How Do You Solve a Problem Like Veronica (Mars)?

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Veronica (Mars)?

I’m assuming all us Marshmallows have, by now, seen the fourth season reboot of Veronica Mars. I’ve been stewing over it for a week, trying to get my feelings in check so I could compose something for the blog. I know it’s going to sound like I hated everything about season 4, but that’s not true. There were some great parts and, even though I also had some major issues with it, if they hadn’t killed Logan I’d have been on board for another season. But then the wheels came off the Veronica Express just as it rolled into the station and the more I read from the writers (and Kristen Bell, herself), the angrier I am about it. A solid week of therapeutic rage-tweeting just doesn’t do justice to my anger. It’s epic, spanning years and continents, lives ruined, blood shed. Epic. I hope that in the last week my thoughts have coalesced into something coherent. Maybe not, but I’m going to dive in anyway.

Ah, Neptune, how I’ve missed you! It’s like going home again. Not much has changed… and therein lies our first problem. But the issue isn’t what writer Rob Thomas thinks it is.

“The longer I play these high-school relationships,” he said, “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.”[1] “The movie was intentional nostalgia and fan service. It was a fan-funded movie. It was like making a list of all of the things that we thought fans wanted to see, and trying to build a mystery plot that would allow us to get to those bits of dessert. That was what we set out to do. These episodes [season 4] are a bridge to what Veronica Mars is going forward. If we started off with something that was half teen soap, half noir-mystery show, these episodes are taking us to a place where we are pretty strictly a detective show.” [3]

—   Rob Thomas

First off, what’s wrong with nostalgia? That’s your fan base. Country folks like me have a saying, Rob: you don’t shit where you eat. The fans are the reason your show that was cancelled after three seasons got a movie and was then resurrected from the dead 12 years after it last aired. That doesn’t happen on accident. Your fans are fucking necromancers. Fear them. They’re the reason you have this job. Stop degrading “fan service” and “pandering to the fans.” Without them, you’re just writing Veronica Mars fanfic. I’m so tired of patronizing showrunners telling us that they’re “giving us what we need, not what we want.” That’s like me going to work and telling my boss I’m giving him the work he needs, not the work he wants. It's not going to end well.

    

What’s sad, Rob, isn’t the high-school nostalgia— it’s the fact that Veronica as a character hasn’t changed at all in 15 years. She and Dick Casablancas are the only ones who have had zero personal growth. I love Dick… um, Mr. Casablancas… but he has the IQ of a walnut so I’m gonna give him a pass there. Veronica, on the other hand, I expected better from. It wasn’t until I was a couple episodes into the new season, horrified by the way she was treating her friends and her boyfriend, that I truly realized something: that’s who she’s always been. Veronica is laser-focused on what she wants, on the mystery in front of her that needs solving, and she’ll walk over everyone in her path to achieve that. Her unbridled selfishness was expected, understandable, and even endearing in the first two seasons when she was a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old girl who had been through an unimaginable amount of trauma. It was less appealing in season three. Remember when she tanked her father’s election because she couldn’t be bothered to pick up the damn phone? Everything else is sacrificed in the wake of Veronica achieving her goals. And we’ve loved her in spite of it because, hey, her heart was mostly in the right place and she’s been through a lot.

And then we get to the movie. Maybe we were just so glad to have her back that we were willing to overlook her flaws, like the shitty way she treated Piz. I was never rooting for their relationship, so maybe I let that slide. But to be honest, looking back on it now, he wasn’t just some random dude she had dated for a hot minute. This was a guy who had loved her since freshman year of college and whom she had spent the last year in a relationship with. He deserved better than to be dumped over the phone. She knew when he was in Neptune that she still wanted Logan and she could have broken up with Piz in person, like an adult. At least Piz got a phone call, which is more than we can say for the law firm in New York that was trying to hire her. (Why does this girl even have a phone?) But we got our happy ending and it was probably the last time we’d see Veronica Mars, so I took the win and didn’t over-analyze it.

And then season four happened. I was really looking forward to seeing Veronica all grown up. What a badass woman she was going to be, right?? Wrong. Apparently, Rob only knows how to write teenage Veronica, so that’s what he’s done. And she is AWFUL! She’s a willful, selfish, myopic sixteen-year-old brat stuck in the body of a thirty-year-old woman and it’s become vastly unappealing. Let me count the ways:

LOGAN:

She was awful to Logan. She yells at him for proposing. She treats him like a loser because he’s actually made freakin’ heroic strides to better himself and take care of his mental health. The way Veronica belittles his therapy makes you wonder if Rob forgot that he gave her a degree in psychology from Columbia? Perhaps she should use that on herself because it was just disturbing the way she pushed Logan to lose his hard-won control and got turned on when he put his fist through the kitchen cabinet. For someone who spent the first three seasons badgering Logan to get control of his issues (and more than once breaking up with him because of them), it was just bizarre! Maybe the writers were going for one of those “be careful what you wish” for scenarios where she thought she wanted well-adjusted Logan but then realized she liked bad-boy Logan better. I think if that was the case, they could have taken some more time to explore that because it came off making Veronica look like a total psycho. And can we talk about the fact that when Logan Skyped her from deployment she got mad at him because she was doing something else and couldn’t just sit around waiting for him to call? Honey, when your soldier gets the time to call you, sit your ass down for fifteen minutes and talk to him! Wallace would have understood and the Murderheads would have still been in the basement. It was straight-up shitty and I lost a lot of respect for her as a character.

WALLACE:

She was awful to Wallace. Can we nominate him for sainthood for how many times he must have put up with her crap over the last fifteen years? I realize part of this is a pacing issue because they tried to cram what should have been 12 episodes into an 8 episode arc, but it comes away feeling like Wallace is trying to stay in her life and she doesn’t have time for him anymore. In one of the few opportunities to see him, the writers had her hijack their movie night to work on the case. Now I get that movie night with Wallace didn’t fit here because it did nothing to move along the narrative, but surely they could have found some other way to give him screen time? As a married father, I’m certain he doesn’t get many kitchen passes for time to hang out with his hot blonde best friend. He has a wife and a kid and a job, Veronica. Not everyone can just blow off the early showing of a movie and catch the later one. But, let’s face it, Wallace was never going to get to the 10:00 showing either, was he? I know there’s a murder to solve, lives on the line and all that, but it’s just another example of Veronica thinking only of herself and her wants and needs. Wallace was written like a dog, just her yanking his leash and taking him where she wanted him to go. He had about as much of a story arc as Pony, showing up as filler without any real purpose. We’ll get to the why of that later.

WEEVIL:

She was awful to Weevil. They never really explained what came between Veronica and Weevil. There was a vague mention of Keith and Cliff working on a lawsuit for him against Celeste Kane. Apparently Weevil settled out of court because he needed the money. So why is Veronica angry? Did Weevil not pay her dad and Cliff what was owed them? No explanation was given. Or was she angry that he didn’t hold out for more money? She couldn’t have been sympathetic to the fact that he had bills to pay and a family to support? As if she herself has never been in that situation? Come on. Or is it that Weevil had a wife and kid and lost them when he went back to gang life? Veronica, who hasn’t progressed one iota beyond what she was in high school, is looking down on him because he bettered himself and then fell back into his old life? Pot, kettle, black, my dear! And yet he still saved her ass in the end. Veronica doesn’t deserve him.  

  

KEITH:

She was less awful to Keith than anyone, but she still failed him. Another example of self-absorbed Veronica is the fact that her dad is clearly struggling and everyone noticed except her.

MATTY:

Other than Keith, she was the only one to see a better version of Veronica. I guess she was included this season because Veronica needed some reason other than lots of money and saving lives to care about this case, but I really wasn’t feeling this character at all. Obviously she’s meant to be Veronica Jr, but holy crap does no one else think that perhaps this version of Veronica should not be a role model for a traumatized teenage girl? And isn’t it sad that Veronica herself has been written to the point that she ISN’T a good role model anymore? But Matty might be a lost cause anyway. This high school girl breaks into Dick Sr.’s house, sees him get stabbed, is looking him right in the eyes when he’s beheaded… and just turns and walks away with zero emotion. No shock, no horror, no disgust. And then she goes off and plays in the band at the new high school’s dedication like nothing has happened. If she’d been a hardened criminal, I might have accepted that reaction. As it is, I think she’s a sociopath and I doubt that’s what the writers were going for. Add to that, her selling the engagement ring she found was a pretty morally bankrupt thing to do, but maybe I’m dragging my own personal baggage into this. When I was a kid my mother had some family heirloom jewelry stolen from her, and by extension all of our descendants. I would have been on board with the justification of it if the Maloofs had been responsible for the bombs, but they weren’t. So this kid steals a piece of jewelry with priceless sentimental value from the family of a bombing victim, which results in the violent deaths of two (albeit shitty) people. And we’re somehow supposed to cheer her on for this?? Not me. The only part of her story arc I truly enjoyed was Veronica saving her from Liam Fitzpatrick. That was one of the highlights of the whole season for me!   

LITERALLY EVERYONE ELSE:

Veronica was just bloody awful to everyone and I rarely felt any sympathy toward her the entire season. I don’t like her as a character anymore. How did that happen? She’s been one of my favorite people for decades! I’ve always enjoyed her snark, but in this season it was gifted to everyone on the show in such liberal doses that it came off as spectacularly bitchy instead of smart and witty. Even her quips about Dick just seem tired and childish now. After all these years the two of them can’t cobble together some sort of amicable relationship for Logan’s sake? Really? And it’s not just Dick. Everyone got the sharp side of her sanctimonious sarcasm and the sheer magnitude of it made it lose whatever humor they were going for. Veronica Mars has turned into a Mean Girl. She’s basically become Madison Sinclair and that is just heartbreaking to me. Where is the Veronica I fell in love with? I didn’t see much of her here. But then they saved everyone at Kane High and Veronica had an epiphany. We finally saw some of her marshmallowy center again. I thought, “Ok, this is it. This is where they pull victory from the jaws of defeat where Veronica’s character is concerned.” Cue a great ending, with Veronica seemingly on the road toward being a healthier person, someone I’d want to watch more of in the future. And that lasted about five minutes. Thanks for nothing, Rob Thomas.

THE PROBLEM WITH VERONICA:

Veronica’s problem isn’t her. Not really. It’s the fact that Rob doesn’t know how to write her any other way. He doesn’t know how to write her as a grown woman, and he’s freely admitted it. He wants to keep the same damaged, traumatized, angry girl she was in high school. He doesn’t want her to grow or evolve because he either doesn’t know how to write that person, or he doesn’t want to. If that’s the case, let him write for Matty and give Veronica to someone else. Or better yet, hand off this show to other writers and let him go write his tortured noir detective drama. From what I’ve read in his interviews, he has this vision of Veronica that’s so disassociated from what Veronica Mars is that it might as well be a different series. And that, my friends, is the core of the problem with Veronica. What Rob wants to write isn’t Veronica Mars. It’s a dark, twisted detective show that bears little resemblance to the series we know and love. But, hey, he has a show about a detective, and he has a loyal fan base already in place. Instead of creating something new, let’s just use what we have in storage. What could go wrong with that? Again, let me count the ways….

“But our hope is that we get to tell more Veronica Mars mysteries, and if we do get to do that, we want it to exist as a mystery show, Veronica Mars as a P.I. out in the world, solving mysteries. [2]

— Rob Thomas

This is where it becomes apparent that Rob and the fans have two very different ideas of the kind of show Veronica Mars actually was. He sees it exclusively as a detective/mystery show. I always thought of it as an ensemble show about this interesting town and all its diverse characters that just happened to be set against the backdrop of a murder mystery. For me, the show was about the characters first and the mystery second. Having Veronica out in the world leaves behind this huge cast that has rich depth and endless sources of narrative from which to draw. Bitter, angry, snarky, damaged Veronica alone in the world holds no appeal for me. Keep her in Neptune, where she belongs. She doesn’t need to leave home to solve murders. Murder, She Wrote ran for 12 seasons and in that time Angela Landsbury’s sleepy little fishing village in Maine had 5.3 murders per year. Have you heard of the BBC, Rob? England abounds with well-loved mystery detectives whose tiny towns have an alarmingly high murder rate. Perhaps you should check them out. I don’t think it’ll be jumping the shark if Neptune has one big murder per season.   

And doing that with a boyfriend or a husband just felt less interesting, less sexy, less noir… [2]  

—   Rob Thomas

I couldn’t give a fuck how “noir” it is. (And saying “noir” over and over again doesn’t make it what Veronica Mars is.) Maybe it’s not as interesting for you to write, but it’s more interesting for us to watch! We love Veronica and we want her to be happy. None of us think she’s ever going to have an easy life, so giving her this one thing (a supportive husband) to ground her is what will keep her from becoming a character we hate. Having Logan there to try to drag her, kicking and screaming, into functional adulthood was literally the only thing I found interesting about her character this season. Take that away, and she’s not someone I’m rooting for anymore. Oh, and by the way, did you see Logan walk out of the ocean with that surfboard? All our sexy eye candy boxes are checked, thanks.

It’s just hard to imagine a detective show with a 35-year-old woman with a boyfriend. I just don’t want to write that. [3]

—   Rob Thomas

Yes! Yes, I can imagine it, Rob! And it would be amazing. I don’t have the chops to write it, but you need to get some romance writer in to help you with this, since you clearly don’t want to do it. Veronica deserves this and you’ve created the perfect character in Logan Echolls to challenge her, to protect her, to fight for her and alongside her.  

If you can’t have your detective have romantic interests, it’s hard. [3]

—   Rob Thomas

Columbo, Poirot, Miss Marple, John Barnaby, Adrian Monk, I could go on. It’s not hard to write great detectives who aren’t getting laid every episode, you just want to write trauma porn.

And it teeters on phony trying to get Logan involved in the case somehow to keep him present. If he’s just going to be the boy she goes home to at night, that’s less interesting to me. I can’t say that it’s impossible. But it didn’t appeal to me as much.” [3] “And it was tough keeping Logan involved in this particular mystery. I didn't want that challenge each time. [2]

—   Rob Thomas

I can’t think of anyone easier to write into a story about a detective than a Navy intelligence officer with martial arts skills! (Can I mention how glorious that fight with the Carr brothers was?) There is a bottomless well of ways to integrate Logan into the narrative and if he doesn’t fit at one point or another, deploy him. You need to torture Veronica that badly? Having her husband away God-knows-where, in God-knows-what kind of danger, is emotional conflict in and of itself. This isn’t rocket science. I get that it isn’t going to be as easy to fit Logan, Wallace, Weevil, and Dick into each story as it was when they were all in high school together. I don’t think anyone expects that. It would have been easy enough, though, to make one of the bombing victims Wallace’s star basketball player, or to make one of the victims (or suspects) someone from Weevil’s world. That would have given them a stake in the outcome. Instead, you chose four people no one knows or gives a shit about as victims. If none of your core characters fit anywhere into your story, you don’t need new characters. You need a different story.

Also, we're doing a show that's noir, and our noir detective and her happy home life with her boyfriend or husband just didn't feel right moving forward… Also in most of noir, that possibility for romance or sex exist in those stories, and it's tough to have that exist if there is a husband at home.” [2]

—   Rob Thomas

Anyone else getting so damned tired of Rob’s “noir” hang-up? I feel sorry for his wife that I have to say this, but you can be married and have sex and romance! Why is it that everyone assumes that we can’t be happy unless our heroine is banging random dudes every week or is in a constant on-again/off-again relationship? I’ve been in that endless on/off relationship. It wasn’t fun for me and it sure wasn’t fun for the people around me. Maybe I’m just old, but I don’t want to watch that anymore. It’s fucking exhausting. That’s one of the reasons I was looking forward to this season so much. I was dying to finally see a strong, independent, successful woman with a great man behind her. There isn’t enough of that out there. When I got done with the first book in my series, my editor said, “Great! Now how are you going to break them up in the next book?” She wasn’t happy when I told her I wasn’t. “Well, how are you going to create conflict, then?” Lady, they’re vampires. By the time the series progresses to present day, they’ll have been together for 200 years. That’s 200 years of being married and fighting evil. I’m pretty sure we’ll have sufficient conflict there without me making either of them into assholes. I remember saying, “She’s a badass in her own right. Why can’t she just have a supportive husband?” And, yes, that might be why they didn’t renew my contract, but I will plant my flag and die on this hill. 

“And I want to strip the show of nostalgia. I want it to be about a kick-ass detective solving interesting cases. I don't think we're going to be ever as pure detective as something like Sherlock, but somewhere between Sherlock and Fargo, I think we could exist. 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.” [2] “I think the next one is going to be away from Neptune. I think she is done with Neptune for a little while. And the thing that Kristen and I have been talking about, and I don't know that this is what it will be, but [we've talked about] doing one of those Agatha Christie-style mysteries. Like a mystery in a snowed-in manor or on a boat, putting Veronica in a very Agatha Christie-like, though modernized, setting. It's one of the things we're playing with.” [2]

—   Rob Thomas

Can I be the one to break it to Rob? Pretty please? Rob, darling, the soap opera of Veronica’s life is why we all watched. It wasn’t the mysteries and I cannot for the life of me understand why, after all these years, you don’t get that! If you want it to be solely about the mysteries, then you need to come up with another show. You don’t take a show heavily built around a huge cast of characters and strip it all away. No one tuned in solely for the whodunit. We wanted to see how all of these diverse people from all different backgrounds came together in Veronica’s life. That’s what your show is about.

“After we decided we were taking a fourth season to the streaming networks, [Rob Thomas] said, ‘I have an idea in my head, let me work on it for a month and I will pitch it to you,'” star Kristen Bell says of Logan’s shocking death. “He pitched it to me over the phone — the entire mystery and gave me the spoiler at the end — and he said, ‘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.' When it comes to the end of Veronica and Logan’s story, Bell says, “As it turns out, Logan and Veronica were in love, they were the perfect couple and because we discovered that, unfortunately, we had to tear it down.” [4]

—   Kristen Bell

Girl, I don’t even know where to start with you. Can we all just assume that Kristen Bell has been Stockholm Syndromed into towing the company noir line by Rob Thomas? Because if she truly believes this, I am speechless. Season 4 Veronica is anathema to Kristen Bell’s whole life and brand. Kristen is a strong, funny, independent woman who has a successful career, and children, and a seemingly great marriage to a husband who has fought his own demons. She’s very much like Veronica and she’s got millions of followers who think her life is interesting. To hear her say that there’s nothing funny or interesting about the same qualities in Veronica, is just mind boggling. I truly would have expected her to be the first person to stand up for Veronica and say, “This is not my Veronica. This is not the kind of person I want my kids watching.” She’s said that she wants her girls to grow up in a world with Veronica in it, but is this the version she wants to show them? This hard, bitter, broken Mean Girl without a shred of empathy? Someone who has little regard for anyone beyond what they can do for her? Someone who is toxic and emotionally abusive to the man who loves her? Who degrades and sabotages the years of work he’s put in to making himself a better person? No one is a bigger cheerleader for Dax Shepard’s sobriety than Kristen and that scene with Veronica and Logan in the kitchen should have been a wake-up call to her that this version of Veronica is not someone to be looked up to or emulated in any way. I could forgive it if they’d let Logan live, let him guide her on a redemption arc toward making her an emotionally stable adult. But, no, Rob wants to tear her down, heaping trauma on her until she is a shell of what she could have been. (Does anyone really believe she’ll talk to Jane the Therapist for any meaningful reason other than they need content for the voiceover??) Do you know what you get when you do that? You get Cersei Lannister and SPOILER ALERT: she was the villain, not the hero. I’m sure Veronica will be drinking and drugging and banging randos every week too… because it’s noir, baby! That’s really the legacy of a “strong woman” you want to leave for your kids and ours, Kristen?     

“[Writer Diane] Ruggiero-Wright shared that there was actually some considerable back and forth in the writers' room about the beloved character's fate. But ‘not from Rob, because Rob is very confident in his ideas,’ she made clear. ‘He has an idea, he has confidence in it and then he commits to it. He's not going to get talked out of something for bullshit reasons... If it's just that fans don't like it, there's no way he's going to listen to that.’ " [5]

—   Diane Ruggiero-Wright

As a writer, you’re selling a product. Telling the consumer that what they want out of your product is bullshit isn’t a really effective marketing strategy. Let me know how that works out for y’all. I, for one, won’t be tuning in to any more Veronica Mars episodes. A few days ago I would have said I’d watch if they brought Logan back and fixed Veronica, but now, after reading all these interviews, I don’t trust any of these writers anymore. They are all so clearly out of touch with their fans, their characters, and what their show actually is, that I can’t see a path forward for me as a viewer. I never thought I’d say that about one of the top 5 favorite shows of my life. If Hulu were to greenlight a “fixed” season 5, they really need to hire someone outside of Hollywood to consult on the scripts and make sure the writers don’t carpet bomb the fanbase again. (I’m available!) As for me, I choose to believe this is how season 4 ended:

Close up of Veronica lying on the her bed, screaming and crying because of the car bomb.

Pans out to a hotel room in Sedona.  

Logan, rolls over in bed: Veronica, what's wrong?

Veronica, shaken: I dreamed Rob Thomas blew you up.

Logan holds her: Rob Thomas is a whore. Go back to sleep.

THE END

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[1] https://www.vulture.com/2019/07/veronica-mars-ending-death-rob-thomas-explanation.html

[2] https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/veronica-mars-season-4-explained-rob-thomas-interview-1225788

[3] https://www.rollingstone.com/tv/tv-features/veronica-mars-hulu-spoilers-rob-thomas-interview-860225/

[4] https://ew.com/tv/2019/07/22/veronica-mars-season-4-kristen-bell-finale-shocker/

[5] https://www.etonline.com/veronica-mars-producer-admits-there-was-debate-over-controversial-season-4-ending-exclusive-129169