Veronica Mars

The ending of S2 was so Scooby Doo and ott that it just about ruined the season for me.

yeah, "kind of blows it" is too charitable. Compare that rooftop scene with the final confrontation in S1 and it's like, wth happened writers?

Frankly, I loved it. It was so over the top and crazy, and it almost fit the weird escalation that started off the season with the bus killing all those kids. To me, season 2 was not quite up to the level of season 1, but still great.

haha i love the ending. im glad its super ott

imo, its better as 'totally wtf unpredictable' than 'oh so it was the janitor' the way it had potential to be (that would have been the scooby doo ending iirc)

they do leave some loose ends in the season, that im p sure they had trouble resolving

Yeah I like the S2 ending, save for the distractingly crappy low-budget f/x.

i actually think the veronica-wigs-out subplot in s3 is kinda ... right. i mean as far as her being super-suspicious of logan & everything, it just makes more logical sense than '& they lived happily ever after.'

i do hope they give logan some irreverence back tho hes kind of turned into duncan :-/

for some reason, it took me half of S1 before i could consistently recognize duncan when he came on-screen. he just kind of faded into the sea of other douchey-looking brown-haired guys at the school. during one episode i was like "oh you know what, duncan wears argyle a lot, i'll bet i can remember him that way," but it turned out to be same episode where ducan lends logan one of his argyle sweaters and SEXY MIXUPS occur.

that guys is super forgettable in every way, yeah

i think rob thomas had big plans for duncan as a character but the dude who played him just couldn't get it done, acting-wise

otoh, Duncan's final act is one thing I do really love about the S3 finale, not that that required any acting feats.

I remember reading Rob Thomas based Kyle Bradway on the dude who played Duncan.

ahahahaha amazing!

Miss this show...

i always thought it was weird that the chick who played gia in S2 is in like, everything, all the time now. she was a p great character tho

S3 kinda worth it 4 the sweat scavenger hunt episode

veronica: "your fly is open"
dick: "I know. party ritual."

<3 dick

n/h

Our one dvd of season one ist kaput. Major bummer

got hooked on this when i gave it a second try, sped through s1.

what are your favorite logan zings?

Trina: Will you just hear me out, please? My boyfriend Dylan spotted me some cash a few months ago, and now he's bugging me about it. I — I can't get him off my back.
Logan: Did you try standing up?

Mr. Daniels: You know, the glow of your father's wealth and celebrity may be enough to sustain you through high school, Mr. Echolls, but do you know what it will get you in the real world?
Logan: Please say "high school English teacher." Please say "high school English teacher."

haha he's such a punk i <3 him

sad i can't find the "so you got a trophy for a rim job?" scene on youtube :(

what's the song at the end of s2e7?

It's "Run" by Air. Off Talkie Walkie.

So I watched this whole series in a little over a month.

Despite the fact that the show just sort of sputters out at the end, due to cancellation, I think I might have liked S3 a little better than S2. I admire the ambitiousness of S2, but there were SO many threads going at once and whole episodes in the middle that just seemed to drag. I liked the lighter touch of S3. Still, best stretch of episodes in the series is definitely the back third of S1; I don't think many people disagree with that.

Random peeves I couldn't get out of my head:

1. Who is paying for the suite at the Neptune Grand? At first it's the Kanes, but when Duncan moves out, are they still paying for Logan to live there by himself? At the end of S3, Dick Casablancas Sr. suggests that *he* is paying for it -- but is he paying for just Dick Jr., or Logan too?

2. After she was raped and her head was shaved, Parker wore an unflattering wig for one episode. Next episode, her hair had miraculously grown back to shoulder-length, despite the fact that the other rape victims still sported silly bald caps. (I thought maybe it was just a more realistic wig, but no.)

Also, skimmed through this thread last night, and this...

In any other actress's hands Veronica Mars would probably be completely insufferable! She's, umm, particularly good at being punchably smug / clever / quippy in a way that does not inspire punching impulses -- like, quite the opposite.
― nabisco (nabisco), Thursday, February 1, 2007 12:43 PM (3 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

...is totally OTM. She's a really great actress.

<3 kristen

so having heard about this show for years i finally start to watch and plow thru season one in one week on netflix. very good, great entertainment. love the dad. maybe it was just bad luck and the timeslot but it does seem weird it wasn't a bigger hit. part of me wonders if it would've done well on a bigger network and part of me wonders if it wouldn't have been canceled midway thru the first season (nevermind lasted three seasons) if it hadn't of been on the cw.

Probably would have lasted longer on something like ABC Family channel that is geared towards younger people. Greek has been on 4 seasons now and that is pretty bad.

The subject matter probably wouldn't fly on ABC Family, though I admittedly don't watch that channel very much.

finished s2 recently. not as good as s1 for sure, but still pretty great. loved guttenberg!

the more i think abt it, it's kind of odd how most of the fathers in the series (keith aside) are kinda bad guys? daddy echolls, pedo mayor, wallace's dad (shady past least), Meg's dad, mr. casablancas.. idk, just a stray thought.

i think a major theme of the show is that the adult world does not have kids' interests at heart and is often actively harmful/abusive/neglectful of kids.

iirc rob thomas has a background in YA fiction (and maybe teaching, too) that might account for his POV.

it's a noir, most every adult is suspect in some way (and it ends up being significant when veronica discovers that her dad is willing to… what is it, have an affair with mrs. laura san giacomo just because it makes him happy?). moms and other women, too. veronica's mom ditches her rehab and takes the money veronica put toward it; celeste kane despises veronica and then still doesn't like her even after she helps solve lily's murder; one of her female teachers tries to hold off an investigation into madison sinclair's ballot-stuffing out of spite for veronica.

i can't remember the (fired) journalism teacher doing anything morally vicious. levy-the-business-teacher does nothing but have his retirement investments tank because he bought big into casablancas stock. apart from wanting to hide her past, and from being a little bit of a jerk to keith at first, did wallace's mom ever do anything blameworthy? logan's mom seems kind of put upon by his dad's behavior, but apart from being generally a bad mom i don't remember her doing anything specifically bad.

anyway, like horseshoe says, the bearing of their parents' behavior on the kids' lives is a pretty big theme: whether, say, the kids can somehow find a way to not be complete creeps given the world their parents have made for them or the examples they've set. lots of them are creeps, but they can at least point to their parents a lot of the time.

but it's also a recurring counterpoint to that that veronica discovers after helping someone out that there are plenty of decent people who like her and aren't especially mendacious or manipulative, she just couldn't see it through the perspective on her social world she'd adopted after being shunned by all the 0-9ers.

iirc rob thomas has a background in YA fiction (and maybe teaching, too) that might account for his POV.

you do rc (in both cases)

My wife and I finally finished the first season, and I pretty much hated the show. I mean, I thought the acting was great across the board, and the writing was tops, but rarely have I seen either put in service of stories I cared less than a shit about. Of all the things that bugged me perhaps number one was Veronica mentioning she had been raped in the first ep, but only getting around to finding out who raped her in the second to last ep. Like, VM's Things to Do list:

1. Solve murder of best friend
2. Find lost dogs and parrot
...
13. Find out who raped me

VM, apparently, was first pitched as a YA novel, and the rights bought as such.

We're not going to bother with the future seasons. That first one was just so full of holes and ridiculousness (in a bad way) to bring down the ridiculous (in a good) way stuff. Shame Kristen Bell hasn't taken off beyond this show, but she was great in "Deadwood."

i think a major theme of the show is that the adult world does not have kids' interests at heart and is often actively harmful/abusive/neglectful of kids.

This seems to be the implicit theme of any show about rich kids. It's a convenient way to get the grown ups out of the picture.

u dislike a lot of awesome stuff iirc

i thought they did a pretty awesome job of spreading the central storylines out over the course of 10+ hrs. balancing the time between that and the episodic mysteries is one reason why this is a great tv show in a different way than if it was a great 2 hr movie all about solving lily's murder. i'm sure that would be neater, but i'm totally willing to forgive a few minor plot holes to get stuff like dognappers and purity tests and transmoms too

i don't understand why they had to fuck with the theme song for s3 though :\

My wife and I finally finished the first season, and I pretty much hated the show. I mean, I thought the acting was great across the board, and the writing was tops, but rarely have I seen either put in service of stories I cared less than a shit about.

man, wonder which part of this they'll put on the dvd

Killing off --REDACTED-- halfway through the third season was the show's greatest mistake. And that awful Twelve Angry Men episode. And Wallace's dad. Otherwise: top-notch.

My wife and I finally finished the first season, and I pretty much hated the show. I mean, I thought the acting was great across the board, and the writing was tops, but rarely have I seen either put in service of stories I cared less than a shit about. Of all the things that bugged me perhaps number one was Veronica mentioning she had been raped in the first ep, but only getting around to finding out who raped her in the second to last ep. Like, VM's Things to Do list:

1. Solve murder of best friend
2. Find lost dogs and parrot
...
13. Find out who raped me

i thought it was pretty clear that #13 was something she basically wanted to put behind her? she keeps up her investigation, like she does with every other ongoing mystery in her life, but what's she supposed to do, go banging on doors day after day? when she goes to the cops to report it lamb laughs her out of the office, and she keeps it a secret from her dad for a long time. in fact, the two ongoing mysteries she does more actively pursue are both concerned with important other people in her life (finding lily's murder and finding her mom), while she tends to suppress things that (justice aside) only concern her and which nothing can be done about. seems like pretty good character-plot-writing to me?

she only investigates her rape (which turns out to be a somewhat ambiguous rape in a turn i'm not sure i would feel better about if they'd planned it that way or if they just twisted it that way at the last moment) when a new lead opens up from another case. 2-12 are her living her life/helping her friends/occasionally fucking w/ 09ers. i'm kinda happy the show wasn't 22 weeks of 'chick finds out who and wrecks vengence on her rapist'; not really crying out for 'i spit on yr grave: the tv show'.

have you only seen the first season?

yes! and one ep of season two before i stopped and thought 'ok, i need to watch something besides veronica mars for at least a week or so'.

I just thought it was sort of pointless to bring up the rape in the first ep if she wasn't going to follow through til the end. And in the end it only took an ep to solve something I would think would be even more damaging/horrific than the murder of your best friend. Just not needed, and really did reveal the on-the-fly nature of even that first season. I mean, I'm not even sure they knew what to do with the missing mom story! In the last ep, she she's basically back just long enough for Veronica to kick her out and write her off.

There are easy fixes for all these problems, which is why I'm so down on the show. I can handle failure, obviously I can handle success, but what bugs me more than anything are shows and movies that have everything going for them yet still drop the ball. All I can see is potential squandered. At the end all I could think of is that "Brick" did the hard boiled high school detective thing better. And Buffy did high school just as well as Mars, and it had vampires!

i'm not sure how anyone in 2010 could still regard vampires and teens as a positive

you'll want to avoid monk though, they take even longer to solve the central mystery. and you'll totally want to avoid homicide - they never solve it!

just finished the first season of this, too -- thought it was pretty entertaining. but the "twists" there at the end kinda amounted to making the show a lot less subversive/dark than what it started out with -- the rape, the incest, etc, all turned out to be kind of warm and cuddly, amazingly enough. also sort of weird that lily was depicted as a horrible human being throughout the season ...