Muchas Gracias, Bitch

Veronica Mars can never seem to pick the right guy. She falls in love with one guy, but he might be her brother, so things end. Another guy seems nice, but was just using her to help him cover up the fact that he stole his dad’s car plus a cachet of illegal drugs. Things are going nice with the bad boy, but his dad did try to kill you, plus it turns out the first guy is not your brother, and although you hate his mom, she has moved out of town. Then you find out that this guy impregnated the girl that he used to go out with. Oh yeah, this girl is in a coma, and you continue to blame yourself for the whole thing. And let’s not forget that you and your boyfriend were caught in this girl’s house trying to save her youngest sister from a life being locked up in a closet as disciplinary tool. Complicated enough for you? Well, it gets a whole lot better than that.Even though I am pretty much fully indoctrinated into the Veronica Mars cult, I have to say there are still some things that escape me. It has to do with the whole Veronica-Logan thing. I know, I know, you are going to say that I hate Logan unfairly, yada, yada; but I just don’t understand how people think that theirs is the greatest love of the century. That’s not to say that I like Duncan more, but I do think that the reason that she is never going to be truly happy with either one of them is that they possess the two things she is looking for, but neither of them possess enough of the other quality to be worth all of the trouble. I guess what I am saying is that I don’t understand why she puts up with so much shit. I will say that the LoVe mashup is better than Veruncan or Dunconica, and even Loronica would work, but not Verogan. My point? Uh, get back to me on that one.

Veronica finally confronts Duncan about Meg’s baby. It turns out that letter that he read a couple of weeks ago was from Meg’s aunt. Meg wanted to live with her in Seattle, and her aunt was saying yes. Apparently Meg’s aunt is scared to e-mail or call people on their cell phones. Maybe Meg’s parents had them bugged, which may be why she was so cryptic in her e-mails to the social worker about her sister. Veronica was nearly in tears, and Duncan was trying to tell her that it didn’t concern her. You could kind of see what he meant; he didn’t know that Meg was pregnant when she broke up with her, so Veronica shouldn’t think about it. Then there is Veronica’s view which is it is crazy to think that “your secret illegitimate child gestating in the womb of your comatose ex-girlfriend affects neither you nor me.”

Is this complicated enough for you yet? It’s only five minutes in, and we’re only getting started. Dick Casablancas comes by to invite the two of them to his boat party, and he has a little news. Meg just woke up! Of course Duncan wants to see her, and since Veronica still has her visitor’s pass from picking up the stuff for Abel Koontz, she uses it to create a couple of fake passes so she and Duncan can visit Meg.

Although she has been in a coma, when Meg wakes up to see Duncan and Veronica, she is actually really happy, and more apologetic than anything else. She tells the whole story, how she wanted to live with her aunt in Seattle because her parents were going to force her to put the baby up for adoption, and not by wrapping it in a blanket and leaving it outside of a fire station or in the bathroom at the prom. The baby was going to be sent to the Levi-Stinson sanctuary house. I don’t know about this Levi guy, but Stinson’s was a sanctuary for me for four years. The place Meg was talking about was all about the religious indoctrination and tough love discipline, and by Meg’s parents’ standards, that pretty much assures this kid is going to be caned if his dimples are too big.

Normally, you would think that Duncan would have a say, since he is the father, and I am not sure what sort of custody battle would go on with one or both people under 18, but with all of Duncan’s playing fast and loose with things like pre-marital sex, her parents wouldn’t approve. Meg is so worried about what might happen to the baby that she tells Veronica that if anything happens to her, don’t let her parents take the baby away. Come on Meg! You just got out of a coma! You are going to be around for a while. Sure, an embolus could find its way into your lung or brain and kill you, but again, you beat a coma; consciousness is half of the battle.

So the Meg mystery is kind of wrapping itself up, but Keith Mars is working on another mystery. Woody Goodman asked Keith to his office in order to discuss a little investigation he wants Keith to do. Somebody stole the Aaron Echolls sex tapes from police evidence room, and wants Keith to find out who it was. He has the full backing of the county, and he’ll have all the resources he needs to go all Ken Starr on Neptune’s finest. Those tapes are central to the prosecution’s case, and if Neptune was to mess this up, it would only bring more ridicule to the town.

Since Keith is hated among the police leadership, so appointing him means that nobody can accuse Woody of being soft on corruption. Besides, Keith is the best guy for the job. He’ll do more than sing “Sheriff Lamb, I’m watching you. I see your evvvv reeee mooooove.” (Sorry, I had that stuck in my head ever since a poster commented on that a few weeks back.) Keith even wants to buy some ice cream, but not for celebration, but to soothe the pain of his daughter, who was just picked for jury duty…on her vacation.

The next day, Keith starts his investigation. He wants to make sure that he is getting as much cooperation from Sheriff Lamb as possible, and for his part, Sheriff Lamb promises that Keith will have everything that he needs. He really doesn’t know how anything happened because the police station has great security. Everybody has magnetic key cards, and the codes are changed every day. It all seems so bulletproof; you begin to wonder why Keith is there at all. Then you realize that Sheriff Lamb is more interested in playing Mr. Universe in the mirror than figuring out what might have gone wrong.

Then we have Veronica. She was expecting the case to be pretty easy. She is even named jury foreman in an effort to teach her that the justice system is more than “drive through express justice.” Oh, and she gets to learn all about civic responsibility as well. At this point, I was thinking that Veronica would rather be doing her civic responsibility picking up trash on the side of the road. At least for that punishment, you get to do something fun beforehand like mailbox baseball or underage party. And to make it worse, she is the foreman and has to pay attention. Here is what we have so far:

Two wealthy kids, Robbie McKinnon and Hunter Hayes, are being accused of aggravated assault of Anisa Villapondo, a poor Mexican woman. The woman works at a car wash, and missed her bus home, when two guys picked her up while she was hitchhiking. They smoked some marijuana, and they took her back to their hotel room on the premise that they were all going to do Ecstasy. When she got there, she wasn’t so into it, and even though they beat her, she managed to grab their gun and fire a couple of shots in the ceiling. The boys fled the scene, and were picked up after she gave the police a description and video surveillance was consulted.

The defense tells a different story. The young Mexican woman was actually a hooker, and she said they could go tag team for $80. The boys admit that they were soliciting, but they claim that when they got to the hotel, the young woman’s pimp came in and fired a couple of shots into the air. The hotel owner saw a black man leaving and jumping over a fence, and the security footage confirms his account. Oh, and the pimp, Carnell Miles, saw the report on the news and turned himself in. Anisa also happens to have a record, including currently serving probation for being the armed lookout during a robbery.

On the first vote, only eleven people on the jury think that the two boys are innocent. Hey, eleven out of twelve is pretty good, right? Well, it is good, but it doesn’t mean you can return a not-guilty verdict. Who is the juror guilty of not conforming to the rest of group? Some old Latin woman who dares to knit instead of listening to the evidence. I call her Latin because the big business man who nominated Veronica as foreman, but looked like he sort of wanted to run the show, asked if her opinion was racially motivated. I am guessing he wouldn’t have asked that if she was from Romania, but I seriously couldn’t tell because the actress playing this woman had one of the worst accents I have ever heard, which is strange because the actress was born in Puerto Rico, so you would expect that she wouldn’t have to fake it. It surely didn’t sound like the accent of any baseball player I have heard, but that’s not important. When asked why she thought Anisa might be innocent, she displayed her street smarts, because, you know, only poor immigrants have street smarts, and wondered aloud why a woman who works as a prostitute all night would bust her ass at a car wash. Hmm, she’s got a point there. Hookers don’t normally take honest jobs, because that would take away from the money they could make hooking, and if you aren’t in it for the money or the drug addiction, why bother at all?

Since the old lady knitting wouldn’t vote to convict, that means that deliberations are going to be at least another day, and already she is starting to feel the pressure of being foreman. Thumper visits Veronica at work, the first time we have seen her at Java the Hut in a while, and after he assures her that he is not Sleepy or Grumpy, he says that he has an interest in the case, specifically, what is she going to do about those two frat boys who beat up the Mexican girl. Veronica says that she isn’t supposed to talk about the case, and Thumper says that of course he wouldn’t want to prejudice the jury, although clearly he’s already tampered with them enough that they should be sequestered.

The next day, the jury is deliberating once more. The old woman raised a shadow of a doubt within the defense’s argument, but the burden is on the prosecution to prove their case, and with the issue of the gun, things just don’t line up with the prosecution. The defense has the pimp who came in to confess that he did the shooting, the testimony of the hotel manager who witnessed a black man running away from the hotel, as well as the video of a black man, gun clearly visible, running from the hotel and hopping over a six foot fence. What do you say about THAT, old woman? Well, our old grandmother is turning out to be quite the Nancy Drew, or should I say, Veronica Mars? All of that is believable, but the hotel manager said that he waited over ten minutes after hearing the shots before poking his head out. If the pimp was in such a hurry to flee the scene, why did he wait ten minutes before leaving the scene of the crime? I guess the pimp got sick of waiting for the cops to show up to turn himself in, so he ran across the parking lot and escaped, but felt so bad about it later that he turned himself in. Makes perfect sense.

As for Keith, he is still trying to get the low down on exactly who stole those sex tapes. The first person to ask, of course, would be Deputy Sacks. We’ve never heard much more about the hot Sacks/Hauser cop on divorcée action since the episode with the policeman’s ball / benefit / bachelor auction, and I for one am very glad. Sacks already has the 80′s porn star moustache, you being to wonder if his bedroom consists of a water bed, black felt paintings of naked women, and Ron Jeremy rolling papers. Sacks doesn’t have much for Keith, although he agrees with everything that Lamb has to so with regards to the security. It’s becoming more and more clear that this is probably an inside job.

One person who breaks ranks about the security is Leo. You all remember him. He had the hots for Veronica, and she had the hots for him, although things got rough when Leo found out that Veronica was using him to get into the evidence locker. God, Leo has played fast and loose with evidence before, you wonder why nobody is putting the screws to him? Although Keith never really approved of LeRonica, or Vereo for that matter, he knew Leo was a straight shooter, and hey, it can’t be any worse than that Echolls kid getting into her pants. Leo’s said that the security around the place is a joke, and the chief is so out of touch that he has no clue.

Not one to leave any stone unturned, Keith even brings in Logan to discuss what happened, but Logan doesn’t like the way Keith is talking to him, because he makes it sound like Logan was the one who planned it. It seems preposterous, but losing the tapes would hurt the prosecution’s case, and Logan did have a visit with his father just a little while ago. During this time, Keith gets a call from a person at the Neptune Dispatch. Leo had said that good celebrity porn is scarce, so if Keith was looking for the tapes, he should try and find who was paying for them. His source at the Dispatch says that he has a source at the Inquisitor tabloid that somebody is out there willing to pay half a million dollars for those sex tapes. Returning back to Logan, Keith asks a few more questions, and Logan is not very helpful, but says, “Dude, if I hear anything pertinent, I’ll let you know” to which Keith replies, “My name’s not dude, it’s Mr. Mars.” Mr. KEITH Mars to you bitch.

After a tough day of special investigating, Keith gets home and he sees that Veronica has made dinner. Two more people have said that they wanted to deliberate the case, and so it looks like she is going to be in jury duty the rest of her vacation. Keith enjoys the little Cornish hens that she made so much, that he tells her that she can open one of her presents a little early and waive the strict Christmas morning only policy he has been running all of these years. She walks into her room, opens her eyes, and sees…her old computer with a bow? No, no, no. Keith assures her that it is actually a new laptop with more RAM, a bigger hard drive, and faster processor, or at least that’s what Mac told him. Veronica is very happy, and when she goes to turn it on, she sees that Keith has decided to do a little tampering of his own.

On her laptop are two articles about the Carnell Miles, pimp from the case. He was known as Matrix Miles when he was at San Diego State. He had a great football career ahead of him until he blew his knee out in training camp. It just so happens that the local sports radio jock is on the jury, so when Veronica says that she thinks the pimp has a familiar face, the guy remembers him and gives everybody the same information as would have been in those articles. Of particular interest is how would Matrix Miles have been able to run that fast and hurtle that big fence if the injury he suffered to his knee was career ending? And wouldn’t you know that Miles’ agent is the father of one of the boys standing trial. It all seems just a little too convenient, don’t you think? The only detail left is the gun. If Miles is lying, how is possible that he was seen leaving the scene on video with a gun?

Veronica takes care of this last bit herself. The girl who was attacked called her boyfriend to help, but he didn’t arrive until after the police, but Veronica didn’t believe this. Neither of the boys had a gun registered in their names, so who could have owned the gun? It was probably Anisa. She was on probation and knew that if the cops found out she was holding any firearm, she would do jail time. She called her ex-boyfriend Anquann, who is black. White men can’t jump, but black guys can, and it was Anquann who hopped the fence. He then later returned to the scene because then the police wouldn’t think he was there in time to tamper with evidence. Being dark outside, you couldn’t get a clear enough shot to really distinguish between Anquann and Carnell, and they all look the same anyway, so it was easy to get confused.

While the prosecution’s case hasn’t suddenly become bulletproof, there is a good enough circumstantial case to convict, and pretty much every part of the defense’s case has been blown to shreds. If Miles wasn’t on the scene to corroborate McKinnon and Hayes’ story of events and say that Anisa is a hooker, there wasn’t much evidence to support their side. Still, there are a few people not convinced, and although some people are arguing that the boys are innocent, the majority now side with the prosecution. The rich guy urges that Veronica tell the judge that the jury is hung, but Veronica refuses and says that they aren’t going home until they reach a verdict.

Keith has been diligent with his case as well. As part of the investigation, he wanted a list of contact information of everybody working at the police station, including e-mail addresses. When he goes to look for it, he notices that it was missing, even though Deputy Sacks said that he placed it there. Keith asks for another copy when the administrative assistant Inga says that she received an e-mail from somebody offering $50,000 for the tapes. In fact, everybody in the office received that e-mail. Now that Keith sees that there is a buyer, he tries to contact the person offering the money, but apparently the tapes have already been sold, as evidenced by the “dude, I already have the tapes” reply he gets.

When Logan visited the police station for questioning, Deputy sacks placed the phone list in the binder for Keith. Logan saw the list and took it, and made the offer to buy the tapes himself. The “dude” in the e-mail was a clear hint that it was Logan, and Keith heads over to Duncan’s apartment to find him. Logan did buy the tapes, because he wanted to erase them, but not before he watched all of them first. He wanted to watch them apparently so he could testify about what was on them. Still, this is seriously creepy. The shots we saw were pretty tame, but there were cameras all over the place in that pool house, so you know that there is going to be some nasty shit in there. And let’s be honest, if there is no money shot, “One Night in Lilly” is not going to be worth all that much.

Logan had to watch five or six tapes of that stuff, so it was no wonder why he was in tears by the time Keith got there. Memories of perhaps the only girl you have ever truly loved are difficult to watch, but if she is boning your dad, that’s almost unbearable. If only he had been a better lover, maybe she wouldn’t have had sex with Aaron, and she would be alive now. When Logan answers the door, Keith knows what is going on, but Logan has already degaussed the tapes, and while there could be some bits here and there that a forensic technician could save, the tapes are pretty much worthless. It might hurt the case against his dad, but at least he doesn’t have to spend years watching the love of his life being defiled by his father all over the internet.

Veronica’s jury has been deliberating, but it looks like they are at an impasse. Specifically, the rich guy, who thought this thing was tied up, and has been getting more irritated by the day, refuses to send “two boys from good families to jail on the words of a Mexican whore!!”. Shit, tell us how you really feel. This last outburst gets one of the last people to move over to the side to convict, and although he is still screaming that Veronica should declare the jury hung and get a mistrial, he decides to change his vote to convict. The two kids are rich enough to appeal, and at least he won’t have to worry about it anymore, or take any more of Veronica’s “snide little digs”.

With the vote to convict, Veronica’s job is done, and there were some people who were impressed with what she had to do, including a black woman who was a woman’s studies professor at Hearst, a local liberal arts college. She told Veronica she was very impressed with the way she handled things and said she would be a good fit for Hearst. Veronica isn’t so sure because a) it’s too close to Neptune and b) the tuition is not something she could handle. The professor says that there are plenty of scholarships and grants, and that Veronica is the type of student she would fight for when it comes to admissions.

Despite all of the good she did, Veronica’s situation is not much better. The 09ers are going to blame her for the conviction, and even though the PCHers liked the verdict, they probably could have shown their pleasure by doing something other than painting “Muchas Gracias Bitch” on the windows of her car. When she gets home, her dad explains that sometimes doing the right thing is the hardest thing to do, and he has some difficult choices ahead as well, and asks Veronica about Deputy Leo.

Logan bought the tapes for $50,000, but why would somebody sell it to him for that price when they were worth at least ten times that amount? Going through Leo’s record, Keith finds some evidence that he was the one that sold the tapes, not the least of which was that he tampered with evidence before. Leo has a sister that has Down Syndrome, and she has been having trouble at school with kids picking on her, and she has started to fall behind. Private school is expensive, and selling the tapes seemed like the easiest way to get the money. In truth, it seemed like Leo was happy to get caught, and while Keith wasn’t going to throw the book at him, he couldn’t just let him slide in the report. Keith’s report doesn’t mention that Leo sold the tapes, but since it was his responsibility to look after the tapes, his negligence was most likely the cause of the theft. Leo hands in his badge, and Keith’s work is done.

With the evidence gone, it looks like Aaron Echolls conviction just got a whole lot less probable, but that’s not the saddest news of the day. Meg died at the hospital, and although her baby survived, it meant that Veronica probably wasn’t wanted at any 09er party, and decided to stay and spend New Year’s Eve with her dad. It looks like it’s going to be a sad night of pizza, and Veronica’s[not Keith's - thanks I Love Beer] dad can’t even stay awake long enough to watch the ball drop, meaning Veronica is going to be alone for the night, or so she thinks.

The doorbell rings, and I am thinking that it has to be Duncan. Meg just died, and surely he would want to be with the person who could give him emotional support, and surely he knows that his girlfriend might need even more support than he does. Veronica probably thinks that it is just the pizza guy, but when she answers the door, it is neither Papa John’s nor Duncan. It’s Wallace! He’s back, and the unconditional love of a best friend is exactly what she needed.

I really liked this episode, but I am not sure about Meg’s death. I think things would have been more interesting if they had let her live. I know somebody in Veronica’s life was supposed to die, but since Leo was kicked off the force, why not have him die in a robbery while he was picking up a Christmas present for his disabled sister? Now THAT would have been a surprise. The Aaron Echolls situation just got a lot shadier, and wouldn’t it be strange if he was convicted of murder but his son went to jail for another one? And although Wallace is back, he has a lot of explaining to do. Unfortunately, new episodes don’t start until the middle of January. Until then, make sure to catch reruns of this season every Wednesday up until that time.

What did you think of this episode? Was Logan right to destroy the tapes? Will Aaron Echolls be acquitted? Well Veronica be able to keep Meg’s baby away from her parents?