"My Mother, the Fiend"
Ms. Hauser (see “Nobody Puts Baby in a Corner”) assigns her sex ed class to carry dolls around to practice being parents. “So that’s where babies come from,” Veronica remarks. Duncan picks out a “Baby Think-It-Over” for them as Veronica is summoned to Clemmons’ office. There, he makes her take all of her keys out of her purse and busts her on having one to his office which she used to get to the drug test results (see “Normal is the Watchword”). Clemmons threatens to suspend her, which would jeopardize her chances of getting the Kane Scholarship, but tells her he’ll just give her detention. Cassidy tracks down Mac and hires her to design a website for his new company, Phoenix Land Trust. Principal Moorehead (see “Ahoy Mateys”) announces that Trina will be directing the school’s performance of Hamlet; Veronica notes that this must mean that she was the first person kicked out of the Surreal Life house. Veronica heads to her detention, which she will be using to organize a closet full of permanent records. “And I can’t use magic, right?” she asks Clemmons. Towards the end of the assignment, she finds Lianne’s record and looks through it, discovering that she was suspended for three days during her senior year for spreading rumors about another student. Veronica realizes that Ms. Hauser was another student involved in the incident. Clemmons catches her reading the record and notes that snooping is what got her in trouble in the first place. The electricity goes out at the breaker’s yard where Weevil is working and he’s ambushed by Logan and a bunch of 09ers.
At school, Veronica asks Ms. Hauser about her friendship with Lianne, but she doesn’t want to talk about the rumor that got Lianne suspended. Nearby, Veronica spots Weevil taped to the flagpole as he taped up Wallace in the pilot. She then heads to Clemmons’ office and asks him about the rumor. He was a science teacher at the time but doesn’t know what happened. He lets her know that Mr. Moorehead was the vice principal back then and Mary, a school employee, was a student. Veronica tracks down Mary, who is mute, and communicates with her via the sign language alphabet. Mary seems to tell Veronica that Lianne was a “fiend.” Veronica goes to visit Moorehead, who remembers Lianne. He won’t tell her the rumor but shares that Lianne was pretty vicious. The two wind up at the Hamlet auditions, where Trina is excited to see both of them. She informs Veronica that Evan Rachel Wood will be playing her in The Aaron Echolls Story. Kendall goes to Duncan and Logan’s suite and flirts with Duncan, then freaks out over the doll. She offers to take Duncan for a ride in Dick Sr.’s Maserati, telling him, “You don’t need sex ed. I am sex ed.” Duncan rejects her just as Trina and Logan arrive. Kendall and Trina don’t hit it off very well. Veronica meets with one of her mother’s old friends at the Hut and learns that Jake may have gotten someone pregnant 25 years earlier. At the time, he was dating Celeste, so either Lianne said she was pregnant and got dumped or she got dumped and said Celeste was pregnant.
At home, Veronica asks Keith what Lianne was like when they first met. She asks him get look at some county birth records to see if Celeste had a baby in 1980. “You know who your mother was,” Keith replies. “Forget the past couple of years. You loved her, she loved you.” At school, Veronica takes photos of the Hamlet auditions, which come to an abrupt end when Trina slips on a skull and knocks herself out. Cassidy meets with Kendall at the Hut, telling her to stop selling his family’s things. He then asks her to be the face of Phoenix Land Trust, since he’s 16 and can’t sign legal documents or meet with investors. She doesn’t want to work but agrees to after she learns that she’ll receive a salary and commission. Keith finds Veronica at Mars Investigations and tells her that there was no baby born in 1980 with Celeste or Jake’s last name. He suggests that Celeste might have had an abortion and Veronica asks him to check it out. Keith doesn’t think that she should rock the boat with her and Duncan’s relationship. Veronica just wants proof that Lianne was a good person, and Keith notes that as a bonus, she gets to prove that Celeste really is a witch. He points out that if Celeste hadn’t broken up Jake and Lianne, Keith wouldn’t have gotten together with Lianne and Veronica wouldn’t exist. He then gives her the news that a Jane Doe baby was found in the girls’ bathroom at the Neptune Prom in 1980. Veronica immediately thinks that the baby is Celeste’s. Veronica takes the doll to Duncan’s suite, where he tells her that he can’t take baby duty tonight because he has plans. They turn out to be with Celeste.
After an acerbic fight in which Veronica references the Jane Doe baby and Celeste calls Lianne a “drunken slut,” Veronica heads to the bedroom, where Celeste’s assistant/maid is folding laundry. Veronica learns that the woman, Astrid, works for Celeste in exchange for grad school tuition. She begins to suspect that Astrid is really Celeste and Jake’s daughter. At school, Logan and Weevil meet up in the restroom, where Weevil blasts Logan for attacking him. Logan says that he deserved it for firing a shotgun at him and Veronica (see “Normal is the Watchword”). Weevil claims that he wasn’t behind that and says that he burned Logan’s house down (see “Rat Saw God”) and had him abducted (see “Ahoy Mateys”) because he thought Logan killed Felix. The two decide to work together to find out what really happened, but first they have to beat each other up to make things look good. After the fight is broken up, a biker named Hector says that after what Logan did, he would have buried him. At the hut, Mac shows Cassidy the website she made for him, which he likes. (There might be something - or someone - else he likes, too.) Veronica pretends to be a real PI and meets with a woman who was once the foster mother to the Jane Doe baby. The woman reveals that the baby is Trina. Veronica goes to see her in the hospital and gets her to tape a fake scene in which she says that she’s dying and needs a bone marrow transplant. Trina notes that she really is adopted and Veronica pretends that it’s news to her.
After she leaves, Veronica realizes that she might ruin Trina, so she goes back and tells her the truth about her birth. Trina thinks she’s being punk’d. She’s not heartbroken to learn that Celeste might be her mother, since Celeste is rich. She encourages Veronica to send the tape she just made to Entertainment News. After the successful tabloid blitz, Mary finds Trina and Veronica at school and frantically begins signing to them. Veronica figures out that she’s Trina’s biological mother and wants to donate bone marrow to her. Later, Veronica and Mary communicate via typing and Veronica learns that Lianne was actually Mary’s friend. Veronica fills Trina in, telling her that Lianne recanted the rumor because Mary asked her not to tell anyone that she was pregnant. After Trina was born, Mary left her with her father, but he panicked and took the baby to the dance, knowing that everyone would suspect that a student left her there. The father happens to be Moorehead, whom Trina confronts in front of the school faculty. At home, Veronica finds the rat (see “Rat Saw God”) in the freezer and decides that it was a message left for her. Keith tells her that she was right and he should have won the election so he could take over the case. At school, Veronica tells Clemmons that she’s on to him - her detention was meant to get her to reveal the truth about Moorehead, Mary, and Trina so he could replace Moorehead as the principal. He, of course, won’t admit to anything. Veronica goes to the hospital to get Koontz’s possessions (again, see “Rat Saw God”) and stops in to see Meg. She is shocked to see that Meg is pregnant. Just after Veronica leaves the room, Meg regains consciousness.
THE SCHOOL BUS CASE: Veronica thinks that the rat on the bus was a message for her.
MEMORABLE QUOTES: “Ever hear of genetics, kid? Thanks to your grandma, I’ve got a 50-50 shot of becoming an alkie. Guess that makes your odds 1 in 4, which isn’t so bad. Oh, and there’s also this latent mean girl gene. You’re lucky you’re made out of plastic.” - Veronica to her doll
Moorehead: “I see that Mr. Clemmons is failing in his prime directive.”
Kendall: “Anyone request turn-on service?”
“Kendall Casablancas, Trina Echolls. Rode hard, meet put away wet.” - Logan
Kendall: “Is there a club where you, Dedee Pfeiffer, Joey Travolta, and Melissa Rivers all meet for drinks?”
“Chicks dig scars and acronyms.” - Mac
Written by Phil Klemmer and Dayna Lynne North; directed by Nick Marck
Veronica: “What’s that?”
Moorehead: “Keeping you out of my face.”
Duncan: “I’m pretty sure it’s called turndown service.”
Kendall: “Oh. Well, who would want that?”
Trina: “There is. I don’t think you’d like it; it’s 21 and over. We’re hitting an after party at Chuck E. Cheese, though, if you’re free.”