Spoilers for this episode below:

Things that happened

Twists! And Turns! The main mystery this week is a really good one with all sorts of red herrings and false reveals all leading to the kind of melancholiness that makes my faux-hipster heart sing.

See, this guy named Max, who I think was played by an actor who used to be on Degrassi: The Next Generation, is convinced he has fallen in love with a girl he met at the San Diego ComiCon but he doesn’t know her name and she’s getting married soon and he desperately wants to contact her before that happens. So Veronica investigates only to find that she’s a hooker, hired by his college roommates, all of that marriage stuff was just bullshit. Mystery solved, right? Wrong! He’s still convinced he had a real connection with the hooker, so Veronica is charged with doing a hooker-search and eventually finds the girl, Wendy, and it turns out she IS in love with Max. Yay! Mystery solved, right? Wrong!

After one of her hooker friends gets roughed up and delivers a message to Wendy that she’s not getting out of her prostitution job easily, Max is forced to let her go, for fear of further violence. He gives her a thousand bucks and sends her on her way. Which Veronica thinks is pretty fishy, and tells Max that he’s been conned by some hooker bitches. Aw! Mystery solved, right? Wrong! After some attempted revenge goes way wrong, Max and Veronica come face-to-face with the pimp, who turns out to be a girl — a she-pimp or madame — who tells Max that Wendy is, in fact, totally in love with him, but the only way out of her (presumably oral) hooker contract is to cough up $10,000. Max does this immediately, because Love Conquers All, despite Veronica’s skepticism that this is all still part of some sort of hooker con. But her skepticism is proved unnecessary when, upon returning to his dorm room, Max finds Wendy and they kiss and kiss and kiss and love is in the air.

Mystery solved, right? Sort of! In the end, Max realizes he has nothing in common with this hooker and can’t really cope with her past as, shockingly, a hooker and a stripper, so she leaves, promising to pay back the $10,000.

In the other plotlines spinning about, Logan and Veronica have the whole let’s-talk-about-our-sexual-histories discussion, which is a rollercoaster for them and for the viewer. At first it seems like it’s going to be some overly trite teenage dramafest, but they actually deal with it rather maturely in an awesome bedroom scene. But then the episode ends with a reveal that just seems silly and tacked on and, damn, I hope they’re not taking us to overly-trite-teenage-dramafest land anyway, because they really did a nice job of avoiding that this episode.

Also, Keith dresses up like a Sheriff and questions the feminist sorority girls about Dean O’Dell’s death in a scene that is so fantastic it defies description.

Things that were good

• Lots! After last week’s kind of ho-hum episode, this was everything I like about Veronica Mars — a great mystery with great characters that manages to surprise throughout the course of the hour.
• That scene with Veronica and Logan in bed was genuinely great writing, save maybe for Logan’s deflection of the Mercer thing. As I said in the recap, I was genuinely afraid that they were going to take the same track most shows take with the inevitable sexual history discussion, but they avoided it, and in the process gave us some great character moments.
• Keith dressed up like a sheriff. He is such a good sheriff. I would have voted him for sure in the sheriff election because, god dammit, he gets results.

Things that were not so good

• That ending. What a buzz kill. Veronica going lingerie shopping is a good premise and they totally just had to go and ruin and make me feel dread — dread! — about the way this story could go.
• Nothing else! This was good!

Worth watching if…

It’s just worth watching, period.

In Five Words

Never Been With Hookers, Either

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