Was it me or was ‘Veronica Mars’ extra funny tonight? The episode, titled ‘Poughkeepsie, Tramps and Thieves’ may have been heavy with humor but it certainly didn’t end on a happy note. If Veronica had a list of do’s and don’ts for her boyfriend, rule number #34 might be “If you slept with a hooker, I’d get over it but if you fooled around with Madison Sinclair, we’re done.” I base this rule entirely on the look on her face when Madison revealed that she and Logan hooked up in Aspen over the holidays.
Lets get the mystery-of-the-week out of the way before we get into the LoVe drama (ugh, I cant believe I’ve resorted to using shipper titles).
Max, AKA “Sir Cheats-a-lot” asks Veronica to help him track down a girl he met at the Comic-Con. After some fantastic BSG banter, the guy explains that he received a text message from the mystery girl whose name he knows as Chelsea, saying she’s getting married. He’s convinced that they had a connection though and wants to find her. Without going through all the details as to how the mystery was solved, Veronica figures out that the girl was a hooker paid for by Max’s friends to help him cash in his V-card.
Veronica finds Chelsea and gets her to meet them at Logan’s hotel room. When she arrives, she sees Max and is as happy to see him, as he is to see her. Hookerness aside, she’s actually rather sweet and the two are definitely into each other. Chelsea, whose name is really Wendy is all prepared to retire from the escort business but then one of her fellow prostitutes shows up looking all beaten up and says Wendy needs to come back with her and bring the thousand dollars she should’ve been paid for showing up to Logan’s hotel room. Max gives her the money but after she leaves, Veronica realizes the bruise on Wendy’s face was make-up.
As payback, Veronica and Max attempt to get the thousand dollars back by blackmailing one of Wendy’s clients, who happens to be a judge. When they go to pick up the money, they find a note that says they need to get in the limo waiting outside. Both get into the limo and find themselves in the company of two very large men and a well dressed woman. Turns out Wendy’s pimp is actually more of a madam (or “agent” as she prefers to call herself) and doesn’t like having her high profile clients blackmailed. The woman says she’ll let Wendy retire if Max pays her $10,000. Max, who mentioned how booming his term paper business was doing earlier in the episode, agrees to pay.
Surprisingly enough, Wendy stuck around. She and Max attempt to be boyfriend and girlfriend but after an awkward moment when Weevil recognizes her from some strip club and Max’s friends proposition her to dance for a bachelor party, Max begins to doubt whether he can get past the whole Pretty Woman aspect of this love story. He goes for a walk and Wendy makes her exit. When Max tells Veronica this, she seems disappointed that he paid for her freedom and wont even get to reap the benefits. Wendy did leave Max a sweet goodbye note and assured him she’d pay him back. She sent him a fat envelope filled with a thousand vertically folded dollar bills. Eek.
All this business about hookers got Veronica wondering if Logan had ever been with one. We knew as of last season he hadn’t. He made that very clear to Kendall when he told her, “When the milk stops being free, I stop drinking it.” But his view on paid sex could’ve changed since then, especially after we saw him with that bedraggled surfer chick last week.
Veronica asks him if he’d ever been with a hooker and he avoided the question. Finally, when the two were having a little post coital intimate time, she asked him again and he said no. She was prepared to be cool about it if he said yes but she was definitely relieved that the answer was no. When she asks if he was with anyone when they were apart, he admits that he fooled around with a girl who meant nothing to him and is actually disgusted with himself for doing it. We assume he’s talking about surfer chick.
After a chat she had with Wendy about lingerie turning a guy on, Veronica decides to spice things up for Logan and heads off to buy something sexy for him. While she’s there, she runs into Madison (who happened to stop by Logan’s earlier in the episode but Veronica assumed she was looking for Dick). The two exchange snippy words for a bit and then Madison drops a bomb on Veronica. She tells her that she and Logan hooked up while vacationing in Aspen over the holidays. Veronica was visibly devastated by this.
Finally, Keith continued investigating the dean’s murder by getting a copy of the police report. When Veronica mentions that the dean’s window was egged the night of the murder, Keith decides to check out the Lilith house as they are likely to be the ones responsible for the eggings (this, as reported by the Hearst Lampoon – apparently the girls hit a bunch of other places as well).
Keith dresses up in his old sheriff gear and interrogates Claire and Fern. He gives them the bad-cop routine, yelling at them to tell him the truth about what they saw. The girls don’t realize he’s not a cop anymore and confess that they and Nish were responsible for the eggings but that Nish wasn’t with them when they egged the dean’s window. Nish shows up just then and immediately calls Keith out for (illegally) impersonating an officer. This is the second time Keith’s failed to remain undercover during this investigation. Last week Landry busted him for attempting to act like someone else. You’re 0 for 2, Mars. Guess having a book published and being all over the news isn’t so great for a working private investigator. He keeps his cool though and so does she. She tells him that she went around back to egg O’Dell’s Volvo.
Keith later tells Veronica that O’Dell’s Volvo wasn’t there the night he was killed but that his other car was. He wonders if Mindy drove the Volvo to her husband’s office but if she did go to see him, why didn’t she tell him about it?
That about sums it up. Based on the previews, it looks like they’ll be laying the drama on pretty thick next week. The fall out from the Madison/Logan thing is going to be huge. About this episode though, I have to say – even though Mac, Parker, Piz, Wallace and Dick were all completely M.I.A, it was still incredibly entertaining. As a BSG nerd, I really appreciated the quips about the show in the beginning of the episode. I also liked that Wendy wasn’t, as we might’ve thought, just your typical streetwalker. It’s the little things that really make this show as great as it is, don’t you think?
