A Mars in a Saturn?

It’s been a while since I watched the first 3 seasons of Veronica Mars. Probably a decade – I watched some of it with Ben back in Ankeny. It started as a CW show, though it never fit the model very well; it’s a neo-noir about a hard-boiled private detective, which is not exactly the teen drama wheelhouse. But they cast Kristen Bell and told us she was in high school and we just dealt with it. They got her out of high school for season 2, which was an improvement, but they also did a decent job keeping the setting from limiting the show – a lot of it takes place in her car or office like any PI story.

Season 4 is back on Hulu, presumably after Rob Thomas wrapped the final season of iZombie. It brings back all of our old favorites, murders a bunch of them, and cooks up a classic Veronica Mars story on all fronts. The frame story is a classic real estate scam where poor people are asked to bear the pain of some capitalist scheme while corrupt authorities play along. Dad is still there to give us access to the world of old men and to take the bleeding heart cases, but this time instead of telling Veronica she has to stop he’s finding reasons to push himself out. Logan is back, just as sad and hot as before; he’s in control of his anger now but Veronica sort of likes him better when he’s not.

The dog in this new season is really good, and carefully shot in a lot of scenes. He’s rarely the focus but he’s really good in the background, dogging along and waggling his eyebrows at us from the negative space in the scene. He’s worth watching even if you have to rewind to catch him in the second pass.

Obviously any show coming back has to balance itself between nostalgic fan service and making something new and independently valuable. VM does bring back most of the fun folks we remember, but I think does a decent job of only using them for this story and not just trying to shove in everyone on their one day of filming. We bring back the hot deputy in a new role and let VM dream bang him after they spend a day working together. We bring back the lawyer, who has a really good handheld one-take as we meet him walking through the hospital. It’s exactly the same character he plays on iZombie and he’s so good at it – narcy in performance and definitely full of selfish motivation, but professional and willing to admit when other people would be better. There is some fluffy – plutonic high school friend is in this a lot for no good reason, and we meet Logan’s ex for one scene that goes nowhere except a last-moment meaningless redirect. But overall I think it’s really well done. It helps that the series wants to do long-arc mystery, which gives it plenty of time for characters, but it feels like they thought about what they wanted, not just who they could get.

Veronica is exactly the same Veronica. It’s both what we want and what the format demands. She’s so far past traumatized that nothing stops her. Not shock or danger or pain or even reason. Just like every other noir PI. She’s the person who (literally) runs toward an explosion while everyone else flees. She’s outraged by injustice and eager to fight against it, but wise enough to know it won’t work. They give us all the cynical puns (“Are you asking ‘Where in the world is Carlos Juan Diego?'”) a good amount of high-speed PI banter, and just a bit of nonsense jargon. There’s narration in a car and over a traumatic scene, there’s holding a big camera and planting bugs, and there are a couple of sleight of hand heists. The opening line this season tells us about how she had to escape when she was 19, and continues with a metaphor laden description of an anthropomorphized town. It all feels very precise.

Season 1 kicked off this show with Veronica (then 16) being raped, her friend murdered, and a big cover up because it involves rich people. That motivates her to undertake her own investigation, against the will of the police and her father and often against wisdom. But she’s persistent and lucky and smart and stubborn and eventually unmasks the conspiracy. It of course doesn’t work – most guilty parties and all the folks that abbed them get off without consequence, and she is labeled a troublemaker. But it’s better than anyone else has ever done for her, and she helps a lot of other people along the way.

This season orphans a 16-year-old with a bombing in the first few minutes, to set off a complicated plot about money and interconnected terrible people. That orphan then sets out in her own investigation, seperately from the police and Mars Investigations, making good progress on the case but also narrowly avoiding death. She spends most of the series unable to trust anyone to help her and unable to face her own traumas, past and present. Which as you might expect feels very familiar to Veronica. She narrates at us in an early episode about how maybe she can help her new orphan before she becomes… me.

The show has a number of great parallel stories. The Veronica-orphan one obviously but also several with Veronica and he father. For example, they both start genuine friendships with people they’re investigating, and whom they eventually suspect or confirm to be participating in serious crimes. Veronica’s friend eventually turns out to be innocent but leaves her because Veronica won’t trust her ¹She also comments on how unhealthy it is for Veronica to still want to be friends with someone she thinks might be a mass murderer, just like Logan sees how bad it is for her to like the angry and unstable version of him.

This season has an esthetic I really like. It plays the noir-in-California angle with light and dark just like the original. Like all the Rob Thomas shows it has good (usually horizontal striped) sweaters ²including possibly my favorite one from iZombie: https://wornontv.net/141181/. The title sequence in particular is high in style, and establishes a blue-red-white neon-stripe over water theme that they carry into other parts of the show. The title sequence is somewhere between a Bond title sequence and sports game player stat cards, against a minimalist vocal version of the original them song and cool 3D art and dimensional cross-fades. It makes me want to paint in VR ³which @BPS recommended to me during the last HA4H, though I doubt I’d like the doing as much as the watching.

One of the main frame story plot points is now-less-angry Logan trying to convince Veronica that maybe what she wants is less avoidance and more healing. That maybe she could be happier if she did something like see a therapist. Which is if course not Veronica’s style at all, and not without reason. She’s got lots of experience that tells her such things won’t work for her, even if they might for someone else. She avoids reacting to this for the whole season, even as she does make other improvements in her life. The epiloge gives us hope that things might be different later, but only the thin sort of hope that Veronica can sustain, tempered with plenty of fleeing. She saves the town but still maybe not herself. It’s the right target for this character, and this series.

I really like Kristen Bell in this role, years ago and now. On The Good Place she’s doing something similar, which is described in-universe as Arizona Trash Person – an identity to which I strongly relate. Veronica Mars is that same core, pushed into an archetype that gives her respect for her trauma and witty banter and access to rich people she can sometimes scam, among the abuses they throw at her. I have imagined that VM is the coolest, saddest version of me. Too broken to ever be different, but powerful in a quiet way against people who sometimes need to be persuaded by power, and at least sometimes a force for good in a world that often abandons good in favor of power. That still feels true, and still feels like where I would hope to end up if I had to flee again. But now like VM I have dreams that aren’t merely of being alone, if I can ever find the path.

ZiB

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Sent from a phone.

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