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?