Veronica Mars S1 Ep 18: Weapons of Class Destruction

Original airdate: April 12th, 2005

Rewatched: April 12th, 2025

Rising violence in schools has left its mark on teen series. Buffy explored this in a season 3 episode that ended up being rescheduled as it was set to air right after the Columbine school shooting. Veronica Mars is set post-Columbine and shows that fears around safety at school still exist. As on Buffy, it’s also clear violence at schools is a complex issue that can’t be boiled down to angry outcasts who play too many video games.

Ms. Stafford, the pep squad advisor subbing as a journalism teacher after Ms. Dent “got knocked up” as Veronica says this episode, has Veronica cover the fire drills for the school newspaper. They’ve had three in one week and it strikes the students as odd. It turns out the fire drills are bomb threats. Veronica suspects that Norris and Ben may be involved. Norris is a thug and bully, although he has been nice to Veronica in the past as well, and Ben is a new kid. Veronica begins looking into them, deciding to follow Ben after school one day. She sees him packing fertilizers into a trunk that contains a large gun, but then Ben gets into her car and tells her to drive. He has her drive to the Camelot motel. Logan turns up (he was on the phone with Veronica when Ben got in; Veronica dropped her phone, but Logan could hear everything) and beats up Ben, until Veronica tells him to stop. Ben is an ATF agent, undercover at Neptune. Norris has a concerning website and seems to be mobilizing other like-minded kids. Ben asks Veronica for her help and Veronica visits Norris at his house. He has a large weapon collection, but Veronica finds no evidence he’s been calling in the threats. She does notice he lives next door to another Neptune student, one who gave Veronica evidence to point her in the direction of Norris. The neighbor, Pete, was also bullied by Norris and has good computer skills. The next morning, Norris is arrested, with fertilizer and a gun found in his trunk. Veronica is sure it wasn’t him. She has evidence that Pete set up the website and made the calls, and that Ben planted the evidence, unwilling to lose his arrest.

Pete was motivated to frame Norris because Norris bullied him non-stop in middle school, even putting him in the hospital once. Veronica (and Ms. Stafford) do the right thing and publish a story in the school paper, showing that Norris wasn’t behind the bomb threats. It was the right thing to do because no one deserves to be blamed for something they didn’t do. It’s unfortunate that the bullying Pete faced goes unpunished (and his pain isn’t fully explored). This was done better on Buffy, with her speech about the pains of growing up. But it’s still the right thing to do. Unfortunately, this also leads to Ms. Stafford being fired. Doing right isn’t always rewarded.

In the relationship category, things become complicated for Wallace and Veronica when they are told their parents are dating. They navigate their feelings about the relationship and how it changes their friendship in this episode, which involves a fight, making up, and declaring they are each other’s best friends. For Veronica, it also gets complicated. She starts off the episode with a date with Leo but then kisses Logan after he saves her. This remains unresolved this episode.

Finally, in the Lilly Kane case, not much happens. Logan tells Duncan about Veronica’s investigation. Duncan is angry at Veronica, upset she knows so much about him and upset that she suspects he could kill his sister, although he later pieces together that if his parents paid off Abel Koontz, they must also think he did it. At the end of the episode, he disappears, leaving his family thinking he’s run away.

This episode shows how complicated high school life can be, even if you aren’t investigating your best friend’s murder, with navigating parental separation and dating, your own first steps into the world of dating, and the violence and cruelty that appear when thousands of teens spend five days a week stuck at school together.