Veronica Mars, Luckiest Girl in the Universe? So not the case. While the Casablancas, Sinclairs, and Kanes of the world are busy sliding down the ski slopes or getting sand in their cracks on the shores of St. Tropez, I'm stuck here in Neptune for winter break. If you spent your life in the Alaskan tundra, two weeks in SoCal might seem like a treat. But for me, it's just more of the same, only worse. Do I get to catch up on my reading or lounge around watching 'A Christmas Story' for the seventeenth time? Uh, that'd be a big fat no.

One of the fringe benefits of turning 18, besides the dubious reward of being able to buy that chewin' tobacky I love so much, is that I'm now a registered voter. And thereby granted the privileges and responsibilities of full adult citizenship...

Including jury duty. Yep. Veronica Mars gets to spend her winter vacation in a tiny overheated room with a bunch of other unlucky citizens who would rather be just about anywhere else-in this case, your standard cross-section of Any Small American Town: a Knitting Grandmother, a Single-Mom Waitress, a Sports Guy, the requisite feminist, the token Latina, a Captain of Industry type...you get the picture.

The case looked open-and-shut-a little too much so, in fact. Some of my jury-of-her peers were more than a little too willing to shut the case before it had barely been opened...and I can't say I wasn't also eager to leave the courtroom for the couch. But there were some reasonable doubts raised, and it seemed only fair to honor the process. Two 09er types were accused of bringing a non-09er back to a hotel room and beating her. Their story? That Anissa Villalpando's reputation made her 'victimhood' unlikely. She invited them, they claim, and then her pimp showed up, apparently to get money he felt she owed him, and they left. Anissa claimed, however, that the guys picked her up while she hitchhiking, took her to the motel, and attempted to rape her. When she fought back, grabbing a gun from one of them and firing shots into the ceiling, they fled, leaving her there, beaten up.

It seemed a little too tidy to me--the girl with the bad reputation and the crappy job, allegedly beaten by her pimp after the two guys tried to have a little harmless fun... so I did my best to channel Henry Fonda a la 'Twelve Angry Men' and push my peers past the easy answer they all seemed so eager to find. I believe we found the truth--Anissa gave it to us. She had be coerced and beaten by two guys supposedly just out for a good time. Too bad they were such bad storytellers.

Community justice...a family affair. Woody Goodman asked Dad to lead an official investigation into the disappearance of the Aaron Echolls tapes that were being held at the Sheriff's office. Despite what Lamb and Sacks describe as impenetrable security, someone got past Neptune's Finest and stole the best evidence anyone had against Neptune's most infamous homicidal Hollywood has-been. Dad was sure that someone had stolen the tapes to sell them--celebrity porn being as popular as it is--and it turned out he was partially right. The tapes had been stolen, and they had been sold. But not for the reasons Dad suspected. The culprit? Surprisingly, Deputy Leo. In need of cash to help with his sister's medical bills, he sold the tapes (at a fraction of their potential eBay value) to Logan--but Logan didn't use them to help his dad. Instead he destroyed them. Who wants footage of their ex-girlfriend bumping uglies with their dad? Yech.

I'd like to say my courtroom drama kept me away from the drama at home, but I had no such luck. After confronting Duncan about Meg's pregnancy, I learned that he already knew. Just when it seemed things couldn't get any weirder, Meg woke up from her coma, apologized to me, and then told us what we already knew: that her parents were dangerously incapable of raising a baby...or providing a normal home for one. And as everyone knows, normal is what we aim for here in Neptune. Meg begged us not to let her parents take the baby if anything should happen to her. And then something did happen to her.