"Weevils Wobble But They Don’t Go Down"
Veronica and Mac are stuck in a long line at the food court while a girl fights with the cashier. They talk about Piz, whom Veronica doesn’t want to keep moping for the last few days of freshman year just because she’s taking an internship with the FBI (see “I Know What You’ll Do Next Summer”). Mac suggests that Veronica let Piz know that she’s also not looking forward to being away from him all summer. At the cash register, the girl, Abigail, asks the cashier, Jalisa, to give her card back, but instead, Jalisa has her escorted out by campus security. Weevil is in the human resources office, filing a workers’ comp claim with a guy named Marchant, who’s skeptical that Weevil actually injured his knee on the job. He notes that some people like to try to fleece the school out of money, so it’s going to take a while to process the claim and make sure it’s legit. This means Weevil may not see any benefits for a month. Veronica and Piz are studying in Piz and Wallace’s room when Veronica decides to break the ice by calling Piz’s cell phone and pretending they’re already in a long-distance relationship. She lets him know that while she’s enjoying herself in Virginia, she also wishes she could be with him. They then proceed to make out (and possibly do more).
At the sheriff’s department, Keith gets a crash course in how Hearst’s student IDs work. Students using fake IDs are spending fake money, which means they’re committing fraud. A campus cop tells him that the situation is being dealt with, but Keith doesn’t think the students are being punished enough. The cop informs Keith that the two kids caught with fake IDs have identified the same man as the person who sold them to them, but he’s a convicted felon, so now he’s Keith’s responsibility. The student busted in the cafeteria, Abigail, picks the culprit out of a lineup, as does another student. The guilty party is, of course, Weevil. Later, Keith expresses regret that Weevil is in this position, then gives him his one phone call. “What’s Veronica’s number?” Weevil asks. He leaves a message on Mars Investigations’ answering machine, but it takes him two tries because the ancient machine cuts him off the first time. Veronica dutifully heads to the sheriff’s department, where Weevil tells her that he’s being accused of breaking into the campus bursar’s office to make fake IDs and put money on them. Too bad Weevil doesn’t even know what a bursar is. He knows that the two students fingered him because they know he’s an ex-con - thanks to Veronica (see “President Evil”). “Whoops,” she says.
Veronica starts her investigation in the bursar’s office, happily showing off her brand-new PI badge. She learns about ID cards and is told that there’s only one machine on campus that can program the cards. Weevil had access to the office, as the bursar knows because he let her in once when she was locked out. Bursar overhears the conversation and mentions Weevil’s supposedly bogus comp claim to Veronica. Veronica asks the bursar how she knew that the fake cards were fake. The bursar tells her that a food-court worker noticed suspicious names on some cards and started a list of them. Veronica next visits the worker, Jalisa, who gives her the list of names (which include Sylvia Plath, Honus Wagner, Niels Bohr, and Leonardo Fibonacci). Veronica asks Jalisa to let her know if any of the names pop up again, but Jalisa tells her that after Plath and Wager were busted, the other students stopped showing up. Veronica summons Abigail (AKA Sylvia Plath) to the library, where Abigail tells her that Weevil approached her with the idea of selling her a new ID card after hers was rejected at the food court. She feels bad about having to turn him in, since she’s sure he has children to feed. Elsewhere on campus, Wallace throws something away and spots another student fishing it out of the trash.
The fake Honus Wagner comes to the library, and after talking to him, Veronica goes back to the sheriff’s department and asks Weevil if he didn’t come up with this scheme to get his money from the college since he couldn’t get it through his comp case. He says no, but he also doesn’t have an alibi for the times when his meetings with Abigail and fake Honus supposedly took place. Keith drops by with good and bad news - Weevil has been released on bail, but the machine used to make the fake IDs was found with Weevil’s prints in the locker next to his. Veronica heads back to campus and hangs out with Wallace as he finishes up building a model plane for his mechanical engineering final. He mentions his stalker and Veronica suggests leaving something weird for him to pick up, like cutoff shorts. Wallace introduces Veronica to a professor who has information on the ID-card machines; she learns that it would take a very smart person with a supercomputer to make a fake card. There is a supercomputer on campus, but only a few people can use it. Plus, anyone wanting to use it to make a fake card would have to write software first. The professor suggests that Veronica talk to a grad student named Leon who’s good with cryptography.
At home, Veronica encourages Piz to ask Keith to come on his radio show and debate Vinnie. The two start making out but Keith interrupts them. Piz asks him to be on the show, but Keith is reluctant until Piz points out that that means Vinnie will get to say whatever he wants without any response from Keith. Veronica then asks her father to buy a new answering machine, telling him he’s cheap. She says that she’s figured out how to prove that Weevil is innocent, but Keith responds that they found his fingerprints all over the machine used to make the IDs. Back at Hearst, Veronica chats with Leon, who offers to let her look at his research materials, until he realizes that they’re missing. Vinnie and Keith go on the air with Piz, first discussing Keith’s crackdown on underage drinking (see “Un-American Graffiti”). Vinnie says he wants to focus on the more important laws, earning him more respect from the listeners, who only call in to insult Keith. In the library, Wallace spots his stalker nearby and leaves briefly to see what he does. While the stalker looks at some of Wallace’s notes, Wallace turns the tables on him and looks through the stalker’s stuff to find a bunch of notes on himself. The stalker catches him and asks him if he’s familiar with the Castle. He’s being invited to join it, but he can’t tell anyone about the invitation or it will be revoked.
Elsewhere on campus, Veronica tells Weevil that whoever framed him had 24 hours to get his fingerprints in the ID machine. She wants to retrace his steps to find out if he might have accidentally touched the machine without knowing it. He tells her that he went to the radio station first, and she shows him a photo of the ID machine and asks if he saw it. He doesn’t find it familiar, so Veronica suggests a field trip to the station to see if he’ll remember. They arrive as Keith and Vinnie are talking about their law-enforcement experience (Vinnie saw a 20 percent drop in crime on military bases when he was in the military). As Weevil literally retraces his actions, Vinnie mentions Keith’s various brushes with the law while Lamb was the sheriff, adding that Veronica has been arrested twice. He doesn’t think the question is whether Keith can clean up Neptune but whether he can clean up his own household. Veronica responds by shoving Vinnie’s head into his microphone. The next stop on Veronica and Weevil’s field trip is Marchant’s office, where Marchant tries to kick Weevil out since he’s not a Hearst employee anymore. Weevil buys himself a little extra time by lying that he knows Marchant’s home address.
Next Veronica and Weevil head to a dorm room where Weevil fixed a sink and touched a bunch of stuff underneath it. Veronica quickly recognizes one of the room’s habitants as the girl from her criminology class who wondered if Weevil was ever tempted to return to a life of crime. Veronica takes a photo of her and heads to the library with Weevil. There, she shows him that she actually took a picture of a photo behind the girl that shows her with a bunch of friends in Aspen. Included in the group are Abigail, Leon, and someone Veronica thinks is the fake Honus. Veronica gives Weevil the option of getting himself off the hook or doing so and taking the Aspen kids down with him. Of course, she has a plan to take care of that. At the Neptune Grand, Logan is making summer plans over the phone with Parker when Dick suddenly asks him if he tried to stop Cassidy from committing suicide (see “Not Pictured”). Crying, Dick mentions a time he tortured Cassidy when they were kids, and Logan says that he’s not sure Dick and Dick Sr. (see “I Know What You’ll Do Next Summer”) should be spending time together. He suggests surfing in the morning and Dick says he’ll bring the beer.
Veronica puts photos of the Aspen kids around campus, asking people to send her contact information on them. At the Mars residence, Veronica shaves her legs as she and Mac get ready for a trip to the beach. There, they, Wallace, and Piz discuss Matchbox Twenty so that Piz can say, “Rob Thomas is a whore.” Veronica brings up Wallace’s stalker, but Wallace doesn’t want to talk about him. As Logan and Dick emerge from the water, the other four look for a place to try out Wallace’s finished plane. The flight is successful but the engine gives out and it crashes near Dick and Logan. While Wallace works on his plane, the other five sit together in awkward silence until Mac gets so uncomfortable around Dick that she leaves. He follows her and tries to tell her that he’s sorry for the way he treated her and Cassidy. She accepts his apology, but he tries to take things a step farther with a kiss. She disgustedly smacks him and leaves as he asks her not to tell Logan, for some reason. Piz tries to make small talk with Logan but accidentally offends him. Fortunately, Wallace fixes the plane, giving them an excuse to head off. In the library, Veronica matches up fake names with Aspen kids and learns that they have connections to the town where the ID machines are made; plus, one’s father is an executive with the machine company. The kids then show up and call her into a private meeting, where they try to make a deal with her.
Veronica rejects the offer of a fake card with unlimited funds, noting that the kids don’t have access to an ID machine anyway. They tell her there’s another one and they can make more cards, just with less-idiotic aliases this time. Veronica is angry that rich kids are ripping off poorer kids and then blaming Weevil for their crime. Fortunately, she’s taped the conversation and threatens to turn the kids in if they don’t get the charges against Weevil dropped. She leaves them to discuss their options, then calls Weevil and tells them to look in the engineering lab for the extra box. As Logan watches poker on TV at the Neptune Grand, Dick debates telling him about something on his computer. He finally shows him a video he’s come across of Veronica and Piz getting friendly in Wallace and Piz’s dorm room. He tells Logan that he got the video in an e-mail. Logan heads straight to the radio station and beats up Piz, who gets in a few punches of his own. Keith finds Veronica at Mars Investigations and tells her that the kids all turned themselves in to the campus police. As he hooks up their new answering machine, Weevil calls and lies that he didn’t find the other machine. Keith hears Veronica’s blackmail tape on the old answering machine and mentions that the kids never confessed. Veronica notes that they must not have remembered that. A bloody Logan arrives and tells Veronica, “There’s something you should know.”
THE TITLE IS A PLAY ON...: The toy slogan “Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down.”
MEMORABLE QUOTES: Mac: “He wants to date you and be near you? Greedy little bugger.”
Marchant: “Says here you spent a little time in prison last year.”
Jalisa: “Just because I didn’t go to a school with a water polo team doesn’t mean I don’t know who Fibonacci is.”
Keith: “The legal drinking age is 21 for a reason. I plan to continue enforcing it.”
Caller: “For Sheriff Mars, this one’s a two-parter.”
Veronica: “I think I read in Teen People that a clean leg shave will make that special boy sit up and take notice.”
Wallace: “Pray to whatever god you believe in she flies. Otherwise, my a%$ is grass.”
Piz: “This is totally knotting up my inner nerd.”
Written by Phil Klemmer; directed by Jason Bloom
Veronica: “And if he didn’t care, I’d probably be complaining about that…to my girlfriend…while waiting to pay for frozen yogurt. I’m a girl.”
Weevil: “So did Martha Stewart.”
Veronica: “Who wouldn’t know?”
Jalisa: “Greatest European mathematician of the Middle Ages.”
Veronica: “Yeah, of course.”
Vinnie: “Know what laws I plan to enforce? The important ones, like murder and terrorism. These aren’t just the subjects of our favorite movies and TV shows. These are the things that threaten us here and now in Neptune, okay? Once those things are taken care of, maybe I’ll have time to drop in on campus-area bars…for a cold one.”
Keith: “Shoot.”
Caller: “First, why do you suck? And the second part, what’s it like to suck so hard?”
Mac: “I read in FHM that boys like bare breasts.”
Veronica: “Interesting. I did not know that. Bare breasts, you say?”
Veronica: “Orville Wright’s exact words, if I recall.”
Mac: “Wait, you have an inner one?”