The case au de jour this time was recovering money from a couple of con artists. Sprinkled throughout this were memories of Lilly since the episode was building up to a memorial as her family donated a fountain dedicated to her memory to the school. Logan (the psycho I mentioned earlier) volunteers to create a memorial video since he used to by Lilly's boyfriend. He's going to compile it using tapes of her throughout her childhood that have been provided by her parents. As he's watching them, he laments to Veronica that these tapes show a whitewashed version of Lilly, not who she really was.
The con artists are college students who are super smart gamer types. Veronica finds them by pretending to be a prospective mark. It turns out that the person who meets up with her to get the money is an actor who has been told this is all part of a TV show called Duped, which supposedly is a candid camera show that films people falling for dumb scams. Veronica finds out that the calls were placed from a payphone in a gamer bar. She visits, finds someone with a similar gamer name to the email address the con email came from, gets him to out himself by joining his team and then repeatedly killing him, then steals his license so she can learn more info about him. She finds out he goes to this prestigious tech school, so she and Walter pretend that Walter is a math nerd thinking about joining when he gets out of high school. Oh, did I mention that the client who hired Veronica just happens to be the girl that Walter has a huge crush on?
They attend the prospective student party and Veronica gets guests to talk about the con artist and his roommate. She finds out a lot of things, then goes to the dorm room and learns that they have an alarm that alerts the boys cell phone if the code isn't entered in time. Veronica's dad poses as a DEA agent to gain access to the boys' dorm room and plant a bug while supposedly looking for drugs. Then Veronica listens in and figures out the alarm code when they leave by counting the number of tones when they set it.
In the flashbacks of Lilly, Veronica is remembering the day all four of them (her and Duncan, Lilly and her boyfriend) were supposed to go to the homecoming dance but instead used the limo to hang out and drink all night, filming themselves playing truth or dare. During the course of this, Veronica admits she's never gone skinny dipping which Lilly says they're going to have to change. This is important for how the episode ends. The reason Veronica is having flashbacks of Lilly isn't because of the memorial (at least not entirely) it is because of the homecoming dance, which her new boyfriend is planning on taking her to.
Back on the case, Veronica breaks into the gamer dude's dorm and steals their hard drives (including the back-up which she almost doesn't discover in time). She gets them out of the way by luring them into showing Walter around campus pretending to offer free tickets to play a game they've been excited to play. She does this because it turns out the guys have developed a game using the money they scammed people for as their start-up cost. Since they didn't have investors, the boys stood to make millions. After ransoming the drives for the money they scammed from Walter's crush, they give the boys back their drives. As they're walking away, Veronica tells the others that she informed the FBI about the boys' scam, so they're not going to just get away with it.
Since Logan complained, Veronica shows up with the tape of Lilly made on Homecoming night, the night when their parents were worried and stayed up all night. When they get home, Lilly's mom reads her the riot act even though both her kids were out (kinda shows she has a preference). At the memorial, as the tape plays showing that Logan used the tape showing Lilly's wild side we pan to several people's reactions. Based on Jake's reaction, I don't think he's the killer. He was smiling at this memory of his daughter's true self. The mom, however. I totally suspect her now.
The show ends with Veronica and her new boyfriend along with Walter and the girl they helped riding in a limo to homecoming. Veronica asks them to pull over along the beach because there's something she needs to do. She tells the boyfriend that he needs to stay in the limo. She then proceeds to go skinny dipping as a way of honoring Lilly's memory.
I liked this one, but it wasn't my favorite. I enjoyed Walter having a love interest and getting to see a new side of his friendship with Veronica. Glad they didn't make Walter's interest in Veronica romantic. That would have been a bit lame. There was a moment where Veronica's dad meets her boyfriend for the first time when he comes to pick her up for mini golf. Veronica's dad asks if they're planning on doing anything besides just go to the dance and puts some fear into the boy when he responds that since they're planning on just going to the dance and coming straight home afterward, the boyfriend won't mind that he (Veronica's dad) canceled the hotel reservation he (the boyfriend) made for that night. I want to take a moment to talk about the relationship between Veronica and her dad. It feels like your typical TV father/daughter dynamic with the added touch of both of them knowing they can't lie to the other because they're both too good at discovering the truth. They have some conflict, but he seems to really care about Veronica and want to protect her. There is something sus about Veronica's mom, though, and why she might want to hide from him.
This episode did feature a drunken kiss between Lilly and Veronica during the truth or dare game, after which Logan makes a fetishistic remark. I didn't really like that part very much, although it is very on brand for shows during this time period to have two straight girls kiss and a guy (usually one of their boyfriends) say something inappropriate about it. Because I really liked the wrap up with Logan choosing to portray Lilly the way she really was and not some cleaned up version of her and because I really enjoyed how Veronica was able to outsmart the "smart" guys, I'm giving this one an 8/10.
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