Hey, Piz said it, not me. Far as I'm concerned, Rob Thomas is a good guy.Spoilers for the "Veronica Mars" series finale -- and thank you very much, CW promo guys, for that taunting "season finale" ad right before it started, as if there's any value in pretending it's not dead -- coming up just as soon as I seal up our doggie door...
Sigh... Rob said he was very happy with how they ended the season, and he was right. These two episodes were easily the highlight of this self-contained bloc, and the finale was by far the best episode of the season -- probably up in my top 5 "Veronica" episodes ever. I still can't blame Dawn Ostroff and Moonves for pulling the plug -- the audience had very clearly rejected this show -- but I feel a lot sadder about it now than I would have if we had ended after, say, the Uganda episode, or even the Paul Rudd episode.
Or maybe I'm just feeling sad because of what Veronica did to Keith. My wife felt that was a lousy ending for the show, but it felt right to me. This began as a noir show, and while those influences waned in the later seasons (especially after Lamb died and Keith became sheriff), I was glad to have it back for the finale. Veronica's always had this bull in a china shop approach, and she's gotten away with it with few repercussions for herself or the people she cared about. Not this time. Great work by Enrico Colantoni as Keith began realizing he was investigating his daughter, and equally great work by Kristen when she finally came home after Jake Kane told her there was no fixing this for Keith. Veronica casting a futile vote for Keith and walking off into the rain is a bleak ending, but strangely appropriate. We're left dangling a bit on what will happen to Keith -- He'll almost certainly lose the election, but will he do jail time? Lose his PI license, too? -- but as series-ending danglers go, I've seen far, far worse ("Now And Again" being the one that messed with me the most).
And it also felt appropriate to return, at the end, to the show's other core elements: Veronica taking on the rich and powerful (both the fraud ring and, especially, The Castle), Veronica as a school outcast (and having an undeserved reputation as a whore), Veronica squaring off with Jake Kane and Clarence Wiedman, Veronica being at odds with law-enforcement, etc.
It was great -- and, since I either didn't notice his name in the guest credits or they kept it until the end, surprising -- to have Kyle Secor back. His delivery of "Veronica Mars? VERONICA MARS?!?!?!" was a thing of beauty, and the huge portraits of Duncan and Lilly in the mansion were both a callback to the show's origins and a reminder of how much Jake has lost. His daughter's dead. His son is going to be a fugitive for the rest of his life. His wife seems gone. Now he's just a cranky rich man with only his stupid secret society to take care of. I'd feel a little sorry for him if he wasn't, you know, such a bastard.
Along the way, we had characters who had either been too absent or too uninteresting returning to prominence and form: Weevil is planting a foot (probably on the injured leg) back on the wrong side of the criminal line, Wallace is flying model planes and making sacrifices for Veronica, Logan has violence issues, and Mac is using her mad computer skills to help Veronica (I can't remember the last time she did this on a case). After a season in which the supporting cast felt adrift and too often absent, it was nice to have them all back and all acting like I remembered them, and none of it felt like a reset button was being hit.
Some briefer, more specific thoughts on the episodes to follow:
- I didn't see the point of the answering machine payoff in the first episode. If Veronica had the whole thing recorded on her Sidekick, what does it matter if the machine at the office did or didn't get it? (Also, one of my few nitpicks of the episodes: How do these techno-savvy fraudsters not recognize that Veronica could be screwing them one of 17 different ways with that Sidekick?)
- Wallace wearing the electro-shock collar was massively creepy -- and made me even more invested in Veronica taking them down -- only to be surpassed in the creepy factor by Gory's confession about his dad and uncle and the woodshop.
- And speaking of Gory, I suppose Logan's fate is also something of a dangler, but he's always had a death wish, so it fit.
- One other complaint: Dick wallowing in guilt over how he treated Cassidy didn't really work (the character's been too shallow for far too long to make me care about his feelings now) and was abruptly dropped as soon as he found the Veronica/Piz sex video.
- The sound on my DVR dropped out for almost the entire scene in the first hour where Wallace was told about The Castle. Was anything useful said? And did anyone not assume that the sex tape came from a Castle camera planted to keep an eye on Wallace?
- Kristen sings one last time! Too bad it wasn't something more interesting than "Bad Day," even if that was appropriate (and funny) for the situation.
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