instruction from the end of the last episode, tells Mindy to address him as "Sheriff Mars," and she asks him whey they're still there, given that Richard Grieco's prints were all over her husband's keyboard. Keith informs Mindy that the prints were on every key on the board, while it only takes eleven letters to spell out "Goodbye, cruel world." Well, that doesn't prove much, Keith. Richard Grieco might have tried out "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" and rejected it as just a little too abstract in this context. Also, Keith points out that it's not very logical that the killer would have worn gloves for the murder only to take them off to type. Mindy exasperatedly tells "Keith" that she didn't kill her husband, and Keith is all, "'Sheriff Mars.'" Dude, maybe that uniform is even more comfortable that you remembered, but seriously, we get it. Keith takes far too long to lay out the evidence -- the two men overheard fighting in her room, the car being checked out, the phone call, the Xanax -- and sternly says that it doesn't add up at all. He then sits down next to Mindy and tells her he thinks Landry killed Dean Ed. I hope Keith gets paid double for having to play both Good and Bad Cop here. He asks Mindy if she's going to take the fall with Landry, and Mindy looks, for the first time, like she's really considering the possibility that Landry might be guilty. After some tortured thought, she tells Keith what we've known for a long time: that the man arguing with Landry was Dean Ed. Mindy says that Dean Ed was furious...
...and we get thrown into one of those gold flashbacks. If I make any mistakes from here on out, I apologize in advance, but it's hard to remember things accurately after a seizure. Anyway, in the flashback as told by Mindy, Dean Ed waves his gun around and tells Landry that he can forget about tenure -- he's done, not just at Hearst, but everywhere: "No more happy days in academia bedding impressionable students and easily charmed wives!" Considering how Dean Ed and Mindy met, he pretty much called her a gullible trollop twice in that sentence. But given the situation, I can understand how he'd think it bears repeating.