Hello again, Veronica Mars. Rebel girl after my own heart.
It’s been a little over two months since I watched the Veronica Mars pilot, which is long enough for that initial charm to wear off. Sometimes you go back to a show after a break and wonder what the hell you saw in it in the first place.
Not here.
Veronica Mars S1E2: “Credit Where Credit’s Due” reminded me almost immediately why I liked Veronica so much. She’s smart, sarcastic, resourceful and stubborn as hell, but what keeps her interesting is that underneath all of that confidence is a teenage girl who still isn’t entirely sure she wants the life she has now.
She may have been thrown out of Neptune’s rich-kid club, but part of her still misses having a membership card.
And Episode 2 understands that’s much more interesting than simply giving Veronica another mystery to solve.
Veronica Mars Is Still Caught Between Two Worlds
The case this time begins after Weevil crashes a party populated by Neptune’s usual collection of privileged assholes, including Logan, Duncan and Caitlin.
Soon afterward, Weevil’s grandmother, Leticia Navarro, is arrested for credit-card fraud. Weevil eventually confesses himself, but Veronica isn’t buying the convenient answer and starts pulling at the threads.
Yes, it’s a case of the week.
But Veronica Mars is already showing me how you do a case-of-the-week format without making me feel as though I’m watching the television equivalent of paperwork.
The mystery gives Veronica something to investigate, but it’s also constantly revealing something about these people.
Take Weevil, for example.
After what happened in the pilot, he and Veronica have developed a strange sort of conditional respect for one another. They’re cordial, but they aren’t friends. He knows she used to belong to the 09er world, knows she still watches Duncan and doesn’t entirely trust that she’s left that life behind.
And the uncomfortable part is that he’s not completely wrong.
Veronica may tell herself she’s finished with those people, but put her back around Duncan and suddenly that old life doesn’t look quite as dead as she’d like to believe.
Duncan’s friend Troy isn’t helping.
The new kid doesn’t carry everyone else’s baggage with Veronica, so he sees the girl in front of him instead of Neptune’s social pariah. He’s interested. He’s nice to her. He fixes her tires after someone — gee, I wonder who — leaves them flat.
And suddenly Veronica has another little doorway opening back into the world she supposedly doesn’t want anymore.
When Troy invites her and Wallace to a party, Veronica shoots back:
“Haven’t you heard? I’m not allowed in the first-class cabin.”
God, I love this girl.
But the joke covers something real. Veronica remembers first class. She liked first class.
Choosing Keith Cost Veronica More Than She Admits
Duncan is where all of that gets considerably messier.
They’re forced together for a school newspaper assignment, and the awkwardness between them makes it obvious that neither one has simply moved on. Veronica can pretend she’s above Neptune’s social bullshit all she wants, but Duncan still matters to her.
More importantly, being around him forces her to confront what losing him actually meant.
We finally get a clearer picture of what happened after Lilly Kane’s murder. When Keith, then sheriff, focused his investigation on Lilly and Duncan’s father, Jake Kane, Veronica’s friends effectively demanded that she choose between Duncan and her dad.
She chose Keith.
I think she made the right choice, but Veronica isn’t pretending that making the right choice automatically makes everything okay.
It blew up her life.
She lost Duncan. She lost her friends. Her mother left. Keith lost his job. Veronica went from being welcomed into Neptune’s elite circle to being someone Logan and company could torment for sport.
So when she wonders whether Keith was wrong about Jake Kane, she’s really asking something much bigger:
Did I lose my entire life for nothing?
That’s the part of this episode that got me far more interested than who stole a credit card.
And Keith doesn’t give her the comforting answer she wants. When she finally asks why he went after Jake, he admits that knowing what it would cost them might have changed what he did — but he still won’t tell her what originally made him suspicious.
There is something there.
Veronica knows it too.
These Flashbacks Actually Have a Reason to Exist
This is also where Veronica Mars is doing something particularly well: the flashbacks.
I’ve complained about shows using flashbacks as plot decoration, and Scarpetta practically fell face-first into the River of Molasses doing it.
These don’t.
Every trip into Veronica’s past gives us another piece of Lilly, Duncan, Keith or the life Veronica lost. They’re telling us things that affect how we understand what she’s doing now rather than stopping the episode so somebody can dump exposition on us.
A memory of Lilly isn’t there simply to remind us that Lilly existed. It changes how Veronica sees Duncan, his family and herself.
And then the episode drops one hell of a breadcrumb.
A parking ticket supposedly belonging to Lilly shows that she ran a red light two hours after she was murdered.
Well, hello.
Suddenly Keith’s refusal to let go of Jake Kane doesn’t look quite so irrational.
That’s how you handle a season-long mystery inside an episodic show. The Lilly Kane murder isn’t wheeled out for thirty seconds at the end so the writers can remind us there’s a mythology. It’s tangled through Veronica’s relationships, her investigation and the choices she’s making right now.
Weevil Is Getting More Interesting Too
Meanwhile, the credit-card mystery eventually leads somewhere I didn’t expect.
Logan looks guilty as hell for much of the episode — and he’s certainly enough of an asshole to make the theory believable — but Caitlin has secretly been involved with Weevil’s cousin Chardo.
Chardo stole a high-limit credit card and went on a spending spree trying to impress her. Then he was perfectly willing to let his own family absorb the consequences.
Great guy.
The more interesting payoff, though, belongs to Weevil.
When Logan and the 09ers go looking for Chardo and Weevil’s biker crew arrives too, I expected the whole thing to explode into the obvious fight.
Instead, Weevil takes control.
Whatever passes between him and Logan is enough to get Logan to back away, and Weevil deals with Chardo himself. Even then, there’s a line he won’t cross. Chardo gets roughed up and thrown out of Weevil’s life, but Weevil stops his guys before it goes too far.
I like him.
More importantly, I like him with Veronica. Not necessarily romantically. Their personalities work against each other in a way that’s much more interesting than everybody simply helping Veronica because she’s the smartest person in the room.
He challenges her. She challenges him. Neither completely trusts the other, but there’s a growing respect there.
Give me more of that.
Wallace Deserves More Than Errand Duty
The same goes for Wallace, although for a different reason.
Veronica and Wallace have terrific chemistry, and their banter is one of the easiest things about this show to enjoy. But I don’t want Wallace reduced to the guy who happens to be perfectly positioned to obtain whatever Veronica needs for her latest investigation.
He’s her friend.
Let him be her friend.
That’s especially important while Veronica is being tempted back toward Duncan, Troy and the 09er orbit. Wallace doesn’t belong in that world, and I have to wonder what happens to their friendship if Veronica starts inching her way back into it.
She’s already lived through the fake bullshit of Neptune’s social hierarchy. She should know better.
But she’s also a teenager, and teenagers want to belong.
That’s what makes the temptation believable.
And Veronica doesn’t quite understand yet that the girl she is now may fit her considerably better than the girl she used to be.
And Then There’s Paris Hilton
Yes, Paris Hilton is here playing Caitlin.
And yes, Caitlin is an insufferable rich bitch.
Perfect casting.
Hilton isn’t exactly stretching herself into Daniel Day-Lewis territory, and Caitlin annoyed the shit out of me every time she appeared. But I’ll give Hilton this: for what the character needs to be, it works.
Although when Caitlin gets booted from the 09er inner circle and Veronica actually looks sympathetic toward her, I had one immediate reaction:
Veronica, what the f*ck are you doing?
I understand why she recognizes herself in Caitlin’s sudden exile.
But please don’t adopt her.
🔥Our Verdict: WATCHABLE
Veronica Mars still has it.
“Credit Where Credit’s Due” technically follows a case-of-the-week structure, but it never feels trapped by one. The credit-card investigation gives Veronica something to chase while the episode continues developing Weevil, Duncan, Keith, Wallace and the much larger question of Lilly Kane’s murder.
More importantly, Veronica herself remains the reason to watch.
She’s resourceful enough to solve everybody else’s problems while still being completely confused about her own life. Part of her misses Duncan. Part of her misses belonging. Part of her wonders whether choosing her father destroyed everything for no reason.
And yet the girl standing outside that first-class cabin is considerably more interesting than the one who used to sit inside it.
She just doesn’t know that yet.
