"I DO IT ALL FOR YOU, MULDER!"

Awww, come on, guys, throw me a few scraps. Don't you want to be able to tell people you have a blog? Or even two blogs? Of course, I'm always only ever kidding, but as a certain contributor can tell you, I've been always only ever kidding since fifth grade or before, and it does start to wear on you after a while. So, save yourselves!

I note that one of you now has a link on her blog entitled "Geeks Commenting on Veronica Mars." And then you click the link and come over here and practically the entire thing seems to be written by me. OUCH! What do you suppose her many friends and relatives must be thinking now?—to say nothing of her new pals throughout the Guest Services hierarchy at Best Western International Hotels! I'll tell you what they think: "I wonder if tp_gal knows about the typo in her sidebar."

Oh, look, here's a song download from a group called The Annabel Chongs. Oh, my goodness, it's called "Veronica Mars". I'm not wild about the song, but I think I'll post the link anyway because, to paraphrase Griffin Mill, "It's Veronica Mars."

By the way, did anyone notice that Michael Tolkin has come out with a sequel to The Player? I actually read the novel The Player (indeed, it might have been one of the last contemporary novels I read, which isn't saying much) and decided the film was much, much better. So, no sequel for me.

See how easy

A few thoughts

Just a few quick thoughts on tonight's episode. Feel free to chime in any time.

• I appreciate the "Paris is worth a Mass" practicality of the Gilmore Girls casting tie-in, but I would appreciate it all the more if I thought Logan having a half-brother was ever going to be important to the plot.


• This business of every episode lacking one or more of the credited cast members is really starting to grate on me. It's worse than ever this season. What difference does it make that Michael Muhney is in the regular cast if his character appears less than before?


• So, evidently, Logan is burning through his trust fund much too fast. He seems pretty O.K. with it.


• I feel like the show has yet to hit its stride this season. I'd like to see more regular college stuff, not involving frats or rapes. Don't college students have amusing late-night "bull sessions" anymore? That used to be one of the big selling points of the elite college experience.


• I didn't get much out of the Keith / Laura San Giacomo storyline. I guess it was supposed to show us that sometimes nothing untoward is going on. And that Keith is lonely.


• Do you suppose the Fitzpatricks storyline is over now? I would expect that Liam would now turn his attention to Keith as the most likely repository of Kendall's money. Maybe that is coming.


• Shouldn't we be seeing Wallace getting ready for basketball season?


• Wouldn't Veronica have asked the convenience store proprietor for a description of the guy Claire was with? Wouldn't he likely have mentioned the guy was Asian?


• I missed how Veronica figured out that the Charleston Chu's girlfriend was secretly two-timing him with Trip or whatever that guy's name was. Watching again to see. Oh "Chip"! Oh, there is no explanation. Maybe she really does have "pixie spy magic."


• "I think Carly went to Yale!" "Brown." "Still." Hee.


• If the Echolls estate was giving money to "Aaron's Kidz," that wouldn't deplete Logan's trust fund.


• Wouldn't Mac also have told Veronica about Dick's visit the night before the rape? Maybe Veronica will ask Mac about this omission if they ever cross paths again.


• I'm not sure it's fair that they cut away from the non-adulterous goodnight immediately before Keith learned it was non-adulterous. Misleading cuts = lazy writing = unfair to viewers. And if Keith knew it was innocent, why did he present the "money shot" to his client at all.


• I wonder if the other members of "the Greek chorus of feminist shame" aren't giving Parker a hard time for choosing the wig option. Not really the hardcore choice.


• Wouldn't Norman Phipps—who heals quickly, by the way—have likely already have been working an angle to get close to Logan that likely would have precluded him also pretending to be Charlie. And how improbable is it that Logan would have looked into his financial situation at the precise time that Norman Phipps was putting the finishing touches on his article?

I guess that was more than a few. But you should add more.

I really enjoyed the episode and thought it was the strongest so far this season. Mostly for wishy washy reasons like "damn, this commercial needs to be over soon so I can see what happens next". I was very unhappy when the end came and my hour of viewing bliss had ended.

Yes, MWR makes some good point as usual, but I really liked it.

Preliminary suspects?

I'm going to put my early money on Mercer as the rapist. Just a little feeling I have. Others?

Time dilation

One thing I love about VM is the experience of thinking the episode is almost over and then noticing it's only 9:35. I've never had this happen with any other show.

Awwww. A sweet little mini-reconciliation at the end. I love how the jilted help-desk patron just stands there for 25 seconds until the credits roll. He might still be there.

I'm not sure "Oh, you just missed them" is the best way to cover the absence of major characters from an episode, but maybe they should do it every time. "Where's Piz?" "Oh, I think I saw him headed toward the South Lawn." "Have you seen Wallace?" "Yes, he is elsewhere."

I thought last night's episode was a major improvement over last week. It was good to finally see Weevil again, although I was bummed he washed up in his private eye job. "Detective" is a much better profession than "maintenance dude".

And oh my god is Ed Begley Jr. OLD!

And I would also like to thank the writers for not letting Veronica sabotage her relationship with Logan yet. But hey, looks like next week is the dreaded "dinner with Dad". I am really hoping they play it up for laughs, because if done right, it could be quite funny.

I hope they will use next week's episode to exorcise "prudish Keith." That trope is going to get old fast now that Veronica is in college. Of course he doesn't want to know the details, but the whole "no premarital sex under my roof and I'll call unexpectedly to check up on you" business is a little over the top.

TWoP's bloat problem

As recently as last season I would routinely read Television Without Pity's weekly recaps and at least some of the discussion forum postings about Veronica Mars. I've mostly stopped. The problem is that everything about the show has become bloated. The VM forums have more posts than those for any other show by a wide margin (Gilmore Girls is a distant second, and no other show even comes close). When 10-plus pages of comments materialize during the first hour the show airs, and the total grows to 627 posts on 42 pages by the following Sunday, it's a daunting prospect to even start reading. Not much can be done about this posting volume, of course.

But the recaps now suffer the same kind of bloat. I've always enjoyed Couch Baron's take on things, but I'm no longer reading the recaps. The one for "Welcome Wagon" runs to 17 pages. It's just too much (site management seems to sense this, recently adding links to each page in addition to the existing "next page" link). You could almost transcribe the episode in 17 pages. The level of detail in these recaps is just excessive. And it takes CB much too long to generate his lengthy recaps. It's now Sunday afternoon and there still is no recap for the episode that aired on Tuesday. It took him six days to post the "Welcome Wagon" recap. I don't know about others, but my interest in reading a recap declines in proportion to how long I have to wait for it. Three days is about right. By the night before the show airs, I'm really not up for reading a 17-page synopsis of the previous week's episode. But I would eat up a 9-10 page recap that appeared on Friday.

I'm a fan of Couch Baron, but also of Strunk and White, who memorably remind us that "vigorous writing is concise."

That's going to be one well-endowed food bank!

Random thoughts on last night's episode:

• Overall, kind of choppy and without as much of the usual snappy dialogue.


• That sorority could have cured a lot of nausea, a fact we are apparently supposed to ignore. And she never did verify whether the house mother even had cancer, or whether the sympathetic and seed-providing botany professor actually existed. Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy. Hey, she had a Lance Armstrong poster, for God's sake! How much more proof do you want?


• What are we to make of the campus journalist's four witnesses?


• Effort should be made to not show Keith walking or running on sand. Not one of Enrico's strong suits as a performer—it just makes him look silly. Especially that time at the beach.


• Didn't see Piz, didn't miss Piz, but it kind of seems like a character introduced in the first episode should show up in the second.


• I guess we've confirmed who Vinnie was working for. Those pen transmitters of his sure are powerful. Yeah, I forgot it was too early in the season for Vinnie to redeem himself.


• The Veronica-and-Mac guilt trip at the beginning was a bit much.


• What getting drugged and raped has to do with immaturity escapes me entirely. The show really suffers when they write things that don't make sense in order to advance the plot. I feel like that's been happening more than usual.


• Now we know why QT never showed us what was in the briefcase in Pulp Fiction. Inevitable anticlimax. That whole angle was just silly for so many reasons.


• The Food Bank???


• Dick seems to have recovered.


• The humor of "frack" has now run its course. That should not be a running gag.


• Hooray for Dan Castellaneta. The man is a frickin' (not "frackin'") genius. Not even the slightest soupçon of Homer in his Soc professor.


• I really disliked the VMVO at the end recapping what we've learned. Show, don't tell.

I wasn't wild about the episode, which I guess shows. I'd put it in the bottom quartile. I hope that they can execute the three-shorter-mysteries approach without watering down some of the best qualities of the show. I think they will be able to and are still in a semi-expository mode to establish the Hearst universe, but I'm ready for a memorable episode that will go down as a classic.

The Day After

Met with syp this morning at Tully's. We had very similar impressions.

Love Wallace's roommate. Hooray for Beaverton, even if his description of it was, shall we say, over-bucolic. I liked him much more than I was expecting I would. I'm glad.

Hate what they've done to "We Used to Be Friends" but like the title graphic. I agree.

Very happy that LoVe is still intact. Yay! But why did V hesitate when Piz asked her if Logan was her boyfriend? She's not still [groan!] carrying a torch for the donut? I interpreted that as just a pregnant pause followed by a cut. She's a cagey one, though.

One thing that we wondered about though -- didn't Lamb get on the plane with Woody, you know, the plane that blew up? Lamb was never at the site of Woody's apprehension. He just pulled some strings over the phone.

Uranus-Haul

Alrighty... I will confess that I too was confused by the varied number of people who looked alike. The guitar re-seller looked like the dude who got busted for a garage full of stuff. Maybe it was the same person. Who knows. "What was your job title again?" It was the same person! The solution to the mystery did not involve some theretofore unseen random person with a garage full of contraband.

I was also somewhat perplexed by the terrible hair cut of the TA aka the new "nemesis". AKA "Lucky". I'm sure syp caught that one as she is uncanny. I had to read it somewhere. Does he have to be the Shaggy TA? Maybe he shaves the heads of the chicks he rapes (yes... I'm calling the Shaggy TA the rapist after one episode) because his own hair looks so bad. But... didn't they catch the campus cutter when V came on campus last year? No, they didn't. Veronica just cleared Troy. Is this a copy cutter? (I can't stop the puns!)

Am also hoping that there aren't a lot of Veronica just got laid scenes. It's nice to know they have a healthy sex life - it IS Logan for pete sake - but I don't wanna see sweaty post coital Veronica unless it has something to do with the plot. You don't think the reminder that cell phones can be forwarded is setting up some critical plot point? I do think we've done the "Logan's amazing sexual prowess" thing pretty much to death. Of course, some people only have Duncan to compare him to. (For that matter the damned Gilmore Girls had the same problem... little sweet Rory talking about good hot sex with little sweet Lane. *shiver* The next thing we'll know, senators will have their inappropriate sexual relations plastered all over the news.)

Back to VM...one last note, I love Dick. He's so messed up and yet I hope he isn't weepy for too long. His evilness is something to be admired. I love Dick, too, but I think they're setting it up so we suspect him as the rapist. His breakdown with Logan has to be about more than just making an ass of himself, since he's always done that. I don't think there's any reason to believe that Dick never attended any Hearst parties at which he could have picked up, drugged, raped and shaved trusting young coeds. Alternatively, I think we've talked in the past (haven't we?) about the possibility that he sexually abused Cassidy. Certainly he tormented him psychologically and probably beat up on him more than a little bit, but the guilt that Dick is obviously feeling has to come from something bigger, I think. So, incestuous sexual abuser or serial rapist, take your pick. I don't see Dick as the head-shaving type. "You're not very complicated, are you, Dick?"

I'm not sure this TwoP poster is going to survive Season 3

Veronica interviewed some guy who'd had his stuff stolen (which maybe I misunderstood, as he was clearly an upperclassman)

I think that guy was the guy selling Piz's guitar. He wasn't a person who got robbed. Though the guy who was selling Piz's guitar was the one who took Prof. Hottie's class before, and mentored, so VM had a clue that he might have mentored one/some of the thieves.

Then again, I might be thinking he looks like the guy who's garage was opened, as in everyone looks the same. I mean, I didn't realize there was Cormac and Liam in Kendall's hideaway, I thought it was just one man.

A rich tapestry of confusion. I think I sometimes sit in front of this person at the movie theater. Maybe he/she just watched it online, like I did. Took me a minute to decide that it was just Cormac who had horribly deceived poor trusting Keith, and not Liam who had materialized from nowhere thanks to Vinnie Vanlowe (who I suspect is working for Kendall's parents and was trying to protect her, not the other way around--I also think he's going to show up and save Keith's ass).

(By the way, we will not be calling that guy "Prof. Hottie" on this blog even if that should become his standard TwoP nickname.)

Donald Fagen/Fagin

I also choose to believe the clever writers managed to give a simultaneous shout-out to this amusing episode and Oliver Twist.

Well it definitely seems to me that . . .

. . . the new title sequence (on which the jury remains out) shows our young lovers getting ready to embark on their belated cruise to Catalina on Aaron's—er, Logan's—boat. I choose to believe this happened over the summer. As syp will attest, sometimes it's best to humor me.

Countdown

Only three more hours to go!

Whee! (O.K., who watched it online? I take the Fifth.)