Finale wrap-up: "Veronica Mars" | Salon Arts & Entertainment
By Stephanie Zacharek
Season 3 of this drama about a solidly middle-class teenage detective -- played by the wonderful Kristen Bell -- and her adventures and mishaps in the tony (fictional) Southern California enclave of Neptune wasn't the strongest of the series: It didn't have the melancholy noir brush strokes of Season 1, in which Veronica unraveled, as a way of dealing with her own grief, the murder of her best friend, Lilly Kane (Amanda Seyfried). And it didn't have the sustained dramatic texture of Season 2, which focused on the painful romantic travails of Veronica and her on-again, off-again boyfriend, Logan Echolls (Jason Dohring), and also plumbed the layers of trust -- and occasional mistrust -- between Veronica and her dad and business partner, Keith Mars (Enrico Colantoni).
those links lead to finale write-ups (& review of whole season) also by Stephanie Z. whose writing I think I've admired prvsly..

re season 1-- Whodunit -- and much more:
In its first season "Veronica Mars," which its creator, Rob Thomas, originally envisioned as a series of noir novels for young adults, neither sentimentalized the high-school experience nor milked it for Janis Ian-style pathos. Instead, Thomas and his writers took the seemingly mundane matters that seem like life-or-death issues to a teenager (What does it say about me if I'm invited to eat at the rich kids' table? How do I feel about my old boyfriend going out with another girl?) and turned them into something more than just metaphors. huh that's int.
The show's heroine, Veronica Mars (Kristen Bell), who helps out part-time with the private-investigation business run by her dad, Keith Mars (the wonderful Enrico Colantoni), is so well-adjusted and self-possessed (and so sharp with a one-liner) that she barely fits in with the adults around her, let alone the kids. Formerly part of the "in" crowd in the Richie-Rich town of Neptune, Calif., she and her dad are now financial and social outcasts. (He used to be the town sheriff, but lost his job when he refused to go along with the easy and, of course, incorrect assumption regarding the perpetrator of the town's most scandalous murder.) Veronica is the perfect gumshoe loner, like a much prettier Bogey in jeans and a hoodie, and on last night's season finale, she finally unlocked the secret to the mystery that has tortured her for the better part of the school year: She caught the murderer of her best friend, Lilly Kane (Amanda Seyfried), who, the year before, had been found near the family pool with her head bashed in.
Each successive episode only confirms Veronica's perceived invincibility -- which is why it's so devastating when we see her confused or afraid, or when she's overcome with missing her mother. And in some ways, I think the show's most shattering revelation occurred in last week's episode: Before Lilly's death, Veronica attended a party with her upscale friends, only to wake up in a strange bedroom the next morning, unable to remember what had happened to her. Her panties had been removed, and she knew she had been drugged and raped -- but she didn't know who was involved, or how many people were involved.
The sexual assault was never a key plot point in "Veronica Mars" -- it was more of a heavy specter hanging over the show from week to week, rarely mentioned but always present. And while Veronica was humiliated and hurt by the experience, she never allowed it to define her or to drag her down. But naturally, she did want to know what happened to her. She asks questions of her classmates and friends, and entertains numerous what-ifs before finding the answer: It turns out that her then-boyfriend, Duncan Kane (Teddy Dunn), Lilly's brother, who had also been drugged at the party, had discovered her zonked-out in a guest bedroom and, in his own impaired state, decided it would be romantic to make love to her. The revelation is significant because it deals, in a shatteringly adult way, with the gray areas of human sexuality.
Did Veronica have sexual intercourse without her knowledge, and thus against her will? Yes. But was it her boyfriend's intent to rape her? No. It's made clear that, in Veronica's out-of-it state, she was happy to see Duncan, and she sent out signals that he understandably misread. The revelation doesn't allow Veronica the comfort zone of claiming easy victimhood, of railing against an unknown aggressor who intended to do her harm, because in some ways, Duncan was a victim too. The incident was tragic for both of them, an unpleasant (and potentially controversial) reality that the show wasn't afraid to crack wide open. sounds impressive.
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re season 2 Salon.com Arts & Entertainment | Finale wrap-up: "Veronica Mars":
..the light-as-gossamer, tough-as-nails relationship Veronica has with her father.. Colantoni is a marvelous actor, and the rapport between him and Bell is one of the loveliest, most unsentimental parent-child relationships ever seen on television.
But just now, Beaver has told Veronica that the device he's holding in his hand is set to blow up the small plane that her father is traveling in. He gives her less than a minute to call Keith on her cellphone, but she can't summon him. Beaver responds with a nasty shrug. And then, beyond these two rooftop figures, we see a fireball in the sky, a ragged symbol for one of the roughest passages in life -- that of losing a parent, and, in Veronica's case, a colleague who sometimes seems to be the only true friend she's got.
[cut to commercial leaving viewers thinking about] the look on Kristen Bell's face as she watches that explosion in the sky, a perversion of teenage openness in which a young person, ostensibly with everything to look forward to, is instead looking out on a vast world of grief.
Long after that endless commercial break, we realize Keith Mars isn't dead. But for a time, we live with Veronica's loss, and we feel it as if it were our own. Even those of us who lost parents long ago, and under far less dramatic circumstances, are likely to have felt a pang. You're never too old to be an orphan.

back to the current finale wrap-up of season 3:
Season 3 did set up the intriguing and perfectly realistic possibility that "Veronica Mars" could not only survive but continue to find ways to reinvigorate itself. For one thing, Thomas managed, seamlessly and gracefully, the tricky feat of getting his characters out of high school and into college.
Tuesday night's finale... The last two hours of "Veronica Mars" showed us Veronica and Piz's relationship ramping up, just as the two are to be separated for the summer. (He's staying in Neptune to intern at a radio station; she's headed to Washington for an FBI internship, a dream setup for a possible spinoff that is, unfortunately, not likely to become a reality.) Veronica, still uncertain how much she feels for Piz, tentatively seduces him -- only to learn later that the whole thing has been caught on tape. Logan believes Piz made the tape surreptitiously, and in an act of misguided chivalry (one that suggests he's still in love with Veronica, although the two have suffered a harsh split), he beats the crap out of him. With Wallace's help, Veronica finds out that members of a secret Skull-and-Bones-type organization at Hearst College, the Castle, made and distributed the tape. To prove it, she needs to break into the super-ritzy home of Jake Kane, Lilly Kane's father. In doing so, she's caught on a surveillance camera; her father, who has become interim sheriff after the death of sheriff Don Lamb, erases the tape to protect her. The show's final minutes suggest that Veronica's actions have cost her father the sheriff's election. And they cement the dour reality, posited at the very beginning of the series, that the rich assholes -- the Jake Kane types -- are always going to be the ones in charge. To quote the ever-perceptive English pop star Jarvis Cocker, in a song that uses a bit of non-gender-specific British slang: Cunts are still running the world.
I don't see this final episode as being especially rancorous: "Veronica Mars" has always been a clear-eyed show, never been a bitter one. But the episode did feel truncated, unfinished. It gave us no clear signposts telling us where, exactly, these characters are headed next, where they'll end up. Thomas may have figured that the best way to end "Veronica Mars" was to not end it at all -- to leave the show as the unfinished business that it is, to allow his characters to go about their lives as if, somewhere, somehow, on some mythical TV network of the imagination, they would actually continue to lead them.

Letters: Finale wrap-up: "Veronica Mars" - Salon:
--What I've missed most this season has been the truly biting and difficult characterizations and moral quandaries of the first and second season, and all of that came back in spades last night.Veronica's truly furious wit, Logan's emotionally charged knuckles, Wallace's loyalty, even Weevil's casual criminal side--it all gelled again in ways it hadn't done fully for most of the season. In its way, it was the perfect noir finish--the detective, having suffered a personal affront, jumps into the heart of a storm in her quest for justice/revenge. In the end, her actions failed to up-end the criminal power structure--they only reminded the high muckety-mucks that there's one person they cannot mess with, ever--but the price of her work is that several people she cared about got hurt (Wallace, Logan, Piz, Parker, Keith).
And at the last, the detective, finally understanding the consequences, walks away in the rain.