Tuesday Night TV

Sweet, my sources (in the form of a commercial on the CW) inform me that Veronica Mars returns from hiatus next week. Gilmore Girls, House, and The Shield after the jump.

Gilmore Girls: Lorelai goes back into Luke's and it's awkward. Her jeep is pronounced doorknobs (as in "dead as a..."), so she has to bike to work and look for a new car. But this turns out to be a good excuse to try to reconnect with Luke since he knows cars and she doesn't. And she drives her kinda nuts with her car shopping technique, but in a way that finally gets them past their polite awkwardness. And they really do share some nice moments.


Jackson crashes with her cause he's never had the chicken pox and his kids have it. Sookie seems convinced that he will drive her nuts. And he ends up somehow killing Lorelai's doll house. In addition to that sucking, Sookie still hasn't forgiven Jackson for his deceitful non-vasectomy. But this little tragedy finally gets them talking about it, and they seem to be on their way to getting past it.

Paris gets into all her law/med school choices and freaks out twice. Once in celebration, and then in a very negative "what am I going to do?" manner. And she dumps Doyle as part of her second freak out, wanting to make sure she doesn't make her grad school choice based on him. This starts a whole career vs. relationship thing that at least starts the audience questioning whether Rory and Logan will work out. But like every other storyline this episode, it ends up bringing them closer together as Doyle decides he will be the one to sacrifice and will follow Paris anywhere. And in the last scene, Rory gets her rejection letter from the New York Times internship she was hoping for.

A few funny parts, a little bit of Kirk, which is always my favorite, and the story was kinda nice. One of the better episodes of the season.

House: A three-card monte shill suffers from Aboulia, the inability to exercise will. A crack pipe sends them down the drugs/toxicity road, but that's a dead end. Foreman's new theory is lymphomatoid granulomatosis. So they give her radiation targeted at her immune system, but it turns out she has an infection, and they just destroyed her ability to fight it off. Foreman took the lead on this particular case, and takes the whole basically killing this woman thing pretty hard. I can't say I find any characters besides House, Cuddy, and Wilson all that interesting, so a Foreman-centric episode is kinda dull to me.


Mel from Frasier plays Wilson's ex-wife (#2), who, along with the budding Wilson/Cuddy relationship/friendship, gets a whole thing started where House may want to sabotage them or feel guilty about ruining Wilson's previous relationships with his... unique personality traits. Despite involving my three favorite characters, I am not enjoying this arc and I'd kinda like to see it end, especially since it takes away from House's time ridiculing patients and coworkers.

The Shield: Vic's replacement, Kevin Hyatt, arrives. Claudette tells Vic she wants to expand the strike team and will try to keep him on, but that was just a lie to get Vic to behave for his last few weeks. Vendrell's still feeling guilty over Lem and lashes out at the new guy, which jeopardizes Vic's imaginary chances at sticking around. But with Vic on his best behavior, Hyatt's actually impressed with the way he works.

Dutch and Billings catch a rape case. Billings' inappropriateness just keeps getting funnier ("I love the smell of underage sexual assault in the morning... I didn't mean that the way it came out."), which is difficult considering how nasty the rape case is. She was drugged and raped, but sometime before had "Go Home" carved into her stomach. Two more victims leave them with a serial rapist on their hands, and he's getting more violent with each victim.

The pile of bodies from the season premiere finally comes back up. A contact of Acevedo's says it's from a new Salvadoran gang and he gets the case reassigned to to the barn, since Hyatt comes from INS and might be best equipped to handle the case. The slow moving nature of this story probably means it'll last the whole season, and possibly into next.

Danny's back on duty and looks out of shape, taking Tina's place because she transferred out to be the "new face" of the cops, with her face up all over posters, or possibly to get away from Dutch's advances. And for the first time this season, Julien has a significant story development, with him being added to the New and Improved Strike Team(tm) starting next week.

The 19ers have a small faction who want out of the gang life, and all it does is make them targets. Vic makes it his mission to take care of these kids, somehow identifying it with a dream Corrine has about Lem. He almost manages to save the leader, but he dies when they get to the hospital. Vic loses it in a wall-punching, chair-throwing meltdown in front of the strike team, the new guy, and Claudette. I wasn't buying into the whole Corrine dream thing, but Vic's meltdown was really well done and left the episode off on a great, if heartbreaking, note.