OPEN CASE:  Veronica Mars

VM 3X13

Aired: 02/13/07

Postgame Mortem: It’s all fun & games until someone gets hurt

Review By Fotada

It’s halftime, and the Hearst College basketball team is getting a verbal thrashing from their coach.

COACH BARRY: Damn it! Can someone tell me just what the hell we're doing out there? We're on a basketball court in basketball uniforms, but what we're playing? That's not basketball. Where's the passing? Where's the teamwork? Where's your heads?!

A lot of questions with no clear answers. The team doesn’t feel motivated, and the coach isn’t doing much to help them feel otherwise. According to Mel Stoltz, Coach Barry is a “loser” and the team hasn’t won a conference title in six years.

Coach Barry particularly focuses his frustration on one specific team member, his son Josh. He has more questions for him:

COACH BARRY: Where's the passing? Where's the teamwork? Where's your heads?! And where are you, Josh? You gonna pull your head out of your ass and start playing ball?

Instead of answering, Josh decides he’s had enough and stands up to leave. He doesn’t want to continue playing the game.

COACH BARRY: Josh, damn it. Don't.

Josh turns back angrily.

JOSH: Don't what? Quit? Hey, that might be something I'm capable of.

And Josh storms off. Sadly these are the last words father and son exchange.

But this is no time to quit. This is the halftime, and things can change drastically in the second half. The game isn’t over yet. Halftime is an opportunity to pause, look back on how the game has been played thus far, and to consider both what worked well and what should have been done differently. It’s an occasion to consider new strategies to move forward. Any good coach will tell you that when you make a mistake, you don’t just give up and quit, but rather use the experience to help you grow and learn how to do things better in the future.

Like Josh, Logan has decided to quit playing the game as well. He’s quit going to class, quit shaving and apparently, quit practicing good personal hygiene. Since breaking up with Veronica, it appears his main activities are trashing his hotel suite and moping. But by the end of the episode, Josh and Logan both learn that you can’t quit mid-game. Josh’s wake up call is especially shocking – he discovers his father’s murdered body on the side of the Pacific Coast Highway. And to make matters worse, he becomes the key suspect for the crime.

Once again, Josh decides to take off and run away from his problems. But this time Josh stays away to be a man for his family, so that they will be provided for with the insurance money collected as a result of his father’s “murder.” This time, by running away he’s actually protecting his mother and younger brother. If he were to stay behind, he would only have two choices—plead guilty to murdering his father, or rat out the assistant coach who actually participated in the assisted suicide.

Logan initially runs away from his problems as well, but to benefit only himself. He eventually comes to a different realization than Josh does: in order to be a man, he must face reality. He can no longer hide out in his hotel suite and wallow in his own filth or in the memories of his breakup with Veronica. He comes to understand that it’s only halftime, and things can change drastically in the second half. The game isn’t over yet.

Logan actually makes some huge strides in becoming a grown up man by the end of this episode. He takes Heather Button, having been ditched by her sister, under his wing. He comes to understand that he can’t hide away forever, and returns to school. And he decides to get back to living life, whether that life includes Veronica or not. Why are Logan’s decisions such a big deal? In the not too distant past, he has dealt with disappointments in far more destructive ways. For example, when Veronica planted a bong in his locker, he broke the headlights on her car. When Veronica suspected him of murdering Lilly, he teetered drunkenly atop a bridge railing. And still more of Logan’s past reactions to disappointment: burning down the community pool, having an affair with his best friend’s stepmother, and attacking a police car with a bat. So Logan deciding this time to pull himself together? Pretty huge.

And you know who else I found surprising in this episode? Dick. Dick is actually a pretty supportive friend to Logan. He lies to the professor on Logan’s behalf, excusing his absences by saying he had to have “grapefruit-sized tumor” removed. He cleverly tricks Logan into allowing hotel service to clean up the suite and clear away the piled up food carts. He passes along the message from the professor about Logan’s impending failure, and invites him to a party on the beach to try to cheer him up. He even unknowingly helps Logan out of his depression by dumping Heather on him. Oh, Dick is still Dick of course; he’s still shallow and sex-obsessed. And even though he’s had his own share of disappointments in life, (like having a mass murderer for a brother, for example) he seems to go through life untouched.

Logan and Josh weren’t the only ones dealing with disappointment in this episode. Like Logan, Veronica shuts down after the breakup, but in a different way. Instead of looking within, she looks exclusively without: she chooses to not externalize her feelings, but instead concentrates on tasks to take her mind off her problems. She prefers to move forward and focus on new things. Veronica doesn’t like to dwell on the past, as is evident by these two exchanges. First:

WALLACE: You doing okay? With the Logan situation, I mean?
VERONICA: I've been trying really hard not to think about it, so thanks for bringing it up.

And later:

KEITH: [gently] Maybe you should let me handle this case by myself.
VERONICA: [with faux-humor] You know that won't work. I only brood when I'm not doing anything.

This got me to thinking back to, of all episodes, “Donut Run.” In “Donut Run,” she did do the brooding thing after breaking up with her boyfriend, or at least appeared to. She moped around in her room listening to the Suicide Virgins soundtrack at top volume while Backup licked her face. But it comes to light that her actions were all part of a ruse to cover up for the fact that she was hiding Duncan and baby Lilly in the vacant apartment next door.

Interestingly, in this episode just as in “Donut Run,” Veronica helps someone run from the law. Although this time, (at least at first) she aids and abets unknowingly. She passes Josh peanut butter cookies in jail at his request. It comes to light in “Mars, Bars” that he asked for them so he could fake an allergic reaction and escape by overtaking the paramedic. And in the next episode, she knowingly becomes an accessory by making a fake ID and helping him obtain a coin collection that will finance his escape.

We learn that Heather “Cute As A” Button deals with disappointment by putting on a positive face. Heather’s personality is the polar opposite of Logan’s, much to his annoyance. But in a phone conversation with her sister Melinda, he learns that he’s not the only one who has experienced a setback recently. Heather has been grappling with some heartbreak of her own.

MELINDA: Hey, Logan, is Heather doing okay?

LOGAN: Yeah, is she ever not? Is she always like this, so...bubbly?

MELINDA: That's kind of her new thing. Well, she started acting weird when our dad walked out. I don't think she can get it through her thick skull.

Eleven year old girls take things very personally, and it’s likely that when her father left, she blamed herself. She might have conjectured that if she’d just been a better daughter, her father wouldn’t have left. It’s easy to imagine her beating herself up for any bad behavior, any instances of pouting or crying. So it is perhaps for that reason that she decides to become Super Happy Perky Girl. She just wants everyone to be happy.

So Heather lures Logan out of his Bed O’ Pity by asking him to set up the Game Cube. She perks him up by playing a joke on him, teasing that she’s going to meet up with someone she just met online. She calls a radio station “like two hundred times” to send out a song dedication on his behalf. She gradually draws Logan out of his funk, whether he realizes it or not. Heather doesn’t want what is clinging to Logan to rub off on her (whether it be his foul smell or his foul mood), so she asks if she can borrow some spare clothes. With that, Heather becomes a mini version of Veronica – notice how well Veronica’s shirt fits her? But she mirrors Veronica in another way as well: Heather sets aside her own disappointment to do whatever she can to solve others’ problems. It’s too bad she wasn’t in the locker room giving advice to the basketball team instead of Coach Barry!

Any good coach will tell you that when you make a mistake, you don’t just give up and quit, but rather use the experience to help you grow and learn how to do things better in the future. (Heather coaches Logan, “People in love shouldn't break up. Giving up is just stupid.”) And that is true for any game, but in particular the game of life. In addition to the basketball team, this episode is riddled with references to playing games, gambling and competition: Logan and Heather play Mario Kart; Logan tells Heather, “You need to keep your mind on the race. You're not getting any better at this.”; Dick guilts Logan with, “I wasn’t going to play this card, but shuffle, shuffle, shuffle...”’; Dick drives Melinda to Las Vegas, the gambling capital of the world where they gamble on marriage; Keith asks the head of hotel security by way of greeting, “How are the ponies treating you, Reggie?”, and when Logan realizes that Heather is kidding about hooking up with someone she met online, he volleys back, “Nicely played.”

Halftime is an opportunity to pause, look back on how the game has been played thus far, and to consider both what worked well and what should have been done differently. It’s an occasion to consider new strategies to move forward. As Yogi Berra once said, "You give 100 percent in the first half of the game, and if that isn't enough in the second half you give what's left."

No one can necessarily control what happens to them, but only how they react to it. In this episode, Logan, Veronica, Josh and Heather all had to make their own choices about how to react to their circumstances. To paraphrase another of Yogi’s quotes, life is 90% mental -- the other half is physical.