The good news is that they finally found the next Pussycat Doll and Veronica Mars is back to new episodes for the rest of the season. The bad news is that apparently it’s Heavy Handed Moralizing Week over at the CW this week. This week Veronica Mars teaches us about the evils of racism and underage drinking.

The main plot focused on the racism is bad bit. Sadly it was filled with cliches (like girl from one culture dating boy from another despite her father’s disapproval) but the plot did have a few elements that are uncommon for the standard ‘Racism is bad’ storyline. Just because his brother was wounded in Iraq doesn’t make the Derrick automatically sympathetic and/or not an asshole though. So I’m glad they didn’t have Derrick learn a lesson even when Veronica showed up with Amira’s parents to talk with him. Unfortunately they quickly veered back into horribly cliched territory right after that with Sabirah turning Rashad’s speech back on itself to show him that he should accept his daughter’s romantic choices. 10 points for a positive message, minus many, many more for doing it in such a heavy handed way.

While the anti-racism storyline at least had a theme that the audience can easily support, the anti-underage drinking story isn’t going to resonate nearly as well. Here in Canada the legal drinking age is 19 (and as low as 18 in couple provinces) so Keith’s playing up the horrors of a 19 year old going to the bar seem even sillier up here.

The whole incident that started Keith on an anti underage drinking thing was kind of lame as well. It’s not like when you turn 21 you magically learn to be a more sensible drinker. If you get falling down, completely out of it, drunk while at a bar by yourself, at any age, you’re just asking for something bad to happen to you; age has little, if anything, to do with it.

While it was nice to see Keith knocking some heads, the whole storyline felt more like something that was dictated by the network in response to letters complaining about the usual, more casual, attitude towards underage drinking that one finds on an episode of Veronica Mars. Almost immediately after Keith’s plot was wrapped up there was a scene where Veronica and Dick shared a flask of an unidentified liquid, so it’s like the writers were already trying to forget the storyline ever happened.

For all the complaining I’ve been doing about the episode, it was nice to see so much of the cast there (with the exception of Weevil, all the main cast appeared). And not only was everyone there, they actually served a purpose to the episode. In a lot of Wallace’s more recent appearances, for example, he could have been removed from the episode without it having even a slight impact on plot of that episode. So it was good to see everyone with a purpose.

The interaction between Veronica and Logan was well done this week. Even though they’re quite friendly and even joking around with each other, the awkwardness oozes out of every scene where they are together. And given Logan’s catching of Piz and Veronica together, I’m guessing that things will be even more awkward in the near future.

I’m still not too sure about the Veronica/Piz pairing. I was actually glad when Veronica and Logan broke up as it meant (in theory) an end to their constant relationship angst, but Veronica and Piz don’t really go well together. If the preview for next week’s episode is any indication, Logan’s not too happy about their pairing either, which means that chances are none of Veronica, Piz, Logan or Parker are going to be having a far happy time of things for the foreseeable future.

Hopefully whatever happens next week will be much less preachy and much more entertaining than “Un-American Graffiti” was. There are only four more episodes left this season (possibly forever) and I’d hate for them to be as mediocre as this week’s.

Sir Linksalot: Television News