Well, I finally replaced my long suffering VCR. No longer do I have to worry about the VCR eating a tape and preventing me from seeing something, and I also have the ability to take screen caps. So if there’s something particularly screen cap worthy, look for it to turn up somewhere over on the right. For example, tonight’s episode had an extremely rare appearance by Wallace.
Of course, Wallace’s appearance was of the minimal and unimportant variety. I’m assuming it was included to build up to something else (on next week’s show perhaps?) cause you could have easily cut his one scene this week with no real impact on the story (he did provide a little information on Mason, but nothing vital). It’s hard to believe Wallace used to be such a major part of the show; You would almost think that he and Mac had been spun off to star in their own teen drama and were just making sporadic crossovers into Veronica’s world during sweeps.
The pacing to this week’s episode was a bit unusual. We would see one of the Mars investigating one of the possible suspects for the coach’s murder and then we would move on to something else, only to come back to that investigation ten or twenty minutes down the road. For example, when Keith questioned Stoltz, Stoltz said he was on a plane at the time of the murder. We didn’t see Keith checking up on that alibi until nearly twenty minutes later in the episode. I’m guessing that the slower pacing was because this was the first part of a two parter. You don’t want to eliminate suspects too quickly when there aren’t that many to begin with and you’ve got a whole second episode in which to determine who killed the coach.
As a bonus, the slower pace did allow for a lot more investigation into Cyrus O’Dell’s death then we’ve seen lately. The evidence right now paints Mindy as the most likely suspect but in TV Land the most likely suspect is never the real culprit. Plus it would be monumentally stupid for Mindy to hire Keith to investigate the dean’s death if she was the murderer. The death had been ruled a suicide and so, by hiring Keith, she would have to hope that he uncovered just enough evidence to prove that it was murder but not enough to link her to that murder. I’m sure she would like to have the insurance money, and we know she hasn’t told Keith everything (like about the Dean’s visit to the hotel the night of his death), but if she had successfully gotten away with murder, inviting someone to check into said murder would just be incredibly stupid.
I thought Veronica’s reaction to the Dean’s letter recommendation was handled pretty well. I suspect the only reason the letter actually exists is to help people who still didn’t like the Dean care more about finding his murderer, but it was still a nice moment.
The other thing that the slower pace of the coach’s murder plot allowed a lot of time for was a Logan story. Logan’s bonding session with Heather (interspliced with Dick’s Wacky (and humorous) Vegas Adventure) was a bit sappy but pretty well done. I won’t even point out that Mario Kart can only be played online via the DS (and not the Gamecube that Logan had (I guess he’s been too busy moping to hop onto the next gen bandwagon) and that Heather specifically said she didn’t have the game herself and yet still agreed to play the game online with Logan. Okay, well I guess I did point that out, but I won’t let that stop me from going ‘awwwww’.
I seem to have talked about just about everything in this episode except Veronica and her link to Josh. The other stuff was more interesting I guess. I’m curious as to how Josh escaped from prison and why Veronica was arrested for said escape. I’m thinking either he just got out somehow and the hollowed out book was evidence enough to convince Lamb to arrest Veronica or else he feigned illness after eating Veronica’s cookies, creating an opportunity for Josh to escape. But it looks like we’ll have until wait to next find out.
