Last night Veronica Mars kicked off the new, “What Happened to Dean O’Dell?” story arc. While I liked the episode as a whole, there was a lot of stuff going on that the more nitpicky part of my brain could not shut up about. But on the plus side, there was an adorable little monkey. Awww!
Considering it is presumably going to be the next major mystery, there was surprisingly little attention devoted to Dean O’Dell’s death, and what there was wasn’t all that great. They established on the show that the Dean’s death had been ruled a suicide, and 6 weeks had passed since it happened. Yet when Keith checked his office, the Dean’s wine was still there. Now it’s quite possible that the office wouldn’t be refilled that quickly, but it seems odd that it wasn’t cleaned out in the ensuing six weeks.
Keith’s attempt to get information from Professor Landry was surprisingly shoddy as well. Landry said he recognized Keith from having read Keith’s book though it seems pretty unlikely he would recognize someone whose picture he had seen one time (though I suppose it is possible that he knew that Keith was Veronica’s father and it made more of an impression because of that). I do think it is plausible that Landry would recognize Keith, not from his book, but from the mini-period of fame he had that lead to his writing the book, or when Keith was sheriff, or when Keith ran for sheriff again; Keith should have expected that as well. And, given that Landry is supposed to be a brilliant criminology professor, it seems unlikely that he would give anything away, even if he had bought Keith’s drunken play acting.
Oh, and, in the called it category, here’s a quote from when I talked about the last episode:
I’m guessing one of the three A papers mentioned in this week’s episode will mirror the conditions of the crime
Looks like I was right on that one, as a paper written by Veronica becomes important yet again. Though you would think that if I someone was going to use Veronica’s paper for crib notes, they would have the common sense to use a different meaningless suicide note than the one Veronica used as an example; surely they can’t be that hard to come up with.
As for the main plot of this week’s episode, I enjoyed it. It was good to see Mac starting to get over the issues caused by dating crazy ol’ Beaver. And, now that’s she’s been given a small sembelance of an ongoing plot, perhaps we’ll see her more often for the rest of the season (Wallace seems to still be in need of some plot before he’s going to show up).
It was interesting to see Veronica having to choose between doing her job/telling the truth and protecting a man and his monkey. It did seem a bit odd to me that the professor would be able to get a new monkey so quickly as Pauline said that Oscar had been genetically modified specifically for their experiment, but I’m willing to let it slide as cute monkeys override logical considerations sometimes.
The other big development this week was, of course, Veronica and Logan get back together after that lengthy one episode long break-up. And poor Piz thought he was getting somewhere too. If the preview for next week’s episode is any indication however, we’re going to have EVEN MORE Veronica and Logan angst. I like Veronica and Logan as a couple but I think I’ve fulfilled my Veronica/Logan angst quotient for the year already. At this point, I’d rather they just stay broken up, if only to spare us weeks and weeks of angsty crap.
