Veronica Mars: Guest Post by L

Veronica Mars has become my favorite TV show. Fast-paced, clever dialogue, lots of twists, lots of guessing, and not creepy until the very last episode.

Part of me is dying to compare Veronica Mars (and do you know how hard it is to not spell it Weronika?) to Buffy. Yeah, sure, blonde girl with a single parent who used to be popular in high-school, but is now a pariah; we've seen that before. But the similarity's only skin-deep. Buffy went after evil from the outside, while Veronica is about handling the things our friends, family, and neighbors do when we aren't watching. Buffy is about fighting back against things that go bump in the night, and friendship, and sacrifice, and knowing when to rebel against authority. Veronica Mars is about secrets, and truth, and trust, and when all these things are good, and when they're dangerous. In addition, while Buffy's battle lines were drawn up around Kid/Adult, as well as Popular/Unpopular, Veronica's major battle line is Rich/Poor. Taking place in a "town with no middle class", class tensions underlie a lot of conflicts that, on the surface, appear unrelated to money.

And while Buffy was primarily about the kids -- you could be excused for thinking that, besides Buffy, no one had parents at all -- Veronica is about the whole family unit. The show could have been subtitled, "How Parents Screw Up Their Kids." The interactions between parents and kids are a major vehicle for making the characters multi-dimensional, as well as sympathetic. Several times, you meet unpleasant characters you'd love to hate -- then you meet their parents, and you just can't hate the kids as much. This is, again, tied up in class. I can't think of a poor kid who had truly bad parents, and I can't think of a rich kid whose parents didn't think of their child as an extension of themselves.

In Veronica Mars' world, everyone has secrets, everyone has flaws and everyone is capable of anything. Veronica states her philosophy as, "The people you love will let you down," and in a way, the show is an examination of the effects of that policy. And given that Veronica's boyfriend, friends, mother, police, and town have (repeatedly) let Veronica down, you can't really blame her for being defensive. Throughout the show, most times when she trusts someone (that is, when her reaction to negative evidence is "they're innocent" rather than "they're guilty"), she ends up being wrong. Unfortunately, her reaction to this -- assume guilt -- wreaks havoc on her relationships. Repeatedly accusing people of horrible actions based on unsupported hearsay is a great plan for heartache. And even when she operates on a "trust, but verify" basis, her friends are deeply hurt that she'd suspect them at all.

It is this theme of trust -- how much trust do people expect, and how much do they deserve -- that makes me like Veronica Mars so much; both the show and the character. It's a complicated subject; as a culture, we claim to value loyalty, but tend to define it as blind obedience, the loyalty of a dog. Supporting someone, "right or wrong", is seen as an admirable character trait, and not changing your mind, even in the face of superior evidence, is called conviction. Yet the fact remains that you may like your friends a lot, but you have no way to know that one of them isn't a murderer. How much evidence would it take for you to call the cops?

Thank you, Veronica Mars

So, I tend to pick up DVDs of TV shows that I've heard good things about, when I see them used at Interact (or sometimes new). This started with Firefly, and has continued with several more TV series.

Saturday night while L was feeling badly, I suggested that we pick up one of the shows that we'd not seen (but I'd picked up) and watch it. Veronica Mars was the choice (we also had Heros that neither of us had seen, but I've been meaning to watch it with Lem/M^2), and it was a good one.

I've heard that the first season is the best one, and while I have the feeling that I'll like the others, I can see why: every story is a mystery of some sort, and the entire season is tied together into a single mystery. Each show was excellent and there were a lot of really interesting plots, and as the season progressed there were more and more clues to the overall mystery. I didn't figure it out until the final episode, pretty much at the point where the reveal happened. Wow. Talk about cliffhangers, too. Though the mystery got wrapped up, there were several major plot points that didn't get resolved, which L and I think is horribly evil, and we will have to go find the next season now. :)

In any case, that's the word from here. Great series, L said it's her favorite TV show she's seen, and it's one that she would actually watch again. As for me, I have a hard time ranking things, but I thought it was excellent and would also watch it again. As for other stuff, L's still sick but out of the worst phase, she's probably going to take monday off work and should finish recovering by tuesday. I've got a lot of work still, but not too stressed about it. :)

Favorite character: Tough tough one to pick. Besides Veronica herself, I really like her father, Eli and Logan, and for those who haven't seen the series and start watching it, that may be a bit confusing.

Favorite episode: #10: An Echolls Family Christmas. The poker game whodunit sequence in this one was priceless. Runners-up: #11: Silence of the Lamb. What happens when you dig up dirt on parents? Do you like guitars?, and #22: Leave it to Beaver. Yeah. Well, it wraps up so much stuff in such a surprising way...

Favorite line: either "Who's your daddy?" from Keith Mars (said several times, there's one in particular that made it worth it), or "We used to be friends, long time ago" - Veronica Mars, from the beginning of episode 13. There's a bunch of other good ones, but those stand out. :)