I loved the new season of Veronica Mars. When the trailer came out, and Logan’s all buff and Veronica tases someone, I opined to my friends that this must be what it’s like to be catered to, as an audience. I was thrilled when the show’s early reviews were so glowing. I watched the show and couldn’t have agreed more. I said many things about how thrilling it was to anticipate a fifth season.

It’s just, also, I knew what was coming. And I kept thinking, was I wrong? And stupid? Was I wrong and stupid to think the showrunners knew what I loved about this show? Was I wrong and stupid to love those things about this show?

At the end of the new season of Veronica Mars, Logan and Veronica get married. Then Logan gets blown up in a big explosion. When asked “dear God whyyyyyyyyy” (or some more professional version of the question), showrunner Rob Thomas had this to say:

“The longer I play these high-school relationships, the more it will feel like nostalgia. I almost feel like it will grow sad, it will be a process of diminishing returns to keep being the thing we always were…. The happy pairing off of the leads of the show usually mark[s] the end of the show. Badass private eye and her husband back in Neptune didn’t feel like the show that could sustain itself moving forward.”–Vulture

Which raises the question: Has Rob Thomas ever watched his own show?

The idea that the show would become derailed if positive relationships in the lead’s life were pulling her toward domestic stability is deeply strange considering that the lure of domestic stability has always been one of the show’s central tensions. Veronica’s story is the story of a girl tempted by normalcy, but ultimately unable or unwilling to achieve it.

In the show’s first season, Veronica is determined to find her best friend’s killer no matter what—that’s the season’s central mystery, and it’s obvious that the cost of solving it has been, is, and will be steep. But Veronica can’t let it go. She cares about justice, and she won’t be stalled by the many structural forces that oppose her, from corruption in the police force to economic inequality in the schools and government of her home town. At the same time, she’s frantically trying to find her mother, hoping beyond hope that she’ll be able to repair her fractured family and return to—

What’s that you say? To domestic stability? Yes, that is what she desires.

But the price of the domestic stability she wanted so badly—the price of keeping her mother in her life—is too high. When the rubber hits the road, Veronica refuses to keep believing her mother’s lies about her alcoholism. She cares more about Truth than comfort. That’s one of her most admirable traits, but it can also be one of her most self-destructive.

In subsequent seasons, we start to see the cracks, the moments where Veronica’s admirably dogged pursuit of justice takes on shades of risk-taking behavior connected to a sense of foreshortened future—a common symptom in young trauma survivors like Veronica. She walks into a bar full of mob guys and is this close to getting a tattoo when Logan comes in with a gun and gets them both out of there. (The tattoo thing may not sound that bad out of context, so you will have to take my word for it that it’s quite scary.) Sure, she’s there to clear Logan of murder charges, but there’s no compelling reason why an adult couldn’t take care of it for them.

What makes Veronica Mars special is that she can’t achieve the social disconnect of your average (male) noir detective. Structures of inequality and corruption might keep Veronica in business; they might keep her jaded and mistrustful as hell; but they can never quite force her to cut ties with the people who love and support her, particularly her dad but also Wallace and Mac and (sometimes) Logan. Even as her passion for justice, and her knack for self-immolation, drag her away from them, she still values and needs them. She still bakes cookies and slips them into Wallace’s locker on the sly. What can she say? She’s a marshmallow.

So why make a choice like this? Why tip the scales so far to one side, after four seasons spent exploring the balance? I’ve got a theory, and it makes me want to punch the wall like Logan Echolls right before he gets laid on the kitchen (y’all, that is extremely unsanitary). Here’s Thomas again, on the show’s genre:

“If we were born as a hybrid teen soap/mystery show, we think we can only move forward as a mystery show.” (AV Club interview)

“How I see the show moving forward is much more a mystery, that’s the lifeblood of the show. It’s no longer half-teen soap and half-murder mystery. Now, it’s going to be fully a mystery show.” (Thrillist interview)

“I want to position us more like ‘Sherlock,’ where we can come back from time to time to do these big mysteries. I think the show has a better chance of survival as a mystery show than as the teen soap it was in 2005.” (The Wrap interview)

Rob Thomas has said the words “teen soap” approximately 750,000 times since the season dropped last month, and savvy media consumer that I am, I believe I’ve cracked his cunning code. When he says “teen soap,” he means “shit that girls like.” I’m struggling to escape the sense that Thomas doesn’t want girly feelings cooties all up in his gritty noir badassery, particularly as I finish watching a season of Veronica Mars that featured no Mac and next to no Wallace (he’s mainly there as a symbol of what Veronica thinks she should want), and ended with Keith out of the biz and Logan dead.

The show’s conclusion feels like a message to the largely female fanbase that we were wrong for caring about elements the show has worked very hard to make us care about. Wouldn’t it be better—more seemly—if we left behind childish things like “feelings” and “relationships” and remade Veronica Mars into a photocopy of every lone wolf dude noir hero ever to alienate women from the genre?

In his interview with Vulture, Thomas considers the possibility “that what [fans] loved about the show was not the mystery, it was her friends and romantic relationships,” a dichotomy so false that it has sent me to my fainting couch in a wrathful swoon. Like many TV viewers, I am able to enjoy the twists and turns of the Neptune Bombing mystery while also craving more of Kristen Bell’s chemistry with Percy Daggs III, whose ability to exude goodness, support, and wry humor from every pore is untouched by the ravages of time. Like a goddamn sucker, I believed the show knew that its strength arose from the marriage of those elements.

It’s an exhausting fact that many creators would prefer to leave narrative money on the table than court fans they believe to be there for the wrong reasons. Gavia Baker-Whitelaw lays out beautifully the case of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which tanked Captain America’s central relationship rather than gratify shippy hearts even slightly. After making a movie that leaned into everything (Rob Thomas thinks) fans wanted, and getting roundly dinged for being too nostalgic, Thomas is overcorrecting.

Our media landscape remains deeply suspicious of women’s stories, which is why “soap opera” is such a reliable metonym for unseriousness. A show that spends time developing relationships cannot be prestige television, no matter how elegantly it subverts the tropes of noir detective stories. The notion that there is middle ground between “badass noir detective” and a static, normative “happily ever after” does not seem to have occurred. Veronica has always been a damaged and traumatized character who manages to keep her head above water because of the good heart and sense of justice that anchors her to the support and love of people like Wallace and Keith. If Rob Thomas can’t imagine how to write a show about a character like that, perhaps he might watch the first season of Veronica Mars for some ideas.

The post Teen Soaps Can Be Murder Mysteries Too: The Case of Veronica Mars appeared first on Reading the End.

Episode 19

Or if you wish, you can find us on iTunes (and if you enjoy the podcast, give us a good rating! We appreciate it very very much).

Here are the contents of the podcast if you wish to skip around:

Starting at 00:57 – We discuss Christos Tsiolkas’s 2008 book The Slap (affiliate links: Amazon, B&N, Book Depository). Short version: We didn’t care for it.

Starting at 13:03 – Whiskey Jenny and I could not have been more excited for the movie of Veronica Mars. Nor could we have been more excited to talk about it for a really long time on this podcast.

Starting at 39:55 – We answer a piece of listener mail! What book would you put on the guest room nightstand in preparation of a guest’s arrival?

45:50 – Closing remarks and outro.

Credits
Producer: Captain Hammer
Photo credit: The Illustrious Annalee
Song is by Jeff MacDougall and comes from here.

The post Reading the End Bookcast, Ep.19: The Slap, Veronica Mars, and Listener Mail appeared first on Reading the End.

Note: All spoilers. Spoilers everywhere.

The wonderful Linda Holmes, with whom I nearly always agree (particularly about gender stuff), wrote a piece complaining about the trope of the Bad Caterpillar and how boring it is to have made the love of the Bad Caterpillar the main stakes in the movie. Piffle, say I. Bad Caterpillar Logan having his edges sanded off (shut up! I can mix my metaphors however I want!) is a side show. The stakes of the movie are whether Veronica is capable of — or interested in — becoming her own Good Butterfly; and I don’t think any of us needed twelve voice-overs with appropriative addiction language to assure us that she isn’t.

There’s a scene in the third season of the show where Logan and Veronica are having a fight, and Logan says, “Even right now, as you’re thinking Crap, he’s got a point, you still think you’re ultimately right.” It’s such a good line! It’s so true! Veronica always still thinks she’s ultimately right. Believing that the end justifies the means is the downside to her unflinching moral code, and some of the means she’s employed over the years were, yeah, pretty damn shady.

If we’re Veronica’s friends, we obviously want her to get an amazing job as a hotshot New York lawyer, marry someone sweet and attentive if she feels like it, maybe seek some therapy to work through her not-inconsiderable trust issues, and never ever set foot in Neptune again. But we’re not her friends, and we don’t truly want what’s best for her. We don’t want her to find peace. We want her to be angry and not to leave well enough alone. We want her to take on social inequality like the damn force of nature she always was.

Which is why Logan’s Good-Butterfly-ness or lack thereof is, in my opinion, not the point of the movie; and also is not that relevant to the Netflix series that I have now convinced myself we’re going to get even though I know we probably won’t. Logan’s the reason Veronica comes to Neptune, but he’s not remotely the reason she stays. She stays because she is angry and she can’t leave things alone, and the corrupt pricks of the Neptune police force framed her friend and almost killed her father. Like she would ever leave after that.

I think it’s pretty impressive that the movie conveyed all of this while staying true to who the character has always been and squeezing in an appearance by Max Greenfield. (Bless him.) I have missed watching Kristen Bell tilt at windmills, and I’m excited at the prospect of setting her loose on the forces of racial injustice in this country. Woohoo! Down with racial injustice! NEXT I WOULD LIKE A NETFLIX SERIES.

And now, an important question that Whiskey Jenny and I have been considering: Who leans against a car better, Timothy Olyphant or Jason Dohring?

The post Veronica thou art loosed appeared first on Reading the End.