'Veronica Mars': Burn, baby, burn

And so The CW burns off the last two episodes of Veronica Mars in one night - against the final performance evening of that singing competition thing on another channel. And they wonder why not enough people watched this show. It's grating that Veronica Mars didn't even get a proper send-off; the two episodes shown Tuesday were adequate, but didn't have any sense of occasion to them.

In hour one, Veronica busts some rich kids who framed janitor/occasionally-recovered gang member Weevil for making fake student debit cards. It's nice to see the class conflict element of the show brought up again - it's what made the first season more than a quippy teen melodrama. In hour two, Wallace gets caught up to rush a secret society at Hearst College - a secret society that apparently inserts cameras into their initiates' rooms to keep an eye on them. The camera wound up catching Veronica and Piz in a very compromising position, and promptly lands on the Internet.

On the plus side, the tape inspires Logan to get all punchy - first he erroneously goes after Piz, then after one of the Skull-and-Boneheads that made the tape in the first place. Aw, nice to see the return of Neptune High's "obligatory psychotic jackass" - as Veronica so memorably called him in the pilot.

Doing her own investigation of the members of The Castle, Veronica tracks down where the pledges are meeting - and it's at Jake Kane's house. Jake - father to Veronica's murdered best friend Lilly and high school sweetheart Duncan - is a charter member of the secret society, and the owner of all the records detailing the dirty deeds of its members. To find out who taped her, Veronica steals the hard drive containing the information out of Jake's house. Jake's been down this road with Veronica before, however, and it doesn't take long for him to figure out who took the goods - and a security tape proves it. He puts Sheriff Mars in a nasty situation - arrest his own daughter, or find a way to make the problem disappear? And for the first time in memory, Keith breaks the law. He destroys the evidence to save Veronica - and, of course, he gets busted. The news hits the papers right before Election Day. And, in the very end, Veronica walks off into the rain, having cast her vote for her father in a race for sheriff where he will lose to a moron - the dimbulb private eye Vinnie Van Lowe, who admitted in an interview that he wanted the job because he thinks it would be cool to have a badge. Sigh. Hey, it could be worse - Keith could have lost to a Pussycat Doll. Oh wait, he did.

(Photo courtesy The CW)

Comments

[KristenBellFanClub.com Save Veronica Mars]

so disappointing -- not Veronica Mars the series -- but CW the CoWards.

Why couldn't TNT step in and take this series? -- they've made The Closer a winner / contender. They could do the same with VM.

[Art Marriott]

Frankly, even though this series has been one of my favorites, this last season has been something of a disappointment. The whole concept of a cheeky, precocious high-school age detective didn't translate all that smoothly to a college environment. This season also seemed to overly dwell on Veronica's sex life--don't get me wrong, it would be even sillier to portray a coed as good looking as Kristen Bell living life as a nun. At times, though, it seemed the writers were falling back on sex because they were running out of other ideas to push the audience's buttons--like the episode early in the season, where they not only showed Veronica and Logan in bed, but all but spelled out exactly what they'd been doing.

All this being said, This has been one of the few network series that's been able to hold my interest. With "Joan of Arcadia" and "Gilmore Girls" gone, the "Star Trek" franchise apparently laid to rest, "What About Brian" in apparent limbo, and more and more "reality" garbage already announced for the fall, I think I'm going to be looking for some good books to read.