1.6 - Return of the Kane

With the presidential elections happening, perhaps I shouldn't've been shocked when the writers for Veronica Mars had an election-themed episode. There were a number of people who called it "cheesy" and perhaps it was. We await the Michael Moore documentary "Celsius 9/11: When High School Elections Go Bad" before making a final judgment on that.

Until then...

One of the things I admire about Rob Thomas is that he always makes the show about the individual, not the social class stereotype.

By all rights, Duncan Kane should've belonged to a middle class family. He's not what we usually think of when we think "rich person." Rich people are snobs (like Madison Sinclair) and/or jerks (like Troy). They hardly ever diss their own friends for the sake of being nice to a guy who accidentally sat in the wrong seat during lunch. He's about as decent a guy as you could get.

Therefore, one of the brilliant moves of this episode was making us root for the person who eventually turned out to be the bad guy. Wanda was straight middle class and immediately tried to paint herself as the protaganist of the piece by taking the role of the "freedom fighter." The sad fact was that we, along with Veronica, fell into the trap of admiring Wanda for her style without really taking a look at her substance. In turning Wanda bad, I believe that the writers were trying to tell us to look beyond our usual expectations regarding people. It doesn't matter "the ZIP code that [their] mother shot them out in" (to quote Weevil); it's about making judgments about people based on their substance, not their style.

Whether intentional or not, this was the moral of the episode.

Huh.

I never thought I'd be typing that in the context of a TV episode review.

Other Notes

- Line of the Year: "There's a couple of suckers... in the bag, if you want one." The glare on Principal Clemen's face was CLASSIC.

- Logan's game of one-upsmanship with his father was a sight to behold.

Final rating: ***½. The few Logan parts carried the episode pretty well and the main story, while cheesy, was pretty fun.