This post discusses the final two episodes of the first season of Veronica Mars.

The last two episodes of the first season of Veronica Mars center on the two central mysteries that have threaded their way throughout the year: who raped Veronica at that party? And who killed Lilly Kane? But though those questions have very different answers, they center on a similar problem. How do you be a decent person when up against social pressure, fear of losing your class status, addiction, or even rotten parenting?

There are a few good people in Neptune. Weevil may not be able to resist baiting Logan, when he chases after Veronica, who’s become convinced that Logan was responsible for her getting roofied at that fateful party, even if he didn’t actually dose her himself. “When they run away like that, it’s kind of a hint they’re not interested,” Weevil taunts the more privileged boy. “I”m just looking out for Veronica. So if you think you’re going to lay a hand on her the way you did Lilly…” And when Logan falls back on class to try to assert his dominance in the conversation, Weevil has an answer for that, too. “What’s worse?” he asks Logan. “Thinking Lilly had feelings for me, or that she was using me for sex?” Weevil may be stuck in an ugly and unproductive war of words with Logan, with whom he’s feuded since the first episode, but it’s remarkable to see how consistent Weevil’s support for Veronica has been. He’s one of the only boys her age who appears to want remarkably little from her, who doesn’t ask for anything in return, whether he’s trashing Logan’s car back at the beginning of the show, or only wanting to know “You okay?” when he picks her up from the Ecchols’ house after she discovers the camera in the guest house.

He’s not the only person who is decent out of proportion to public perception. As Veronica uncovers the story of what happened to her at the party, an unexpected voice of conscience shows up in the form of Beaver. “She’s actually kind of hot, when she’s quiet,” the odious Dick declares of Veronica, who is passed out in bed after a GHB-laced drink. “She’s not willing, Dick,” Beaver tells his friend, who is encouraging him to have sex for the first time with a woman who can’t possibly consent. “She’s unconscious.” That he knows the difference, that he, like Weevil, asks “Veronica, you okay?” marks Beaver as one of the boys in Neptune who appears to have picked up a rudimentary moral education, even if he leaves her there passed out in bed and ends up vomiting outside, rather than ensuring her safety.
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This post discusses episodes nineteen and twenty of the first season of Veronica Mars.

One of the things I like a great deal about Veronica Mars is how well, even in the midst of its mannered noir storytelling, it captures what it means to be a teenager, and specifically what it means to be variable as a teenager, without being light or inconsequential. And this pair of episodes, whether through Weevil’s break-in at the Kane house, Veronica’s burgeoning relationship with Logan, or the sexual harassment of Carmen gets at something frightening about being in high school. It’s possible for teenagers to be genuinely different people than who they were when they did things that were criminal, but they have the resources to take actions with truly lingering consequences.

When Weevil breaks into the Kanes’ house, he initially tells Veronica a lie that’s based in teenage changeableness, saying he wanted to retrieve a diamond ring. “I was trying to get it back,” he tells Veronica. “It was my mothers and she was saving it for me for an engagement ring. Once upon a time, I was dumb enough to think I wanted Lilly to have it.” What he’s really after is a spy pen that holds secret messages, a toy Lilly got out of a cereal box and bragged to Veronica–before Veronica knew about Weevil–that she’d use to communicate with her conquests. Whatever message too or from Weevil that was in that pen may have been written in a moment of passion and total sincerity. But he’s changed enough, and circumstances have changed enough, for him to need it back. Being the bad boy Lilly used to make her parents angry is no longer such an innocent occupation.

In the next episode, Veronica gets caught up in helping Carmen, a girl whose boyfriend is blackmailing her into staying with him with a tape of her suggestively sucking a popsicle in a hot tub that turns out to have been made under the influence of GHB. The boy is revoltingly self-regarding and self-justifying. When Carmen sticks to her guns and breaks up with him, he distributes it, believing that no one will want Carmen once they’ve seen the video, telling Veronica “She forced me to. She left me.” It’s utterly pathetic, nasty behavior that ignores the fact that both he and Carmen are headed off to college, a world where people won’t know to track down a video of Carmen in a sexually compromising situation, and where even those who do might understand that she was drugged, that the video doesn’t represent her whole personality, or even that sexual voraciousness (if Carmen had made it consentingly) is hardly the whole of her personality, or a crime. The boy, hopefully, will have to live not just with being taped to a flagpole and an unfortunate tattoo, but with the moral knowledge of what he’s done. Carmen, by contrast, may suffer the short-term consequences of the video, but in refusing to retaliate, even though Veronica cooks up the material that would allow her to do it, reveals herself to be the more grown-up person. She knows what she’ll be able to handle after high school.
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This post discusses episodes 17 and 18 of the first season of Veronica Mars.

I’ve really come to believe that Veronica Mars is at its best when it’s a show about Neptune, and “Kanes and Abel’s” and “Weapons of Class Destruction,” both separately but particularly when they’re taken together, get at two important aspects of the town. In throw-away exchanges, we learn more about the extent to which Neptune, which also has Hollywood kids like Logan, has been shaped by the tech boom, as personified by Jake Kane. And in both episodes, we see the effect that the parental pressure to achieve has at kids at Neptune High, for good and for ill.

Amelia DeLongpre, Abel Koontz’s daughter, provides Veronica with an important piece of context when she explains that “Jake Kane cheated him out of his streaming video project,” a disagreement between those families that embittered Koontz, and that provided a cover for something more sinister. What Amelia believes is a legal settlement between her father and Jake Kane over the allegations that Kane stole Koontz’s streaming video technology, Veronica is coming to think of as a payoff for Koontz, who is terminally ill, to take the blame for Lilly Kane’s death.

And in the next episode, Norris (Theo Rossi), a former bully who becomes the target of a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms sting after web chatter suggests he might be planning a school bombing, explains why his family has access to things that aren’t widespread in Neptune. “My dad’s a programmer over at Kane software, so we get all the latest technology,” he tells Veronica, who came over to his house on behalf of the ATF to try to search it for a pipe bomb. “We were one of the first households in the country to have wifi.” That technology is part of what makes Norris a suspect, first by giving him an online life that made him an easy setup, and second by giving his family access to the finances that let him pursue things like a weapons collection or a trip to Japan, harmless preoccupations that were made to seem suspicious.
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This post discusses episodes 15 and 16 of the first season of Veronica Mars.

After a crackerjack pair of episodes in our previous outing in the Veronica Mars Television Club, I thought this week’s were a bit of a downshift, creativity-wise. But that’s okay, given where they got us emotionally. Much of Veronica Mars is about long-standing emotional commitment, whether Veronica is searching for her mother, unable to let go of the question of who killed her friend Lilly, or carrying a torch for Duncan. And these two episodes did a nice job of looking at what it means to sacrifice something for someone you love, or to stand by someone who’s behaved in a way you find reprehensible, but who is still bound to you, or simply to do something you think is silly for someone who means a great deal to you.

First, there’s Veronica’s relationship with Logan. I joked on Twitter earlier today that there’s an extent to which Logan is the Jaime Lannister of Neptune High School, and the more I think about that comparison, the more I think it’s true. Logan is a privileged guy who does enormous damage to the people around him, inspired in part by the treatment he receives from his emotionally detached, image-obsessed father, and who resists efforts to understand him better, even when such efforts might rehabilitate his reputation. And “Ruskie Business” has a lot of emotion parallels with Jaime’s journey on this season of Game of Thrones, with Veronica playing Brienne of Tarth, minus the need to fight an actual bear.

Over the course of this season, we’ve gotten to know Logan primarily through two losses: the death of Lilly Kane, his on-again-off-again girlfriend, and the presumptive suicide of his mother, inspired by his father’s philandering. The lost of Lilly is in the past, and he and Veronica first team up to honor her real memory, rather than the white-washed image Lilly’s parents prefer to present to the community. But the loss of Logan’s mother is fresher and more immediate, and the power of that wound inspires him to seek out Veronica to try to track her down.
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This post discusses episodes 13 and 14 of the first season of Veronica Mars.

“I thought being a private eye was about shooting dudes and making out with sexy widows,” Wallace teases Veronica in “Lord of the Bling,” the thirteenth episode of the first season of Veronica Mars. “The widows come later,” Veronica promises him, but these two episodes of the show are about what happens when people refuse to conform to the tropes that they’ve been assigned to. First, there’s Bryce Hamilton, the son of Percy “Bone” Hamilton, a hip-hop producer, who sets up an elaborate scheme to prove to his father that being good at science doesn’t mean he’s “soft.” And in the second, there’s Carrie, “the gossip queen of Neptune High,” who uses her acute understanding of the high school rumor mill to take the brunt of a student-teacher relationship scandal for the girl who really got pregnant, an act of courage that demonstrates how Veronica, who normally keeps her detective’s toolkit sharp and clean, succumbs to bias when her own social milieu is the subject of an investigation that rubs up against her own sore spots.

“Lord of the Bling” traffics fairly heavily in stereotypes, but it gets away with its cliches with some deft attention to the extent to which stereotypes are useful to the people that embody them and to code-switching, and by making those stereotypes the subjects of the case itself. “You know that boy could stand to get hit in the head with a dodge ball or two. Toughen him up,” sighs Percy when we first meet him, signing a waiver that will let Bryce get out of physical education so he can pursue an independent study in science. “How did a man like me end up with National Black Velvet and Urkel?” Percy’s identity, as we’ll learn throughout the episode, is a creation rather than a natural outgrowth of his personality. “He didn’t advertise the fact that much of his success was due to his comfortably upper-middle-class Jewish attorney,” Mr. Bloom tells Keith Mars. Later, Yolanda, Percy’s daughter, whose disappearance is what prompts Percy to seek Keith out to look for her, explains that she’s disgusted by the way her father treated the drive-by shooting that left Mr. Bloom using a wheelchair. “You let everyone believe you ordered it because it gave you cred,” she tells him, after running off with Mr. Bloom’s son. His wife even teases him in the opening about his insistence that Bryce isn’t tough enough. “And the street was tough and you lost a lot of homies. But this is Neptune,” she tells her husband, suggesting that Percy is clinging to a trope that may have outlived its usefulness for his family.

But clearly, Percy’s attachment to that stereotype has done real damage to Percy’s family. Bryce—though he turns out to be the architect of the ransom demand for Yolanda—is bitter that his father is resorting to a private detective, rather than calling the police, a gesture he believes is meant to protect Percy’s reputation as not cooperating with the cops, rather than to expedite the search for Yolanda. “He’s been in jail a third of my life, but I’m the embarrassment? State science fair winner three years in a row but I’m the one that’s soft,” he tells Veronica, in what turns out to be the motivation for his hoax. When Veronica and Keith catch Bryce and march him back to his father to explain, Bryce tells Percy, “You can be mad, Dad. But you can’t call me soft.”
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This post discusses the eleventh and twelfth episodes of the first season of Veronica Mars.

Halfway through this first season of Veronica Mars, I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t necessarily care very much about the cases themselves that Veronica is investigating week-to-week, but that I care a great deal about getting a better sense of Neptune, California. When the cases serve the setting and the characters, I tend to find myself much more engaged by the procedural elements of the show, which happened to varied extents in these two episodes.

The first—featuring a welcome appearance by New Girl‘s Max Greenfield—does that in two different ways. The bar murders that Keith and Veronica investigate open up an area of Neptune’s economy that we haven’t heard that much about before. In addition to being an enclave for wealthy Californians in the tech and entertainment industries, it’s apparently also a tourist haven. “Oh, but it was so important for the mayor and the Chamber of Commerce to put that scare behind us,” Keith complains of the rush by other city officials to pin the earlier stranglings on a suspect whose method was similar, but not identical to, the killer who reemerges. “This is all about tourist revenues? God bless America,” Veronica snarks when the mayor and Sheriff Lamb pull her father back into the case, using him for his knowledge, but without any promising of redeeming him.

The case also provides an opportunity for Weevil to deliver a hilarious, angry monologue at the police station that serves as a distraction, but that’s also a penetrating look into unequal policing in Neptune.
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When I wrote last week about the rising trend of Hollywood figures using Kickstarter to solicit backing for projects that they might or might not have been able to finance through the normal studio system, I got back two main objections to the idea of giving Kickstarter backers equity in the projects they invest in. First, there was the idea that Kickstarter is effectively a means of garnering charitable support, the cause being to liberate artists from the crippling influence of profit-making system. Second, there was the objection that expectations of equity would put pressure on filmmakers to generate profits, leading them to make more commercial decisions than they might have otherwise, and eliminating the advantage of working outside the studio advantage in the first place.

I’m not exceptionally sympathetic to the idea that Kickstarter is or should be a charitable enterprise for any number of reasons. First, there’s the idea, which I think animates a lot of the anti-Kickstarter sentiment, and which is not entirely fair to people working in Hollywood, that there’s something distasteful about giving large amounts of money to people who already make a great deal more than many of the rest of us. More pointedly, I actually think it’s worth interrogating the idea that liberating artists from the studio system is an inherently great idea, much less one worthy of major charitable giving.

There are absolutely movies that couldn’t have been made by traditional studios, and there should be more venues that support funding movies that are about people of color, that are about poor people, that are about political subjects that aren’t going to be hot sellers but that also might not be popular enough to attract support from a big non-profit outlet like PBS. At its meritocratic best, Kickstarter can be a place where projects like those get discovered by people who will love them, and get the funding and support that other outlets are too blinkered to survive. But that isn’t actually particularly what we’re talking about here. We’re addressing the argument that Kickstarter can give artists who have long records of working in commercial film and television and making projects with studio backing the chance to buy their way out of the system. In the case of the Veronica Mars movie, that’s not really what’s going on. The movie, as I understand it, will still be made in collaboration with Warner Brothers, which is handling distribution of things like rewards. In the case of Zach Braff’s project, his Kickstarter is explicitly set up so he can exit a commercial system that would have provided him with funding, but under conditions he didn’t want to accept.

With that clear, it’s worth remembering what working in the system provides. It means excellent facilities and equipment. It means getting hooked up with distribution. It means the ability to reach out to talent more easily than might have been possible otherwise. While there are absolutely edits from networks and studios that end up being bad for film and television, and that are cowardly, conversations between executives and creators are not inherently some sort of poisonous thing, and genius—or even mere inspiration—is not inherently best off when it’s left to flourish unsupervised. This is a common misnomer that people on the outside of creative professions seem to have, but almost everyone I know who writes, or makes art, appreciates second opinions, and editing, and advice on what will find an audience and what won’t. 30 Rock was initially going to be a show about cable news. Lena Dunham works with Judd Apatow and Jenni Konner for a reason. We can argue about the results, but one thing that working with NBC or HBO gets you is access to Lorne Michaels or Judd Apatow, particularly for artists who are leveling up. I would be much more interested in bending the curve on what studios are willing to take on than in exiting the system entirely, whether a Kickstarter demonstrates a strong core audience for a given creator or project, whether it becomes matching funds, or whether Kickstarted funds are what let an artist buy access to a studio’s resources.
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This post discusses the ninth and tenth episodes of the first season of Veronica Mars.

One of the things I’m coming to really enjoy about Veronica Mars is the way, compared to other television shows and movies about being a teenager, social groups are relatively fluid. This was an insight that Mean Girls, which made its bow in theaters five months before Veronica Mars debuted on television, made brilliantly at its conclusion: that being a Plastic was a temporary condition rather than an ontological one, and it could pass with the end of a school year or on the occasion of a momentous bus accident. Veronica Mars actually takes that idea a step further in these two episodes, which serve as an illustration of how porous the 09ers are as a clique. They’re people, after all, rather than rigid a fraternal order, and their social group can’t actually provide everything they want, whether it’s support in being more compassionate than their parents or someone who’s willing to ante up for a genuinely high-stakes poker game. Veronica herself has always been a reminder of that fact, but these two episodes are a reminder that she’s not an exception—she’s actually more of the rule at Neptune.

The Moon Calves subplot in “Drinking The Kool-Aid” is a little half-baked, unfortunately—it’s an over-the-top way to get at a concept that might have been fleshed out on a smaller scale, that being one of the 09ers, and being part of one of Neptune’s wealthy families, is actually a corrosive and disillusioning experience. Casey (Jonathan Bennett, who played Aaron Samuels in Mean Girls), has come to realize that, as he puts it, “I wrote the Jackass Bible, the Jackass Koran, the Jackass Talmud.” His parents, who have been wealthy their whole lives, let the desire to keep consolidating their wealth corrupt their interpersonal relationships, particularly with Casey’s grandmother. “My parents, who call her Grandmonster behind her back, stopped paying attention to her,” he explains. Having him work out those issues through a cult gives Veronica and her dad a case, but it’s also a kind of quick way to dispense.

By contrast, the person who appears to be working out those issues on a relatively large scale and over an extended period of time is Logan Echolls. The show’s taken time to establish the misery that lies behind the gates to his family home, some of the tension between him and his friends, and the ways in which managing his pain at Lilly Kane (Amanda Seyfried, another link to Mean Girls) has lead him to tweak Neptune’s establishment by helping Veronica subvert the whitewashed memorial the Kanes had planned for her. And one of the things the show is doing now that we know these things about him is showing how his relationships with Weevil and Veronica, the main people he hangs out with who aren’t 09ers, are shaping up like fencing matches, shaped by the participants’ needs and the ground they’re willing to surrender.

“What if I run into a pack of you white boys on some clean, well-lit street? I could be bored to death,” Weevil tells Logan when he’s trying to get in on his poker game. The language of the negotiation between them is similar to what it was when Weevil was going after Logan’s car in the pilot. “You people can hand-roll like nobody’s business,” Logan tells him of the Cuban cigars he’s passing around, and when Weevil wins big, Logan tells the other player “Sean, the money box so I can pay the pool boy?” But the fact that Weevil’s seeking out the invitation at all, and that Logan’s willing to grant it—and that when the theft goes down, Logan’s willing to let Weevil search his friends rather than calling security and having him tossed out—demonstrates how far the two of them have come. I’m not sure how their relationship will shape up long-term given that there seems to be a great deal we don’t know about Weevil’s relationship to Lilly, and how Logan might react when he—and we—find out what the truth is there. But the fact that they were both drawn to the same girl, that they both have parental figures who are willing to sacrifice them for their own good, whether it’s Logan for his good name or Weevil’s grandmother who believes he can do shorter time as a juvenile, suggests a similarity to them that is obvious to us, even if they can’t see the extent of it.

And that’s also true for Logan and Veronica as well. Of course, they were friends for real, once. And it means that Logan’s willing to let Veronica back in when she volunteers to investigate the poker game theft. “Annoy, tiny blonde one! Annoy like the wind!” Logan tells her, more affectionately than anyone else. “You are a natural at this,” Weevil tells Veronica when they stop by the Echolls’ ill-fated Christmas party. But the truth is that it’s just as normal for Logan to want people like Weevil and Veronica in his life as it would be for Weevil and Veronica to want in to the mansion, with its catering and its horribly over-the-top Christmas decorations. As Sean’s experience faking it as a member of the 09ers illustrates, it’s exhausting and ultimately unsustainable to posture all the time, even when you do have the money and social position to back up your bravado. Negotiating the minefield of high school is tiresome no matter who you are. And sometimes the best friendships can survive in the clandestine spaces in between cliques, where nothing is clearly expected, and as a result, everything is possible.

This post discusses the seventh and eighth episodes of the first season of Veronica Mars.

As I’m watching my way through Veronica Mars, I’m learning how to watch the show, which is a good thing—good television doesn’t just figure out what it’s doing for its own self, it finds ways to communicate to viewers what they ought to be looking for in an episode. And what I’ve learned so far is to look for theme in the cases of the week, rather than plot in particular. These two episodes do a nice job of fleshing out the theme of reputation, while also playing with the way that Veronica, Logan, and Weevil are perceived—and perceive each other.

In the first case, Jessica Chastain plays Sarah, a neighbor of Veronica and Keith’s who turns out to have been raped by her mother’s boyfriend, and is pregnant as a result of that sexual assault. The case itself isn’t deeply concerned with that larger theme, though it touches on it in two ways. First, is the idea that while Sarah’s boyfriend Andre may be a cheat and a jerk, those two things don’t necessarily make him a murderer. And then there’s Keith’s perspective on the case: “Young attractive girls who take up with troubled men and disappear without warning?” Keith warns Veronica. “I’ve handled a hundred of these cases in my life and they often end badly. Prepare yourself.” It’s true that Sarah is troubled, but not in a garden-variety way. And while things end badly—Keith ends up having to shoot Sarah’s attacker to protect her—they don’t end up badly because she’s a mess, but because something terrible’s been done to her.

The second case deals much more directly with the question of reputation, as Veronica takes the case of Meg, a popular—but kind—cheerleader who finds herself devastated when a new purity test becomes the school craze, and when a website begins selling test results that purport to reveal the deepest secrets of Neptune High students. The results that are being sold as Meg’s suggest that, contrary to her squeaky-clean image (in contrast to that of her sister’s), as Duncan puts it, “Meg was one of those Britney Spears virgins. And you were her noble Justin, keeping it all on the down low.” But while other students are all too ready to believe the worst of Meg, Veronica, who’s been the subject of unpleasant rumors herself, and who has direct experience of Meg’s decency after her clothes are stole when she’s in the showers at gym, isn’t so easily duped. “Meg, you’re the last good person at this school,” she reminds her friend. “I believe cartoon birds braided your hair this morning.” What she discovers, though, is how willing Meg’s purported friends were willing to tear down her sexual reputation in the hopes that losing that would make it harder for Meg to achieve in other areas, whether she’s winning parts in the school play or anchoring Neptune High’s student news show. It’s a canny recognition of a screwed-up hierarchy that sets up Meg’s virginity as the most valuable part of her, far above her goodness as a person, her skills as a singer, or her abilities on television.

And the episode pivots in an interesting way Meg seeks out Veronica not just for her expertise as a private eye, but for advice on how to handle being widely and publicly slandered. “I don’t see how you do it…Deal. The way people talk about you. Does it bother you the things they say?” Meg asks her. “No,” Veronica tells her. “Here’s what you do. You get tough. You get even.” But how is she supposed to get even with someone like Wallace’s mom, who tells her son “I thought we talked about you hanging out with that girl…We have a chance of making a fresh start in Neptune. There have to be some respectable kids in your school.” Keith’s intervention with her difficult tenant might help her estimation of the Mars family name as a whole, but it may not fix the perception that Veronica’s promiscuous. And Veronica has to cope with her father’s desires for her and the ways in which they contrast with her desire to stay close to him by staying in private eye work. “I think you’ve got a future as a highly paid, Ivy-leage educated executive of some sort who never thinks about private investigation again in her normal life,” Keith tells her. Whether she hears is another question.

Two people who do seem to be getting on the same page are Logan and Weevil, who after getting zeros on a test from a rigid English teacher, discover that the reputations that work for them in different ways can also be very effectively against them. “The glow of your father’s wealth and celebrity may be enough to get you through high school, but do you know what it will get you in the real world?” their teacher tells them. “Mr. Navarro, you find Mr. Ecchols amusing enough now, but I wonder if you’ll find him so entertaining in ten years when you’re pumping his gas.” They jab back and forth at each other in detention that turns into a poker game. “How do you people not make yourselves sick?” Weevil jabs at Logan, who asks him in return, “If I donate to the United Latino Pain In The Ass Fund, will you shut up?” “You’re almost as bad an actor as your father,” Weevil tells Logan. “You know you don’t need a diploma to steal hubcaps?” Logan aks again. These two are clearly meant to be friends, and it’s a minor delight when Logan bails Weevil out of his expulsion. The next best thing to a good friend is a good enemy. And your bad reputation can be an enormous source of strength.

This post discusses the fifth and six episodes of the first season of Veronica Mars.*

Since I started this project, people have been telling me how terrific Veronica Mars is as a depiction of a relationship between parents and children. As someone who followed in my father’s footsteps in a general way professionally, I’ve enjoyed watching Keith and Veronica banter about, but what finally made that section of the show work for me was a scenario where Keith had to be more of a parent to Veronica than a partner, and where Veronica was hurt enough to act more like the teenager that she is than an adult in cargo pants and pigtails. What made this pair of episodes particularly powerful is the examples of bad parenting the tension between Keith and Veronica are juxtaposed against, both of which stem out of the kind of privilege that marks Neptune. Wealth may buy nice cars and gated mansions. But it doesn’t seem particularly capable of purchasing values or emotional connection.

Veronica and Keith run into trouble when both of them overestimate her maturity. Veronica, after hearing Rebecca James, her guidance counselor, leave a voicemail for Keith that makes it clear that the two of them are dating, tries to convince herself that she’s cool with what’s happening. “Next time, could you shoot for an actual teacher, because this has no impact on my grade-point average,” Veronica jokes with her dad. But her feelings about her mother, and the possibility of her mother’s return, remain entirely unresolved. Veronica’s still mailing burners to her mother’s friends, trying to figure out why she was drinking so heavily and acting so terrified. And because her father has treated her more like a partner than a parent, Veronica acts on her conflict in a way that reflects her confusion about their respective roles—by investigating Rebecca.

What made the confrontation between Veronica and Keith so painful was that it was a necessary readjustment for them after eight months of seemingly refusing to adapt to a new normal. “This is what we do,” Veronica told him when Keith reacted with fury to the news of her investigation. “This is how we survive. I was trying to protect you…You have let her into our life like it’s no big deal.” Acting like a private eye has made Veronica feel like she has the tools to handle her mother’s disappearance, and ideas like the burner phones certainly come from spending so much time with Keith. But sorting logistics isn’t the same way as resolving your feelings. And in this case, they’ve made Veronica’s confusion worse because of the contradiction between how hard Keith looks for other people, and how little he’s done to drag Veronica’s mother home for her. “You can find anybody. If she was a criminal, you’d make a couple of grand tracking her down, and you’d find her in a week,” Veronica sobs to her father in Kristen Bell’s most convincing bit of teenaged acting on the show.
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