"Donut Run" An FBI team headed up by tough, seasoned Agent Morris is called in to pursue Duncan after he breaks up with Veronica and flees with Meg’s baby.
Lucy Lawless guest stars.
Let us hope this is Duncan’s Last Episode Ever.
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Well, that was interesting.
Everything that had me pissed off and doubting during the teaser ends up being part of something well constructed. I should learn not to doubt.
I can’t believe they got away with both of those double entendres in the teaser.
I love that Veronica can fool everyone but Keith. She is so going to pay for that.
Logan & Weevil continue to rock. Spin off!
Nice to see some people back from past shows, like our dealer and our VM standin.
If only I liked Duncan AT ALL I would be happy about the fortune cookie ending.
Finally, let me just say that I continue to love how Veronica’s actions are constantly portrayed as the actions of a highly intelligent, and compentent, person with the moral sense of a teenager.
Wow. Head spinning. So much duplicity, so much continuity, so much Old 97s!
I think my favorite thing about this episode may be that the Veronica/Celeste faceoff turned out to be both entirely sincere and part of the con. Although Team Weevil’N’Logan is pretty damn cool, too.
Oh! I forgot about the elevator scene in the teaser; Logan’s flip “Hi, ho,” and the immediate regret on his face, and the way the scene played from there . . . they are both so damn good.
Yeah, what you guys have said. I thought this a fine episode. And I was also glad they pulled back a bit on the “sympathizing” of Lamb and let him be a predictable jerk again. His scenes with Lucy Lawless were great. As were the few she had with Veronica. Oh and I love the eye contact and body language in the scene at the police station between Cliff and Veronica, which her dad doesn’t pick up on.
However, I do not want Veronica and Duncan always loving each other. I could have done without that. Let them just be brother and sister-like and get it over with.
YaY Wallace! Oh how I missed him. Loved it when he told her to take a shower – hilarious! (One of the two things I didn’t care for in the episode was the homeless man accident. The other being the really convient reveal by the tattoo guy.)
But a really great setup – I love how Veronica thinks she’s invincible, but her dad knows that she might have to pay a heavy price for this some day.
That scene where he said he didn’t think he could trust her again was killer.
Logan and Weevil are still the cutest couple ever. Love them both! (Though it looks like Weevil’s been on a diet since the break, good thing because he was getting pudgy.)
Hooray that wooden boy is finally gone!
I think the “love forever and always” ending was pitched right, remembering that V. is still a teenage girl. She’ll love Duncan for as long as Buffy loved Riley.
Oh, what a mess. I don’t like episodes that have to lie to the viewer to work their twists. Case in point in this one: most of Veronica’s interactions with Vinnie. They occurred in one-on-one situations, with nobody to fool but the audience.
It doesn’t help that I found the story they pretended to be telling a lot more interesting than the story they were actually telling.
The one upside is that Veronica is still in love with Duncan, so hopefully there’ll be no new boyfriend for a while. Veronica is most interesting when single, I think.
So, when did Vinnie join in on the deception? Niall, are you assuming he was in on it from the beginning? Or was that letter that Veronica gave him his first invitation?
I was assuming he was in on it from the beginning, yes; he seems too high-risk an option for Veronica and Duncan to try to bring into play half-way through. I got the impression they (well, probably Veronica) had planned things out several moves in advance. Veronica wasn’t giving Vinnie his pen back, she was giving him a pen she’d had on her and recorded things with, etc.
But now that you point it out, I’m not sure there’s enough information in the episode to say for certain one way or the other.
I think the only thing I really disliked about this episode is that it confirms something I’ve worried about for some time: VM’s writers really do believe that Veronica and Duncan have twoo wuv. Where the rest of us see two people with nothing in common, clinging to a memory of love that no longer exists, the writers seem to think that there’s something real. Along the same lines of expecting us to like Jackie (or expecting us to buy Duncan as a femme fatale in the first season), this is a major dissonance between what the writers think they’re giving us and what’s actually on screen.
I enjoyed Lucy Lawless (even more here than I did on BSG), but I’m disappointed that, when the show finally gives us a smart, kickass woman who is Veronica’s equal, she turns out to be a Clarence Weidman-esqe antagonist, whom Veronica handily beats. I hope the character shows up again (in fact, it’s more or less been guaranteed, seeing as ‘kidnapping cases don’t go away’) and that she and Veronica get a chance to interact and learn from each other.
I agree with Niall that playing the viewers isn’t something that the show’s format was intended to handle (in fact, now that I think about it, I should have picked up on the con from the lack of access we had to Veronica’s thoughts – was there even a single voice-over in this episode?), but I’m willing to let it slide this one time. It’s not something I’d like to see the show get in the habit of doing, but in this case I think it worked.
Oh, good catch on the lack of voiceovers. Although now I’m trying to think if there are any other episodes that don’t have them; I have a vague feeling that there are, but couldn’t tell you which.
Actually Vinnie wasn’t supposed to have been in on it from the beginning. Duncan hands him a bundle of cash at the end, him responding with ‘Pay better than your mom’.
Which does seem a little risky on their part, but it does actually make more sense that way..
I do recall a brief voiceover when Veronica was in class doing the Google challenge. (Do they really do that in high schools nowadays?)
Vinnie getting paid at the end is consistent with either interpretation, I’d say. I just think that the Veronica/Vinnie scenes suggest he wasn’t in on the plan to begin with.
I didn’t think he was in on the plan from the beginning either – they’ve made a fair deal in the past about how he’ll change sides for a better offer in a few seconds. That’s what I thought happened here. (I also think they wouldn’t trust him not to run to Meg’s parents for a better offer if he thought he could – the less time he has to work with the better, the less chance of him doublecrossing.
(Oh and the instructor in the Google challenge class was really a coach, not so much a teacher – he’s the one who told Veronica to talk to Mac way back when. I had a teacher just like him in high school, we didn’t Google Challenge, but we used to watch a whole lot of basketball tapes. This was an English class)
Hm, I had thought that Celeste was in on the whole mess; in retrospect that seems unlikely. In which case, it seems clear that Vinnie flipped after Veronica handed him the “private” note to Duncan.
Yeah, that’s how I read it, Dave, thus the “you pay better than your mom” comment at the end.
I loved the scene when Keith calls Veronica and leaves a cryptic message, and the understanding between them is so good that the second she walks into the house she’s already a) knowing exactly what happened and b) talking about her evidence with full assumption that of course by now he’s searched through her stuff and read it.
Hi, I’m finally caught up on all VM episodes and am so glad you guys are here to talk about it with!
Also glad that they named this episode “Donut Run”, because in this house we’ve been referring to Duncan as “the donut” for a while now and fearing that we’re meant to like the character more than we did. This episode just goes to show that the writers are right there with us. I’m glad he got a happy ending, though — it’s a nice way of coming full circle to the time he ran away in season 1 and just wanted to live the wealthy bum lifestyle.
My reading of Vinnie’s flip is that he changed sides when Veronica gave him the envelope. I kind of guessed early on that she was in on it with Duncan because their big fight at school seemed uncharacteristic. But in retrospect, the thing that most blows my mind about their plan is that she really did spend all that time wallowing in misery over losing Duncan — preemptively, before he left.
re: Mr McLaren’s “Finally, let me just say that I continue to love how Veronica’s actions are constantly portrayed as the actions of a highly intelligent, and compentent, person with the moral sense of a teenager.” YES. That exactly sums it up.
I agree that Veronica’s decisions in this episode were those of a teenager, but I can’t remember: in what other episodes did her moral sense differ from that of an adult?
I can’t come up with anything right now, Ted, but I know there have been a few times when I’ve seen her make decisions and thought, “That’s exactly the kind of thing you do in high school, because there’s nothing really wrong with it and you think you’re justified, but as you get older you learn how to handle it better.” I’ll try to take note of when it happens again.