We’re back in the saddle! After a long mid-season hiatus, we’re finally dealing with the fallout of Aaron’s stabbing, and it’s gonna be a doozy.

1.12 Clash of the Tritons

Score: 15

Characters: +2

• Logan (+1)

• Cliff (+1)

  
  

Story quality: 3/5

Someone has framed Veronica for manufacturing and distributing fake IDs. She's perp-walked out in cuffs past a smirking (and saluting) Logan, in a fun callback to the pilot.

Logan's perp-walk versus Veronica's perp-walk.

She’s suspended from school and has to figure out who's behind it. Rick, the guy who fingered her for the ID manufacturing, tells her that he was asked by a secret society, the Tritons, to frame her. He and a friend were pledging and got so drunk that the friend ended up in a coma. Now his parents are suing the school and the Mars family. And also, Duncan is a pledge! And oh no, Veronica has to sing karaoke! But it's okay because Kristen Bell can actually sing!

Turns out, the Tritons are just a bunch of rich nerds and had nothing to do with the alcohol poisoning, because Rick and his drinking buddy were never pledges in the first place. They were actually the ones making the shitty fake IDs, and when coma-friend wound up in a coma Rick knew the jig was up. At the same time, he was pissed off for not being chosen as a Triton pledge, and at Keith Mars for chasing down his dad when he was accused of embezzlement (of which he was guilty and for which he doesn’t seem to have gone to prison because he’s still at home criticizing Rick for being a disappointment). So in a moment of inspired genius, I guess, a quick-thinking Rick framed the Tritons and Veronica for coma friend’s excessive drinking.

I don't know, it's pretty convoluted. But I don’t mind because I had fun along the way.

Also, poor Logan! Everyone knows his dad was cheating on his mom and got stabbed for it and now people are bullying him! Sad face!

He gets into a fight with Thumper in the hall (side note - I think this may be the first time we've seen Thumper as anything more than a background PCHer; he'll be important next season), and Aaron is proud of Logan for defending his mother. Logan finds this ironic.

Aaron, whose stab wounds don’t appear to have been too serious, asks Keith to find out who's leaking stories about him to the press, because it's causing him a lot of family troubles. Turns out... it's Lynne!!! Lynne and Aaron have to go to school to deal with Logan's suspension, and Aaron confronts Lynne about it. Logan tries to defend her, and Lynne announces, "I cannot take this anymore!" and storms out, swallowing a fistful of pills. The episode ends on an overhead shot of her convertible stopped on a bridge, driver's door open, news helicopter circling overhead. Does not look good.

Plot relevance: 5/5

Veronica bugs Ms. James (the school counselor)'s office to listen in on the one-year-anniversary chats she's having with everyone who knew Lilly. And oh boy, do we get an information dump:

• Weevil WAS seeing Lilly (as has been implied a couple times) and Weevil was truly in love with her, but when she got back with Logan he sent her some angry, stalker-ish letters, which makes him a suspect.

• Logan and Lilly were broken up the day Lilly was killed, because he had kissed a girl at a party and Veronica told on him. Logan is angry at Veronica (now we know why he goes out of his way to be such a dick to her) and at Lilly and at himself. On brand for Logan to just generally be full of rage. But also sorrow. His interview ends with a suggestion that he's suicidal.

• Duncan is on some kind of medication for “episodes” that he has sometimes, and he’s been on it for a while.

• Duncan also has no memory of the night Lilly’s body was found - his memory goes from soccer practice that afternoon to her funeral three days later.

  
  

That’s a lot of piping hot tea! Also, for some reason Ms. James has a snail shell on her desk I never noticed before. It's not, like, a fancy snail or anything. It looks like a regular old garden snail. It even kind of looks like it might still be alive because there's some ooze or something around the bottom of it.

Iconic lines/memes: +6

• Veronica to poor Ms. James, who is just trying to help: Wow, I have that exact same platitude-a-day calendar at home.

• Veronica, as fake IDs fall out of her locker: Those aren't mine!

  Lamb, looking through V's wallet: Lilly Kane's drivers license. Drivers license for a 22-year-old Veronica Mars. San Diego University Student ID. Licensed massage therapist.

  Veronica, smirking: Oh yeah. THOSE are mine.

• Veronica to Cliff: Do you know any good lawyers?

  Cliff: Very cute. I know an adequate one who just posted your $500 bail.

  Veronica: They take Diner's Club here??

• Veronica: Hi, dad. Their case is fuzzy and circumstantial.

  Keith: You know the funny thing? Those were also her first words.

• Veronica, looking at one of the fake IDs she’s been accused of making: This is a $250 piece of crap. Now I'm not just falsely accused, I'm genuinely offended.

• Veronica, waking up locked in her own trunk and phoning for help: Hey, Wallace. Whatcha doin'?

  
  

Cringe: 0

Duncan speaking only in pangrams when Veronica confronts him at the karaoke bar is annoying, but doesn’t rise to the level of true cringe.

Outfit of the episode:

Black pinstriped zip-up sweatshirt and black tights under a grey-pink camouflage skirt.

Song of the episode:

One Way or Another, by Blondie. This is the song Veronica sings for karaoke. It's a song about spying on someone, get it? At the time it wasn't commonly known that Kristen Bell can sing. This was eight years before she was cast as Anna in Frozen. Side note: there are some very strange editing choices in this scene.

Another, more important side note: La Femme d'Argent by Air shows up again! That's the song from The Girl Next Door that I said I thought of as Veronica's sleuthing music, but couldn't prove had actually been in other episodes. It's not listed in this episode on Tunefind, and it's not the same segment as we got before. But the song is seven minutes long (nine if they're improvising live) so there's plenty of song to pick from.

Anachronistic reference of the episode:

I actually couldn't find one! I was going to say the Shaft reference, because those movies are from the 1970s, and while they were part of the late-Gen X cultural landscape (in the 90s we were obsessed with the 70s for some reason), but I was doubtful that that extended into teens of the 2000s. But then I remembered that there was a Shaft remake in 2000, so I stand corrected.

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