The Whys of Neptune High Trivia Quiz

Answer: 09ers

Located in southern California somewhere between San Diego and Los Angeles, the fictional town of Neptune is not subtle in its class divisions. The poorer families live on one side of town; the rich ones live on the other, in the 90909 postal code. (Hence, "09ers".) And when Veronica Mars (Kristen Bell) says "rich," she really means it; the kids' parents include movie stars, real-estate moguls, software magnates, and hip-hop impresarios. Quite a lot of her classmates are millionaires.

Some are billionaires. So perhaps it's inevitable that the 09ers don't seem to have to play by the same rules...

Answer: The Kane family, local software billionaires with a tragic past

Jake Kane (Kyle Secor), the father of the family, has amassed billions of dollars through his software company, which apparently has a patent on streaming video. He and his wife, Celeste (Lisa Thornhill), start offering the Kane scholarship in Veronica's junior year. It's a memorial to their daughter Lilly (Amanda Seyfried), who was Veronica's best friend -- and was murdered the year before the show's beginning.

The scholarship is a plot driver even before it's Veronica's turn to compete for it. In the Season 1 episode "Kanes and Abel's", Veronica is hired by an 09er classmate to figure out who's harassing her, keeping her from sleeping and endangering her slot as valedictorian and scholarship recipient.

Answer: Basketball

Wallace (Percy Daggs III) is a basketball player, and -- as we learn in the first-season episode "Betty and Veronica" -- a very good one. In that episode, the Neptune High mascot is kidnapped, and a masked figure releases a video in which they threaten to kill the animal if Wallace plays in the big game against archrivals Pan High. Poor Wallace doesn't want to quit, but doesn't want to risk the mascot's life either -- so it's up to Veronica to catch the miscreant.

That's not all that's up to Veronica, either: it turns out that she's the one who's been stocking Wallace's locker with spirit boxes of homemade snickerdoodles. It's nice to see her doing favors for Wallace, for a change!

Answer: He leads a motorcycle gang

Weevil (Francis Capra) is a Latino student at the high school, very conscious of his assigned place in the social hierarchy and determined to rebel against the system. Sometimes his PCH (Pacific Coast Highway) biker gang functions as a sort of parallel justice system, punishing rich kids whom they think have hurt working-class kids -- like the creepy boyfriend in the episode "M.A.D." Sometimes their criminal mischief doesn't have any kind of fig leaf -- in the pilot episode, we meet Weevil when his gang duct-tapes new student Wallace Fennel to a flagpole to punish him for reporting some PCH shoplifters to the police. Weevil and Veronica have an uneasy, somewhat adversarial friendship; their favors for each other often fall just on the wrong side of the law.

By the second season, PCH politics have become more complicated, and PCH mischief has gotten more serious -- but the gang is still a central part of Weevil's life.

Answer: Pirate Points

The high school sports teams all play as the Pirates, with a real live parrot as their mascot. Pirate Points, used to earn privileges like the right to get lunch delivered on campus from local restaurants, were initially set up to reward students who played on those teams, who supported them on the cheer squad, or who served on student council -- and somehow those students almost all seemed to be 09ers.

In the first-season episode "Return of the Kane", Pirate Points are a major campaign issue in an election for student council president. Veronica helps discover election fraud against Wanda, who has vowed to eliminate Pirate Points -- but Wanda's election is not to be. In the end, the 09er winner makes the surprising move of opening up the system to reward a broader range of activities, including the honor roll and vocational training. It's a little thing that sends a big message.

Answer: She publishes Veronica's article on how a student was framed for bomb threats

Ms. Stafford (Joey Lauren Adams) hasn't been the journalism teacher long. She'd been head of the pep squad, but she stepped up to assist at the paper when the previous teacher became pregnant. Early in this first-season episode, Veronica is concerned that she's going to have to spend the rest of the year writing puff pieces -- but when the school's frequent fire drills are revealed as cover-ups for bomb threats, Ms. Stafford has a chance to show her spine.

It wouldn't be a Veronica Mars investigations without multiple twists and turns, of course, and neither the bomb threats nor the suspect are what they appear to be. After some careful detective work (and some very surprising kisses), Veronica realizes that the suspect has been framed, both by another student and by law enforcement. She writes an article to blow the lid off -- and its publication is forbidden lest the students feel unsafe. Ms. Stafford goes ahead anyway. She loses her job, and the journalism students at Neptune High learn the price of speaking truth to power.

Answer: It's close to the US-Mexico border

Proximity to the border certainly isn't Neptune High's only problem. Plenty of high schools have drug problems without being driving distance from Tijuana, and it's clear that some of Neptune's illegal substances are entering the town through purely American distribution channels. Time and again, though, the drugs that cause so much trouble at Neptune High are shown to have been brought directly there by wealthy students traveling to and from Mexico.

In the Season One episode "You Think You Know Somebody," for example, Veronica works to track down her boyfriend's car, which vanished as he was driving back from Tijuana with friends -- and which contained a pinata full of illegal steroids in the trunk. And, toward the end of the season, "A Trip to the Dentist" revealed the origin of the GHB that Veronica had been given at a party in the show's back story: Logan Echolls (Jason Dohring), everyone's favorite rich bad boy, had brought it back from, you guessed it, a trip to Mexico. (No actual dentists involved.)

Answer: The Tritons

In Roman mythology, Triton was the merman son of the god of the sea -- Neptune. In the first-season episode "Clash of the Tritons," Veronica learns that the Tritons are a powerful secret society within Neptune High, inducting six successful boys from the junior class every year.

After receiving a tip that the club framed her for selling fake ID cards to kids below the drinking age, Veronica does indeed clash with the Tritons. She isn't stealthy about it, either -- early in the episode, she dedicates a cover of Blondie's "One Way or Another" to the Tritons at a karaoke bar.

Answer: He impregnated a student and abandoned the baby.

The student was vulnerable, and panicked, and didn't want anyone to know. When the baby was born, she left it on Moorehead's doorstep -- and Moorehead then dumped the baby in the bathroom at the school prom, knowing that police would assume the parents were both students. Earlier, he'd disciplined Veronica's mother -- also a student -- for "spreading rumors" that a faculty member had taken advantage of one of the teenagers. Veronica slowly uncovers the deception over the course of the episode, all because Van Clemmons (Duane Daniels) makes sure she'd find her mother's permanent record. Of course Veronica can't resist trying to find out why her mother had been suspended, and there are some delicious moments throughout the investigation.

Answer: The rich kids took a limo back from the field trip, instead of the school bus

The people of Neptune immediately notice the disparity, of course. As the poor kids of the journalism club rode to their doom in a smelly, dilapidated school bus, their rich classmates were traveling in comfort in a limousine hired by a parent. (Meg Manning, played by Alona Tal, is the sole exception: an 09er who rode on the school bus for personal reasons. But she's also the sole passenger to leave the crash site alive.)

As you might expect in a show like "Veronica Mars," later events in the season just make the situation worse. Neptune is "the town without a middle class," and in many ways it illustrates the W. B. Yeats line "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold."