"Wichita Linebacker" was the third episode of the third season of Veronica Mars.
Plot[]
Veronica gets caught breaking into the coach's office.
A Hearst College football player loses his playbook and hires Veronica to try to find it. Eventually, she discovers that his girlfriend, Trish Vaughn, stole it in a misguided effort to get him to quit the team. But he loves football and is loyal to the team, so he turns himself in for losing it after he finds out that a student who was betting on their upcoming game gave a copy of the playbook to the team's opponent.
Veronica gets called into the Dean's office. He demands that she reveal her source for the article about the Theta Zeta sorority pot farm ("My Big Fat Greek Rush Week"). Veronica refuses and the Dean threatens to expel her.
Veronica's relationship with Logan gets a little rocky when Veronica finds out that Logan has been gambling instead of spending time with her.
Eli "Weevil" Navarro, receptionist.
Weevil returns, working at a car wash as part of his parole. He gets into an altercation with his boss there so Veronica, feeling sorry for Weevil, cajoles her father into giving him a job at Mars Investigations. Weevil is actually pretty good at the investigation part of the job, helping Keith solve a tough case. Unfortunately, he loses his cool when he catches a man abusing his girlfriend's son, getting Keith fired from the job, so Veronica has to fire him.
She is able to get him another job at Hearst--and herself out of hot water with the Dean--after he fixes the Dean's Volvo, which has been vandalized. She also just happens to figure out who vandalized his car: His fifteen year-old son, who spray painted it after "borrowing" it and getting in a wreck.
The Lampoon doesn't find feminists funny.
Her efforts to defuse another problem for the Dean--a spat between Lilith House and the editors of the campus Lampoon paper over an anti-feminist humor article--seem to have also worked. Until the girl they singled out in the article reports she's been raped.
Arc significance[]
- The campus feminists protest the college's local humor newspaper's mocking of their "Take Back The Night" rallies, especially after they publish a photo mocking one of their latest demonstrations with a cut-out of one of a female protesters named Claire. When Piz, who was recently given his own show on the college's radio station, invites both sides to discuss the issue on the airwaves, one of the feminists (Fern) receives a text message that informs her that the girl in the photo had just been raped and blames the magazine writers for it happening.
- Veronica's inherent suspiciousness strains her relationship with Logan, as she tracks his phone and runs him down when he thinks he's free to do things without her.
- Weevil is hired by Hearst College and begins developing a friendly relationship with the Dean.
Music[]
- "Big World" - Josh Kramon
- "Hold On, Hold On" - Neko Case
- "Fidelity" - Regina Spektor
Production details[]
- The original title of this episode was "Friday Night Sleights," until Rob Thomas informed Phil Klemmer and John Enbom that colleges do not play football on Fridays.
Quotes[]
- Weevil: All right. Guess I'll go wash some, uh, spoiled bitch's graduation gift from Daddy, huh?
- Veronica: [from out of Weevil's line of sight] I'm not spoiled... [Weevil turns around and sees her] ...and, uh, technically it wasn't for graduation.
- Weevil: What about the bitch part?
- Veronica: Uh, it depends on who you ask.
- Dick: Veronica Mars, modern college girl on the go.
- Veronica: Dick Casablancas, Neolithic college boy on the sauce.
- Dick: Okay. Not sure what Neolithic is, but, hey, I'm in college. Maybe someone will teach me.
- Larry: I'm not a criminal mastermind, I'm just a painter.
- Veronica: Yeah, well, so was Hitler.
- Logan: Oh, boy. Nudity.
- Veronica: If you have words written on yourself, it's not nudity, it's political speech. Taking control of one's body to turn the objectifying male gaze back on itself...
- Logan: O-kay... No more college for you.
- Stew: I agree it's impossible. Where would militant feminists get ahold of a softball bat?
- Veronica: [voiceover] Now here's a moral dilemma: You have a cell phone tracker which cost your dad hundreds of dollars. You went through the trouble of activating your GPS-chip in your boyfriend's phone. So, is it a waste of your dad's hard earned money and your time if you don't use it?
- Logan: Is this the help desk? 'Cause I need a little help.
- Veronica: Let me guess. You have this pathologically suspicious girlfriend, and you hope maybe there's a guidebook?
- Logan: No, it's more like, uh... what's beyond "pathological?"
Goofs & Trivia[]
- This episode had a viewership of approximately 3.12 million viewers on its initial airing. [1]
- The title is a play on the Jimmy Webb song "Wichita Lineman" first recorded by Glen Campbell.
- Despite being credited, Percy Daggs III (Wallace), Tina Majorino (Mac), Julie Gonzalo (Parker), and Michael Muhney (Sheriff Lamb) do not appear in this episode.
- When Kurt attacks Larry, shouting "Where's the playbook, Larry? You're entering a world of pain", this is one of several references throughout the series to the movie The Big Lebowski.
- Viewed close-up, the body of the text of the Lampoon article is just lorem ipsum--scrambled Latin placeholder text commonly used in graphic design to demonstrate graphic design and layout without distracting content.
- The text below the photo of the anti-rape protest in the newspaper is actually recycled from the one Veronica wrote about the Zeta house marijuana, seen on the previous episode and at the "previously" clip at the beginning of this one. It's not the same issue, however, because the photo is different.
References[]
External links[]
- MI.net's Roundtable Review.
- Soulful Spike Society's Open Case.
- Television Without Pity Recap.