This is just speculation, but I think the opening arc being 9 eps takes into account the need for time to re-introduce the characters and the show's setting while dealing with a new mystery. Once the characters and setting are incorporated into show for new viewers (Who's that bald dude in the leather jacket?), the following arcs won't need time to account for that.

I thought House was going off the air by the time VM comes back because of baseball?

Witness my recap of the VM panel at Comic-Con.

Witness the Comic-Con promo, which is pretty much the best marketing the show could ever get if the public were allowed to see it.

that was awesome.

Dude, that's really really good. But it's longer than they want PILOTS to be before the ratings jump, so...

What do you mean? It's three minutes long. What do pilots and ratings jumps have to do with anything? I'm not following, unless you just mean it's a little long to be aired during your regular commercial break, as it would take up the entire commercial break. But the hell with that; it deserves to be seen, goddammit.

It was a firefly joke. The point being that things long enough to actually do their job don't get aired.

That was a lovely reminder of why I enjoyed the show. It would be nice if they could break it apart into commercial sized promos.

Resistance really is futile. I've finally come succombed to the allure of VM. I've seen a few reruns recently (most notably I've seen parts of the Sadie Hawkins dance episode twice.) and I've been reading so much about it I gave the first episode another try and I liked it. So much so that I'm trying to remember why I thought I didn't.

But I've only seen the first two episodes, so I'm just getting a hang of who the characters are and I'm interested in Logan's development since right now he's such an ass.

The first time I watched it I think the voice over kinda put me off for some reason but now I realize how important that is since there is so much exposition the writers need to get through and there was only so much they could do using Wallace.

askye, over the course of the series to date, the voice-over technique isn't over-used. There were times I was looking for it, because I wanted to know what was going on in Veronica's mind, but Rob Thomas seems to be pretty good about not cheating like that, which I appreciate.

I hope you like continue to like the series. Logan is a pretty complex character. Season 1 is more cractacular than crack. Scott and I got to the point where we were watching as many as four episodes a night.