So after a nine episode wait the identity of the rapist(s) was finally revealed. It turns out I was only partially right as far as the solving the mystery. Claire’s rape (which really set off my suspicions of Nish) was faked, and possibly some of the others (I assume the one that happened while Mercer was in Mexico was faked as Veronica seemed pretty certain that Moe only helped Mercer drug the girls and didn’t actually do any of the raping himself). I was pretty happy with Mercer and Moe being behind everything but I was much less happy with the episode itself.
There were a whole lot of things in this week’s episode that called on you to basically ignore common sense for the sake of making things more dramatic. If any of you have ever stayed in any sort of student housing, you know that there are always people around, no matter what time of night (and it was presumably not that late at night anyway as the rape was to occur during Mercer’s normal radio show). Yet after Veronica escaped from Mercer, there was nobody was in the hallway, nor did anyone have their door open. Even Veronica’s yelling and pounding on Piz/Wallace’s door failed to attract any attention. This problem was underlined a little bit later when Parker (apparently the only one who reacted to hearing Veronica’s rape whistle) yelling ‘Rape’ had students coming out of what seemed to be every room in the hall.
Moe’s involvement cleared up a lot of questions (like how Mercer knew where to find the girl he drugged, considering she had been using her sister’s ID) which I liked. Unfortunately as soon as he gave Veronica something to drink, you knew he had to be working with Mercer.
Veronica’s apparently getting only a little bit drugged had some issues as well. Yeah, Moe apparently used the last of his drugs on her, and she didn’t drink very much. Still, she was coherent enough to open the window and then hide in the closet, thus throwing off her pursuers, but at the same time she was somehow to out of it to yell for help, or perhaps try calling someone else once her dad failed to answer. I really liked the fact that it was Parker that saved Veronica, but I think it would have been more effective if Veronica had a more consistent level of druggedness.
I thought the stuff with Logan was handled pretty well. It was obviously only a matter of time before Logan and Veronica broke up yet again, and so they stopped wasting any more time with that (at least until they inevitably get back together again at some point in the future). I got a chuckle out of Logan’s little act of vandalism so he could go spend some quality time with his buddy Mercer at the end of the episode as well.
As for our upcoming ‘Who Killed the Dean?’ mystery, I really wish the ads for this week’s episode hadn’t told us that someone was going to die. I think normally the dean’s death would have been a surprise. However, knowing someone was going to die, combined with all the character development being heaped on the dean in the episode, really took away a lot of the surprise. By the time Dean O’Dell started telling Keith how much he looked forward to drinking an old bottle of scotch someday, I had pretty much written him off as the one to die. It’s a pity, as I liked the guy.
It is, of course, far too early to be sure who killed the dean, but some things are pretty predictable. There will be lots of attention surrounding O’Dell’s wife and Professor Landry, especially given the recent papers on planning the perfect murder (as a side bet, I’m guessing one of the three A papers mentioned in this week’s episode will mirror the conditions of the crime (though it may not be Veronica’s just because it would seem like a rehash of the plagiarism thing) and Lilith House because of the fraternity thing but the killer will be someone less obvious. My early, and not even remotely confident, guess is that Tim is the killer.
