Season 1 - Episode 21

 

This episode was so jammed packed with events and information that I’m going to do something I don’t usually do – and that’s a bit of a recap. I need to clear my own mind, and to make clear how I interpreted the scenes. I’m going to try to list events chronologically in “real time”:

 

·        Celeste, worried that Veronica might be Duncan’s sister and generally hating the idea of her son with that Mars girl, tells Duncan that Veronica is definitely his half-sister.

·        Implied is that when Lilly asked about the break-up with Veronica, Duncan or Celeste must have told Lilly the same thing.

·        Logan, in post-Lilly acting-out mode, brings GHB to Shelley’s party. He keeps some of the drug and distributes the rest. Dick Casablancas has some of the GHB. (OK - who else noticed the little reference to the movie, Casablanca, in the opener, when Keith says to Duncan: “of all the countries under military dictatorship, in all the world?”)

·        Madison, Dick’s girlfriend, is not very receptive to his sexual advances at the party. So, as frustrated Dicks have been known to do since the dawn of time, he does something really stupid. Dick puts GHB in Madison’s drink, to loosen her up.

·        Before she even touches the spiked drink, Madison decides to give Veronica what she likes to call “a trip to the dentist” by spitting a truly oookie-lukie into the drink and giving it to Veronica.

·        Veronica drinks it, and starts to get very loopy.

·        Among other things, Veronica ends up lying on a lounge chair with some of the guys doing body shots on her. Logan is there, encouraging the activity.

·        Duncan, Veronica’s brother-in-lust, shows up and rescues Veronica from her turn as a human Margarita glass.

·        Dick and his buddies are with a passed-out Veronica in a guest bedroom. Like some kind of bizarro-world Wally, Dick tries to browbeat The Beave into losing his virginity by raping Veronica.

·        Beaver pretends to go along, but once he is alone with Veronica, he doesn’t have the stomach for such an act. He leaves Veronica untouched.

·        Logan spikes Duncan’s drink with GHB, in an attempt to get Duncan, who is in post-Lilly brooding mode, to “have some fun.”

·        A drugged-up Duncan finds Veronica on the bed. A drugged-up Veronica is very welcoming. Duncan is way too woozy to realize that Veronica is barely conscious and incapable of giving consent. They have sex.

·        Duncan awakens while Veronica is still sleeping. He is horrified that he has had sex with his sister!! So he takes off without so much as a “was it good for you?”

·        Despite the GHB, Duncan has retained his memory of the entire incident. He therefore assumes that Veronica found it memorable as well (not that any guy ever believes any different anyhow).

·        When Veronica wakes up, she has no memory of having sex; she just has some let’s-not-even-go-there indications that she did have sex. She therefore believes she was raped.

·        Veronica learns, a year later (in the last ep), that Logan brought the GHB to the party. So she thinks he may have raped her, and she tells him so.

·        Eventually, Veronica learns that it was Duncan in bed with her. So she accuses Duncan of the rape instead. He is upset, and he tells her the true version of events. Veronica believes him.

·        Veronica, who apparently has the kind of yowza-attraction to Logan that shakes a girl’s nerves and rattles her brain, actually apologizes to Logan for assuming he might be guilty - instead of insisting on an accounting of all his actions that night. I figure she is looking for the shortest path straight to the kissing, so I nod my head in sympathy.

·        Veronica & Logan, while smooching, walk into Aaron’s surprise birthday party for Logan.

·        Logan is through hiding and lets everyone know that Veronica is his girlfriend, and they can like it or leave.

·        Duncan is visibly upset. He tries to leave. He tugs on his car door, but it is locked, so he goes berserk – it seems as if the sight of his best friend with his sister/girlfriend might have triggered one of his “special brand of epilepsy” raging episodes.

·        Meanwhile, Veronica is happily making out with Logan, not giving Duncan’s sad-sack act a second thought. But then Logan tells her about how he encouraged the body-shots, and about how he drugged Duncan, at Shelley’s party. Great balls of fire! Veronica is going to slug him one! But Veronica, proving for the second time tonight that too much love can drive a girl insane, just wants Logan to shut up and make out with her. And again, I must sympathetically say: Good call, Veronica.

·        Logan tells Veronica that he wants a drink. However, he is apparently under a curse which allows him to get very close, but never to actually open up any doors. He goes to the liquor cabinet, and inserts a key in the keyhole, but the key breaks off in there. Yeeeeee!! The symbolism is kinda painful. But Logan doesn’t seem to notice the metaphorical pain, and goes off to get something that will help him break into the liquor cabinet.

·        I note that this seems to be Aaron’s lair, not Logan’s – there’s the locked liquor cabinet, and I could swear that the curtains around the entrance are decorated with a huge likeness of Aaron.

·        Veronica lies back and looks at the ceiling fan and becomes suspicious. She finds that there is a camera in the ceiling fan, and taping and monitoring equipment attached to it. This makes her wiggy; she calls Weevil, who comes to get her.

·        Veronica walks into to her house. There is her mom, Lianne, sitting with her dad and looking all nice and put-together and calm. She says she’s home.

 

OK – wow. All season long we’ve seen episodes with themes about the truth coming out, and in this episode, The Volcano o’ Facts begins to erupt. Note how the episode opens, with a child letting go of a kite, as it catches in the wind and takes flight. Then later:

 

MEGAN (to Veronica): “You gotta let it go. You’ll make yourself crazy.”

 

Yep. It’s time for the facts to begin to fly. As the many references and images related to vomiting, spitting, and opening up emphasize, it’s time to spill, time to open the rectangle with the knob, time for the confessional portion of our show – it’s time to spit it out:

 

·        Veronica tells Wallace all. (Well, almost all. She gave Logan that tardy slip last week, because he needed it due to their bathroom make-out session, and Veronica lies to Wallace about this.)

·        Alicia and Keith confront the “Wallace and the plant” situation head on.

·        Veronica confronts Logan, a passel of others, and then Duncan, about their party behavior, finally wringing the truth (mostly) out of them.

·        Time’s up for Cheyenne; it’s time to come clean about Abel Koontz.

·        Duncan can no longer contain the big secret about Veronica being his sister.

 

Everyone is having stuff poured into them and they are either accepting or rejecting the foreign object. Voluntarily or involuntarily, consciously or unconsciously, they are swallowing and assimilating, or they are choking and spewing. But the assault is relentless. It really is. Life, reality, other people – they are like that. Yeah, they are. They assail you. They attack you. Or they gently kiss and cajole you. They crash in through your windows, shattering glass, or they sneak in through your blood stream ever so tenderly. As Logan notes, the world can’t ever consist of just two people, much as you might want it to, at times.

 

References to movies, and the noticeable differences in people’s stories about the same events, emphasize the disparity between external and internal realities, while the images of entry (locks, drinking, pill-taking, empty stomachs, eating crab cakes that can kill you, kissing, sex) remind us of the constant liquid exchange between the two. We are reminded also, of the joys and sorrows, of the rewards and the risks, inherent in that exchange, in being active in the marketplace.

 

Living and loving is risky, and it hurts. Wallace and Logan both tell Veronica they just want to be there for her, they want to help lessen her hurt – and they do so. We get that message loud and clear in this episode: a burden shared is a burden lessened.

 

It may be a dangerous place, but we all want to be present in the marketplace, don’t we? We want to go to the party. We get burned over and over and over, but we never learn.

 

·        Dick has invested so much of himself in his surfboard, and he prizes it so highly, that he’s devastated when Veronica runs over it.

·        Logan wants his father to love him, and it hurts, both literally (Aaron hurts his arm) and emotionally, when Dad is neglectful or abusive.

·        A very screwed-up Aaron is, in his own way, demonstrating his need for Logan’s love, even as he also demonstrates his total inability to receive it.

·        It hurts, but Duncan doesn’t know how to take back his heart, from Veronica.

 

I still don’t know who killed Lilly Kane. I am so totally clueless. But I like this show. It’s imperfect and so are its characters, but they grab me – damn it, they are getting inside. So I’m in for it again. I did it with Joss Whedon and Buffy, and I’m doing it with Rob Thomas and Veronica. I never learn. I’m always in for it, and up for it. When you open up, you can – oh, heck, you will - get your guts ripped out.

 

But opening up feels so good, and I like it better than the alternative, and they’re just my guts. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve replaced those. So bring it on, Mr. Thomas. I can’t wait for the finale.

 

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For Patti Thompson