‘Veronica Mars’ Season 4: Why I’m Still Not Okay With The Final Episode

Veronica Mars Season 4 Ending

I was hugely excited by the announcement that a fourth season of teen noir show Veronica Mars was going to be made, nearly fifteen years after the show’s initial air date (and cancellation after three seasons), and five years after the crowdfunded movie came out. As soon as the show dropped on Hulu (or Stan, if you’re in Australia like me) – a week earlier than initially slated, I rushed to watch it. And I was so distraught by the ending that it genuinely took two days for my mood to return to something even vaguely resembling ‘okay’.

For those of you who haven’t seen it *SPOILERS FROM HERE ON*, season four has Veronica (Kristen Bell) chasing down a serial bomber who seems to be trying to destroy the Spring Break business in Neptune. It turns out that the first bomb was set by property developer ‘Big’ Dick Casablancas, trying to destroy the Spring Break business in order to buy the waterfront properties cheaply, and the subsequent bombs were set by a pizza delivery man, Penn Epner (Patton Oswalt), who fancies himself a detective and is out to find glory after he is initially ridiculed for his public accusation of an incorrect suspect. The season itself had several issues (one of them being some seriously murky motivations behind Epner’s behaviour, like, if he really was that much of a genius, why was he a pizza delivery man?, and that the people ultimately behind the crimes are more or less ‘hidden in plain sight’ all along, which is a disappointing departure from the way the initial seasons cleverly hid the villain until quite late in proceedings). However, the issue for which there is not enough therapy in the world to appease me is the season’s last-minute killing off of reformed bad-boy and Veronica’s long-time boyfriend, Logan Echolls (Jason Dohring), right after they finally got married.

Series creator and showrunner, Rob Thomas, justified this decision by saying ‘I know this seems crazy or harsh but Veronica is at her best when she’s an underdog and I don’t know that there’s much to root for if she’s now got a perfect relationship. I need to keep her fighting and I need to keep her a little bit uncomfortable in order to have a show. There’s nothing funny or interesting about perfection.’

Except that’s a deeply flawed understanding of how relationships function, and a deeply messed up thing to push on to people.

It’s fair to acknowledge that once the ‘will-they-won’t-they’ is resolved, TV shows often decline in quality, or at the very least, significantly depart from the original formula which made them into such beloved hits at their beginning. But there are two significant issues with this: First, the assumption that TV shows must remain the same in order to be good. There are some interesting observations that the job of the sitcom episode (in particular) is to return all characters to more or less their original starting points. While that is broadly true, TV shows, like life, need to evolve in order to stay interesting, and as across seasons, audiences grow alongside the characters they watch evolve and mature.

Nevertheless, it was fair for Thomas to note that the characterisation of Veronica is someone who is embittered and cynical about people’s fidelity and inherent goodness  – after all, when we first meet her at the age of sixteen, her best friend has been brutally murdered, she’s been raped, her alcoholic mother has upped and left, and her adored father and moral compass has been socially ostracised for a) doing his job and b) being not super wealthy. It’s a lot. Veronica’s very understandable trust issues are compounded by the moonlighting she does as a P.I where, to she regularly sees people cheating on one another and generally behaving in unpleasant ways. So it’s reasonable to point out that for Veronica, the notion of the ‘happily ever after’ is a deeply uncomfortable one. But to keep her in the same mindset as she was at aged 16 is to deny her the capacity to grow as a character.

It’s fair that there was a desire to avoid repeating the pattern previously established (withdrawn/bitter etc), but – and here is my ultimate point – that could have been avoided.

Some of the most complex and interesting storylines come from couples who get together and have to navigate relationships; compromising to fit together, find a way to make it work. Think about the evolution of Niles and Daphne’s relationship in Frasier (and leave aside some of the aspects to his earlier infatuation with her that seem distinctly distasteful in a post-#metoo world). While much of the humour between them in earlier seasons was because of his unrealised ardour for her, after they became a couple, the hardships they navigated through being a couple, and the deepening richness of their relationship that was both romantic and based in friendship, produced some truly hilarious moments. Similarly, one of my (and our fabulous Chief Nerd, Elise’s) favourite TV shows, Chuck, *SPOILER* has the two leads get together in season 3. The show was no lesser for that fact because as Chuck and Sarah’s relationship deepened, they explored facets of themselves that they hadn’t previously shown – it provided more material for the writers, not less.

One of my favourite articles on the ending of Veronica Mars, season four, pointed out that Logan has the most interesting character development because he works to better himself – he has come a long way from the miscreant teenager who organised ‘bum fights’, and he had the potential to become an even more interesting character. How this interacted with Veronica’s cynicism could have provided significant fodder for more story.

But, giving full credit to Rob Thomas for a moment here, the show is called Veronica Mars, not Logan Echolls. So the decision to axe Logan was made to push Veronica’s character development forward, especially given the shows position as a gender-flipped noir which so often has the embittered, cynical detective dealing with the ongoing pain of a tragically killed love.

But the problem is that I can’t actually see how this is going to do anything but ossify Veronica’s primary characteristics: bitter, a hardnosed and reckless desire to catch the bad guy at any cost. Moreover, in most of the noir detective stories, this love has died before we meet the hard-bitten detective.

Thomas said to The Hollywood Reporter, “Moving forward, we’re going to really build around [the idea that] the case is the thing and less of the soap opera of Veronica’s life.” Except Veronica Mars is all about character. Her interactions with her father, Keith (Enrico Colantoni) and the genuine bond of affection between them evokes some of the show’s most poignant interactions. Her internal struggle when the pursuit of justice comes up against questions of morality is inherent grounded in her character. One of its most interest aspects across the years is that Veronica is often wrong. She falsely accuses people (including Logan himself), she behaves badly, she takes her friends for granted, and she can be reckless to the point where she endangers herself and someone has to come in and rescue her (case in point: wandering into the base of an Irish gang that had a particular grudge against her father). So to strip away the elements to the story that allow for depiction and consideration of those complexities would be to lose much of the show’s point.

There’s also a part of me that feels the way in which Logan was killed feels personal. Logan and Veronica were never initially meant to get together, but in the first episodes, the chemistry between the characters, and Kristen Bell and Jason Dohring was so profound that it was written in. I might be putting on my tin foil hat to say this, but it feels as though Thomas resented the manner in which LoVe became such a pivotal part of the Veronica Mars ‘brand’. What really underpins that for me is that the way the series sent off other characters was considered, and gave them a certain ‘exit’. The way in which Logan was killed off feels almost like an afterthought, made more so by some of the questions that arise from the manner. How did he know that she would be in it when it actually blew up? Moreover, the convenience of him leaving a voicemail for his therapist about why he wanted to marry Veronica (why exactly would he call his therapist to tell him about his epiphany? Who has that kind of relationship with their therapist?), and this woman’s decision to keep it from Veronica for a year seems weirdly contrived. Because it was.

However, to be fair, one could claim that the season mistreated some of its other characters, too. Tina Majorino who plays Cindy ‘Mac’ Mackenzie specifically noted that she did not want to return because she did not want her character to be sidelined. Similarly, the complexity to Eli ‘Weevil’ Navaro’s character was stripped away, as was the depth of his relationship with Veronica. What’s worse is that this could have been a really interesting storyline; why he decided to walk away from the court case which would have seen him awarded with compensation for what happened to him in the movie. While we are told that his wife left him along with his child, prompting him to return to his old gang-running ways, the depth of his grief and the reputable life he lost were never really portrayed. Honestly, I would have preferred that rather than the convoluted storyline that involved Mexican cartel hitmen.

But beyond my argument as a writer as to why Logan’s death was a totally unnecessary element to bring in, it also feels like a real slap in the face to fans. I’ve previously talked about the relationship this show has with its fans. Realistically, season 4…hell, the movie, only existed because of the love and support fans showed the show.

Any narrative material exists to interact with fans. Obviously, there is a fine line that can cross into blatant pandering, and there is also a trend that offers a ‘gritty’ or ‘sad’ end (ie the tragic death of the lover), but it’s a balance.

The Veronica Mars movie was very much fan service – it was, after all, fan funded. Much of the movie’s contents and storyline were determined by what Thomas was seeing from fan comments on social media, noting “I did have an idea of things people wanted to see, characters I wanted to get an appearance in, whether it felt extraneous or not.” He added, “there’s no way in the world we would have had a fan-funded movie and I would have killed Logan,” he added.

In the same interview, he said, “I fear that leaning into the high school soap that the show started out as is a losing proposition, that it will start feeling nostalgic rather than vital. If Kristen [Bell] and I want to make more of these Veronica Mars mysteries, I think it’s going to survive best as a true mystery show with a badass PI at the center of it, and I think that works better if the PI doesn’t have a boyfriend.”

Yet for a show whose who schtick was challenging the noir detective genre, it seems the prospect that someone fundamentally gritty and damaged can also have a relationship that the struggle to be healthy was simply a bridge too far.

And at the crux of it, what really frustrates me – as a fan, and as a writer – is that for Thomas, it simply felt too hard to give Logan and Veronica an enduring relationship, and it if wasn’t too difficult, then he perceived it destroyed some fundamental part of the show by making it  emotionally sappy. If that’s the dichotomy in which Thomas thinks, then Veronica Mars is no longer the show which attracted its die-hard following of fans and may as well be a different show with a similar premise.

What did you think of the final episode? Tell us in the comments below!

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