Garoo

The pilot is terribly awkward — by the time Veronica’s mother abandoner her I had burst into laughter. Caliméro much? I understand the need for exposition, but they really, really, really should have saved some of those flashbacks for later episodes, limiting themselves to mentioning events in the voiceover (or maybe it’d have worked better if I hadn’t heard about the roofie sequence beforehand? no, in any case it was just too much at once).

Speaking of which, I’m very, very afraid that we might eventually find out she wasn’t really raped and someone only removed her panties as an unsavory prank. I mean, waking up with her dress on and not particularly crumpled? And I realize they could hardly stain the dress with her virginity blood, but wouldn’t they have made her wear something else than a white dress in order to avoid the doubt?

Oh, and why am I afraid of such a surprise ending? Well, because it’d cheapen the whole thing. Starting the show off with a rape victim is daring enough (despite the laughable, heavy exposition); turning it into a red herring would be in bad taste.

Most of the characters are, if not unidimensional, terribly cliché. The second episode’s West Side Story aspect, in particular, is a bit… uh, I don’t know, not my thing. But, who knows, maybe that’s the reality of California.

Some of the investigations are terribly rushed — clearly, they’re not the writers’ focus, but that’s no excuse. Did I miss something or Veronica and Lilly got themselves fake identity cards in their real name? And how does having Lilly’s fake ID (in Lilly’s real name) allow Veronica to impersonate her? (Actually, maybe they made fake IDs in each other’s names. But it’s still stupid.) And, in the following episode, how can she trace a John Smith who’s been a Julia for seven years? (I won’t even touch the magic PI-only website. That’s just so commonplace in TV and movies.)

I hate shows that artificially dilutes mystery and finds the most preposterous excuses to delay revelations, and it looks like there’s going to be plenty of that. Oh, that’s too bad, Veronica finds where her mother was staying, only a couple weeks too late. That’s so Pretender (or any other mystery show that I hate). And I just can’t believe they dared make her shred the paternity test results. She’s a PI, she’s a journalist, a few days ago she was throwing up to the thought of having possibly dated her half-brother, and she destroys the results and it’s all completely forgotten in the next episode? Come on, that’s pathetic!

And, finally, I’m a bit puzzled by the way they introduced respective love interests for Veronica and Wallace out of nowhere in the second and fourth episodes. To me, that just screams of “Don’t worry! White heroine not gonna date Black comic relief! Ever!” but maybe I’m being paranoid. Doesn’t Wallace actually become more of a cliché token Black guy between episodes one and two?