Veronica Mars -- Papa's Cabin

Oh, my God, LUCKY TIM! That was totally awesome. That was the best reveal since Aaron Echolls. And I liked the different format, where it was very verbal, very not a thriller, although I must admit I was very nervous that Tim would try to stab her in front of all the other criminology students.

Everyone -- by which I mean my sister and TWoP, but which would include my mother if my mother were keeping up on Veronica Mars instead of just waiting for the DVDs so that she can fast-forward through any scenes that don’t feature Logan -- (kidding, Mom, kidding) -- (it’s totally true, everyone except Mom, you know it is) -- predicted the Lucky Tim killer thing. But I love being surprised, so I don’t mind feeling a little dumb to that end.

I did have the satisfaction of feeling like something was off about Tim for the first thirty-eight minutes of the episode. The whole time, even as I was enjoying Veronica being teamed up with someone and also getting to tell him what to do (she really does need Wallace and/or Piz and/or Mac to help her more actively in her cases, simply because I would find it fun and hilarious), there was the impending doom feeling of Wait A Minute, No Way is Tim Really That Stupid. (But dude, the latex glove scene was hilarious.)

I generally really like the villains’ motivations on VM, and think they’re believable and interesting. I think the creators do a good job generally of making them personal enough to resonate. (There are one or two exceptions; I didn’t love the fake rape and the reason behind it; I get both of those on an intellectual level but it was hard for me to plug into the characters and they didn’t resonate with me as I think they should/could have. But I liked the thought and effort that went into them.) This particular motivation, though, carries a certain amount of both resonance and catharsis on a purely personal level. You see, back in my formative years (read: a year and a half ago) I had a lovely prof who I admired and respected, who gave me lovely grades and had nothing but nice things to say about me in my conferences. She paid me very high compliments and said totally fantastic things about my paper. (I was the best paper I’ve ever written, so it deserved lots of good things said about it. But I digress.) So, the following year I ask her for a recommendation and she hems and haws and says that she can’t in good conscience recommend me for a grad school program and she has reservations about my writing. Now no one should recommend a student they don’t feel comfortable recommending, but for heaven’s sweet sake, students generally won’t ask you to recommend them unless you pay them lots of compliments and talk like you think they’re brilliant, and it’s a very annoying mixed message to send. (This prof pulled the same stunt on a couple of my friends, too, so I kind of think she was just passive-agressive.)

In any case, to return to Not-All-About-Me Land, what Landry did is far worse, since you should never say you’ll serve as a reference for someone and then not actually give them a good reference. But it was so much fun -- and if not exactly realistic, certainly just as realistic as anything else on VM -- that Tim would want to set Landry up for the murder to get back at him. I never considered that particular solution, but then, I was a philosophy major. (Now I’m trying to think of what the philosophy major alternative would have been. Maybe having her on my oral committee and then making her look like an idiot.)

Moving. On. Because this is dull to everyone except me.

I am so totally bummed that Lamb really is dead. I don’t mind the way he died; I thought the show sent him off as well as TV shows generally do; there’s no real way to kill off a main character so that you don’t piss everyone off. When you’re putting your main characters in more or less life and death situations every week, it’s really hard to have a death that’s meaningful. Because if something fairly standard gets them -- as with Lamb -- then you feel sort of gypped; but if something Very Special happens to kill them off -- the example that comes to mind is the death of Dax on DS9 -- then you feel like it does their character a disservice, because the very special thing is also generally very stupid, and you’re like, what? huh? and it feels too sudden and disconnected from the show as a whole. So really, there’s no way to win when you kill off a credits-character. There are ways to not lose as badly; Buffy used to do pretty well with that kind of thing, Joyce’s death was well done and Tara’s didn’t especially suck, but then, they dropped the ball with Anya and Spike, so what can you do. So the way Lamb died didn’t especially bother me, but the fact that he died did, if that makes sense. I thought Lamb was just so entertaining, and Muhney did such a wonderful job; I’m really going to miss that dynamic.

And you know, I really like Veronica and Keith better as PIs. I think that that element gives the show part of its noir grittiness, and I associate Keith being sherriff with the time before Lilly died, when Veronica was -- not dumber, but less hardcore, less interesting, less jaded, less fun to watch. As I think I’ve posted about before, I really like having Veronica need to walk the line between being a good PI and being a well-adjusted human being, and I think that line is easier to walk if you’re a regular police officer or sherriff, because you’re up against people breaking definite laws rather than people being kind of morally awful. I mean, Keith and Veronica handled things that were agains the law, as well, obviously; they just went after Dean O’Dell’s killer. But they also spent a lot of time going after people who were cheating on their spouses, or handling cases that the law couldn’t just step in and cover, and if the show loses that sort of -- how do I want to say? Reliance on situation? Moral grayness? Moral discussions, that kind of thing? If it simply becomes a matter of catching people who are breaking the law, I think it will lose a lot and I would be really disappointed. However, due to all the philosophical reading and so forth, I have a very black and white, idealistic view of what laws should be and what following them should mean, so I think I see a necessity to be more black and white that doesn’t actually exist. And I do trust the show not to lose its moral grayness; in the interviews I’ve read they seem very keen on that element and very determined to keep it. So if they can keep pulling off the kind of episodes they’ve been doing, but with Keith as sherriff, that will be really interesting, and I’ll be very impressed.

Oh, and I haven’t even hardly talked about the plot. I liked that Landry killed Mindy, by the way, and I like that it was an accident. Not because I don’t like Mindy -- I didn’t love her, but she was fine, whatever, hardly matters -- but because I really liked where that left us-the-viewers with regards to Landry’s character. Because Landry has never been exactly eeeeeevil, he has always been very self-serving, arrogant, and kind of slimy. And I like that, if we’re going to finish up with him (at least for awhile) that we get left with that taste in our mouths. He doesn’t exactly mean to kill Mindy -- not in the evil mastermind way of Lucky Tim -- but he doesn’t exactly mean for her to live, either. I thought the end of his arc was very consistent with his character, and I really liked that. And I won’t really miss Mindy, either; she was kind of a self-serving brat.

Oh, what else? I’ll be interested to see how Logan and Parker work out. I’d like to get invested in their relationship, but it will be difficult, since it’s been a long time since I was as invested in a TV romance as I am in the Logan/Veronica relationship. I mean, Willow and Oz were awesome, in a warm-fuzzies way, but I don’t usually get invested in relationships as dramatic as L&V’s. Buffy/Angel did nothing for me; neither did Rory/Jess on Gilmore Girls. I think it’s a tribute to Kristen Bell and Jason Dohring that I care so much what their characters think of each other, since usually this kind of relationship would bother me and in fact I haven’t squealed at the TV this much since Mulder and Scully. Before they started sucking completely, I mean. But go for it, Logan, ask out Parker; maybe Veronica can date Piz for awhile. And then you can come running back to each other like two little dysfunctional pinballs in love. (Which is totally going to be the name of my new album.)

Okay, enough rambling. No, wait, one more thing. I have to say, I really hope they keep the mini-arc format instead of just individual episode by episode mysteries next season. I like the episode by episode mysteries just fine, and it’s not like I’ll boycot in protest or anything (heaven forbid). But it takes out some of the fun if you don’t have a few episodes in between to try to guess who did it. Bare minimum, I hope they have a few three and four parters -- not just one and two -- next season, because I think they do them just brilliantly.