Episode Report Card Couch Baron: B | 2 USERS: A+ YOU GRADE IT Art Imitating Life
By Couch Baron | Season 3 | Episode 8 | Aired on 11.20.2006
Veronica's waiting for an elevator somewhere when Hallie walks by. She at first settles for giving Veronica the stink-eye, but returns and tells her that she really loves Mr. Rose. They bitch at each other a bit, and then Veronica asks for the truth about Patrice. Hallie reiti-snots that she doesn't know anything, and besides, Patrice's best friend just faked a rape, so why not ask her? Veronica asks if Patrice was really friends with Claire, and Hallie says she was: they were in the same pledge class. That's more useful information than you usually get from anyone wearing over 80% pink.
Veronica knocks on a door, and Claire opens it to hear, "What did Chip Diller have to do with Patrice Petrelli falling off the roof of the Theta Beta house?" That's an awfully long secret password, and given that Claire tells Veronica to come in, I'm duly impressed with her memory. It looks like Claire has gotten an apartment since her expulsion, although it seems kind of convenient that she'd still be around at all. When Claire opens the door, Veronica sees that Fern and Nish are inside. The story of Patrice, mostly told by Claire, ensues: the Theta Betas used to have the secret room with the two-way mirror, referenced in the second episode. The pledge officer would have the girls strip while their Pi Sig brothers watched, and the brothers would point out the parts of the girls that needed work, even going so far as to circle them with a Magic Marker like plastic surgeons do. Extreme Makeover may finally have been canceled, but its evil lives on. Claire didn't get the treatment because the brothers didn't feel she needed it, but Patrice was practically covered in circles. Claire adds that Patrice was pale and pudgy, but a legacy, and I take that to mean that she was a legacy in not just the university but also in the sorority; otherwise they wouldn't have let her in. So Patrice was already crying from all the marker-ing when someone turned on the light in the secret room and she saw all the brothers laughing their asses off at her. Chip Diller dubbed her "Marshmallow," and the name stuck. If that's the case, I don't know why, instead of the Roman numerals, the Liliths didn't simply opt for Peeps. Nish adds that the markers were the permanent kind, so Patrice had the marks all over her for weeks. Claire adds that her sisters said a tan would fix everything, so they insisted that Patrice lay out on the roof like the rest of them, only one day, presumably having snapped, she literally just walked right off the edge. Fern wraps up the story by saying that Patrice was in the hospital for a couple of months, and now she's in a mental-health facility. Veronica sincerely opines that what happened to Patrice is horrible, but also seems like a powerful motivation for a desperate action, like faking a rape, and maybe even a series of rapes. Veronica asks whether any of the rapes were real, "other than Chip Diller's." And while a lot has been made of Veronica's joking at Chip's expense, I think this statement combined with her sympathetic expression in the cafeteria is enough to show that she views what happened to him very seriously indeed. Nish, not answering Veronica's question, asks if Veronica's proud of having saved the Greeks, but Veronica points out that Nish and the others have hurt their own cause with the fakery, and leaves.