Episode 12: Clash of the Tritons
This one starts with Veronica waiting to see Rebecca, the guidance counselor. She’s not in trouble (for once), Rebecca just wants to talk to everyone who was particularly close to Lilly before she was killed. Veronica’s reluctant to talk and apparently nervous, as she keeps playing with Rebecca’s stapler. Turns out that nervousness is an act; she drops the stapler and switches it with an identical one from her bag. Veronica finally
tells Rebecca that she doesn’t want to get past her grief about Lilly, she wants to use it as fuel to help her find Lilly’s real killer. Meanwhile, a dude named Rick gets called to the office where Sheriff Lamb is waiting to talk to him. Rick and his friend Tim went on a pub crawl the previous night and Tim ended up with alcohol poisoning. Rick dumped him off at the hospital, but was caught on video. Lamb asks how they got into so many bars and Rick shows him his fake ID. Lamb says there are tons of fake IDs in Neptune and he figures someone at school is distributing them. Lamb pressures Rick to say who he got the ID from and he finally says … Veronica Mars.
Lamb and the principal make Veronica open her locker and a bunch of blank IDs fall out. She denies they’re hers, but when Lamb searches her bag and finds several fake IDs in her name, she’s forced to admit those actually are 
hers. Lamb cuffs her and makes her do the perp walk just as class is getting out. Her fellow students love the spectacle and the principal tells her she’s suspended for three days. She calls Cliff, the public defender who sometimes hires her father, to bail her out. Her dad is away on a case and she’d prefer he not find out about all this. Cliff says the blank IDs in her locker are pretty damning and mentions Rick as the one who pointed the finger at her. She confronts Rick and asks him why he lied. He says “they” told him to and he doesn’t dare talk about “them”; apparently they’re everywhere and will destroy him if he talks. Veronica says she’ll destroy him worse and he finally agrees to talk to her in secret at school tomorrow.
Later, Veronica talks to Wallace and asks him to get her a fake ID from whoever’s selling them at school. Since she made her own fakes, she has no
idea who sells them at school, so Wallace says he’ll poke around a bit. At school the next day, everyone’s talking about Logan’s dad getting stabbed by a jealous lover. Logan is having a hard time with all the whispering behind his back and gets even more pissed off when he finds a bunch of press clippings taped to his locker. When some guy makes a remark about Logan’s mom, he goes after the guy and ends up getting hauled to the office.
In the guidance room, Weevil is talking to Rebecca about Lilly and she confronts him with a letter he wrote. Turns out Weevil and Lilly had a thing 
going on when she was broken up with Logan, but as soon as she and Logan got back together, she dumped Weevil and stopped talking to him. Weevil says he could’ve loved her, but she treated him like shit. Veronica is listening to all this—the stapler she put on Rebecca’s desk has a microphone in it—and can’t believe Lilly never told her about banging Weevil. Lilly had mentioned a big secret she had and Veronica wonders if this is it.
Veronica is parked behind the school with a cover over her car. She calls Rick to come talk to her and he tells her he and Tim were pledges to a secret society at school called the Tritons. They pick six kids every year to join the club and they’re very secretive … all communication is done through anonymous notes. As part of the initiation, the pledges had to go on a pub
crawl—with fake ID provided by the Tritons—and have a shot in twelve different bars. Tim passed out at the eleventh and the other pledges left Rick to deal with him. Rick says his father and brothers were Tritons and they think he’s an asshole for not passing the initiation. Rick claims the Tritons ordered him to blame Veronica for the IDs; he had no choice but to listen, but now Tim’s family is talking about suing him for letting Tim get so wasted. Rick wants revenge on the Tritons for screwing Tim over and promises to help Veronica bring them down. He names all the other current pledges, including Duncan Kane. Veronica plants a tracker on Duncan’s car so he can lead her to the Tritons.
Inside, Logan’s dad gets him off with a warning for the fight, but says they (and Logan’s mom) have to come back for a group disciplinary session in a 
few days. Aaron is proud that Logan stood up for his mom, but if he hadn’t been screwing around on her, there would’ve been no need. At Keith’s office, Veronica is unpleasantly surprised to learn her father is back and knows about the trouble she’s in. She tells him and Cliff about the Tritons, but Cliff says Tim’s parents have included her in the lawsuit, as well as all the bars Tim drank at. Later, Aaron Echolls comes to see Keith and says someone has been feeding info to the tabloids. Keith says it’s probably someone close to him and Aaron asks him to find out who.
At home, Veronica gets a visit from Wallace, who tells her he got a line on the fake IDs by leaning on a guy who used one at the convenience store where Wallace works. He says if you put $250 into locker #110 (which is officially assigned to nobody) in the morning, you’ll have a brand new fake ID in your locker by the afternoon. Naturally, he wants to use Veronica’s money, not his own. Veronica goes to school at night and sets up a fake photography display in a display case that’s rather conveniently-located
right across from locker #110. One of the cameras on display is set to take video snapshots of the locker every thirty seconds so she can see who picks up the money after Wallace drops it off. Veronica’s bugged stapler nets her some interesting info when Rebecca talks to Logan about Lilly’s death. Apparently Logan and Lilly were temporarily broken up when she was killed and Logan got hammered and kissed another girl. Veronica told Lilly, who freaked out. So Logan kinda blames Veronica (and himself) for Lilly being alone the night she was killed. Rebecca says he could’ve been killed too if he’d been there, but Logan wonders what’s so great about living anyway.
Later, Wallace comes by with the fake ID he found in his locker, but Veronica isn’t impressed with the quality. Veronica tracks Duncan’s car to a bar and she and Wallace go to check it out. It turns out to be karaoke night and the Triton pledges have to sing and be judged by the crowd. Duncan 
(who sang a half-assed version of “Swing Low sweet Chariot”) won’t say a word about the Tritons, but after Veronica guilts him by talking about Tim being in a coma, Duncan drops a note from the Great Triton on her table. It says “The judges hold the vital scores; you shall hear my voice once I’ve heard yours.” She’s not exactly sure what it means until she’s called up to sing the next karaoke song. Kristen Bell shows off her singing talent with a rendition of Blondie’s “One Way or Another” that brings the house down. The crowd and the judges are impressed and Veronica gets a note to meet the Great Triton in the bathroom. When she gets there, the Great Triton is nowhere to be found, just some asshole who the Great Triton paid to screw with her.
Veronica retrieves the SD card from the camera at school and Rick tells her he found a rat nailed to his door last night. He figures the Tritons know he’s been talking to her, but she tells him to keep his shit together since they have a huge lawsuit to worry about, and they have to make sure the Tritons
can’t screw anyone else over like they did with Tim. Duncan has a session with Rebecca, which Veronica listens in on. Duncan says that he feels like Lilly is still around, watching him, hovering near him all the time. He mentions that he stopped taking his anti-depressants but not the rest of his meds. Rebecca asks if he’s had any “episodes” and Veronica wonders what meds he’s taking and what could be wrong with him. Duncan says he has a three day blackout from when Lilly was killed … he can’t remember anything that happened that day, or the two following days.
In her car in the parking lot, Veronica gets jumped by the Tritons, tied up, and tossed in the trunk. When she gets loose, she calls Wallace to come let her out of the trunk. She figures she can find the Tritons by tracking Duncan 
again, but hears some weird chanting through the stapler microphone and realizes they must be inside the school. She sneaks inside and watches the culmination of the Triton initiation, where the Great Triton says all this year’s pledges have passed and will be welcomed into the club. After they unmask (the Great Triton turns out to be this IT geek Veronica met outside the guidance office), she takes pictures of them and takes off. Wallace is waiting outside in the car and they zoom away.
Veronica figures she can match one of the Tritons from the photos to whoever took the money from locker #110, but according to her video captures, nobody opened locker #110. She remembers locker #110 is a top locker and figures out what must have happened. At Keith’s office, he gives Aaron the info about who’s been feeding dirt about him to the tabloids, but
warns him he won’t like it. Veronica goes to the Sheriff’s office and tells Lamb she can clear herself by 5:00 that afternoon … and if she doesn’t, she’ll confess to anything he wants in open court. She gives him a yearbook and tells him to pick any name, put it in the envelope she provides, and get one of his men to drop it in locker #110. She says there’ll be a new fake ID in that person’s locker by the afternoon, and he’ll know she’s innocent because she’s going to spend all day in his office. Lamb goes along with it and Veronica calls Rick to tell him where she is and that she found out who the Tritons are and she’s taking them down.
At school, Aaron confronts his wife (Lynn) with the fact that she’s the one who’s been feeding the tabloids all the dirt on him. He threatens to leave her with nothing and Logan says he’ll kill Aaron if he doesn’t lay off. Lynn says 
she’s had enough; she walks out, popping some pills before driving off in her fancy red Viper. At the police station, Rick and the deputy show up at 5:00 and the deputy gives Lamb the fake ID that was found in the locker of whoever Lamb picked out of the yearbook. Veronica points the finger at Rick and asks him to show Lamb the $250 in his pocket. Rick says the money is his, but Veronica wrote a message on one of the bills, so Rick is busted. Turns out he has the locker right under #110, so he just cut a hole in the top of his locker to retrieve the money, which meant he never actually had to open locker #110.
Veronica explains that Rick and Tim were never Triton pledges, they were just out boozing with profits from their fake ID business. Rick wasn’t even invited to join the Tritons—remember the Great Triton said everyone who pledged this year made it in—so he was pissed off, especially since his dad and brothers all made it. So he tried to get back at the Tritons by blaming them for his fake ID scam. Veronica wonders why Rick decided to blame her
and he says Veronica’s dad brought his father in for embezzlement last year. Rick’s father was just trying to get a bonus that his company held back for three years, but it ruined their lives so Rick wanted some payback from Veronica. Later, Veronica gives Duncan the photos she took of the Tritons and mentions that Tim woke up from his coma. Meanwhile, there’s a police call about a possible suicide jumper and we see Lynn Echolls’ red Viper with the doors open abandoned on a bridge.