Episode Report Card Couch Baron: B- | 5 USERS: B+ YOU GRADE IT Summer Of Love And Hate
By Couch Baron | Season 2 | Episode 1 | Aired on 09.27.2005
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Hi, you guys, Meg Manning here. So, I know you guys like her, but Veronica Mars is like, such a bitch! First, she acts all too good to help a basketball player who claims that he falsely tested positive for drugs, when all she's doing is slinging coffee and biscotti to the locals, and...what? Oh, fine, I'll tell you who was at the door. It was Logan, but even his biggest fan didn't have time to squee, since he was covered in blood. Turns out he booted Weevil in the face, knocking him out, and the bikers beat Logan up. When he came to, he was on the ground with a knife in his hand next to Felix's bloody corpse. He barely had time to get his story out before Deputy Leo came to arrest him. Leo was just jealous, I bet. Logan got off the charge of killing Felix due to lack of evidence. But his release led to a rift between Veronica and Weevil (go, Biker Boy!), as well as some festering violence between 09ers and bikers. However, Logan was still pals with Dick and Beaver (who are in the opening credits, now), and even Veronica was getting along with the Casablancas boys, at least temporarily. Although she may not be too psyched if Logan keeps ogling their stepmother, Charisma Carpenter. How do you like them apples, Veronica? Also, the Kane parents are up in Napa being boozehounds, although I'm not sure how they're testifying at their trial, and Aaron Echolls is in jail. Tension between the neo-Jets and the neo-Sharks escalates, culminating in Veronica dumping Logan. She's doing you a favor, honey! Oh, speaking of breaking up, did I tell you Duncan totally dumped me on the last day of school right after he learned Veronica wasn't his sister? Tacky, right? According to Veronica, he made a play for her and succeeded, but I know she batted her eyes at him as she poured his coffee and slipped him some free Danish. Cooze! (I just learned that word. I still cringe a little when I say it.) So in the present, Wallace gets busted for drugs too, as do various other athletes, including me. Since precious Wallace is in trouble, Veronica comes back into the detective fray. Of course, she tried to talk to me, but I was all "Step! Off!" I've never said that to anyone. It felt good. So it turns out that the beneficiaries of all these benchings are the children of officers of some corporation called "Boatloads of Fun," so now I'm back on the cheer squad, but I bet Veronica's dad (who's totally writing a book about the Lilly Kane case, btw) was the one who figured that out. I don't hate him for fathering a harlot. She probably gets it from her mom, lol! Some new girl named Jackie Cook, whose dad was a Hall of Fame baseball player, is in the opening credits too. (They were going to put me in, but my agent totally said to hold out for more money. Cross your fingers!) So I get stuck going on a school trip to a baseball field to meet Cook and mayoral candidate Steve Guttenberg, like I even care about baseball if I'm not cheering, and of course the Couple That Must Not Be Named is along for the ride. (Good one, huh? Being snarky is fun.) So then the Casablancas boys get hold of a limo and save the CTMNBN from the school bus, and they offer me a ride too but I'm all "As. If." But then the bitch has the nerve to get on the bus and try to talk to me again! But she gets distracted sort of making up with Weevil at a gas station and I tell the bus driver to leave. Ha! So now we're just heading home and...hey, aren't we going kind of fast toward that cliff? The one without the guardrail? Oh, crap! I'm totally firing my agent. I wonder if Brad Bufanda and Amanda Seyfried want to have drinks sometime? Want more? The full recap starts right below!
Yay for the new season! Welcome, or welcome back, depending on whether you were around last year. Let's get to it.
A longer-haired Veronica leads three teenaged girls to a table at a café as VMVO tells us, "Normal. That's the watchword." That certainly works well with the primary definition of "watchword," since very few people on this show are familiar with it. She goes on to say that she's ready for the new school year, which starts the next day, since she has a best friend and a boyfriend, and Lilly's killer is behind bars, so everything is just peachy keen. (She actually says "hunky-dory," but no one's going to foist any nineteenth-century adjectives on me when I'm perfectly capable of coming up with them myself.) Veronica tells the girls that a waitress will be right with them. At first, I couldn't believe that Veronica got a job up front with no experience, but she waits tables later in the episode, so maybe the waitstaff switches off covering the door. VMVO says that she's got a normal job, but she just wishes fewer of her classmates showed up to her place of employment. Whether she still hates their guts generally or has merely learned that they're terrible tippers is unclear, but either way...
...that's her cue to greet a "Kelvin Moore," who tells her that he needs her help: he got kicked out of "athletics" for his entire senior year for failing the mandatory drug test, despite having been clean for almost the past ten months. If that failure gets you out of Gym, I wouldn't ask too many questions, kid. Since Kelvin flunked the drug test the year before, Veronica makes him give her his hands and swear that he's clean, which he does, and then asks if she thinks he was lying. Veronica says she doesn't know: "I just wanted to see if you'd do it." Buffy goes on to say that she doesn't do that kind of work anymore and...oh, whoops. I confused this with another season premiere. (Which was my first recap! Aw, nostalgia!) Veronica says that Kelvin should perhaps contact Encyclopedia Brown. I don't know if that's such a good idea since, given what we soon learn about Kelvin's tolerance for nerds, he'd probably just end up kicking that skinny know-it-all's ass. Kelvin bites out that it's true what "they" say -- that Veronica landed a rich boyfriend, and she's an 09er now: "Last year was just some big old act for you." With all due respect, I didn't write twenty-two recaps last year for some "act," so can it, Drug Boy. Veronica, for her part, looks bummed that Kelvin's pegged her innermost thoughts so well. It was easy, Veronica -- he just listened to "VMVOs on Tape" on the car ride over. He goes on to say that you have to "pick sides in this town these days," because if you're going to beat people over the head with a theme, it's best to start early and pace yourself so that your arm doesn't get tired. Kelvin leaves with a sarcastic "Sleep well," but VMVO isn't fazed: Kelvin is a bully, so she'll sleep just fine.