Finale wrap-up: "Veronica Mars" season 2 - By Stephanie Zacharek

One of the purposes of season finales is to wrap up a million and one loose ends -- or, in the case of "Veronica Mars," a million and two. ....

am lkg at again and want to put here for now, though alread have. I'm at loose ends (as I think is evident in the scattershot way I am posting here to dlww) still reading about VM but without focus, now that done watching season 1 & 2. and 3 does seem sorry-making. no new int to take its place. some of this at least is posted below, beginning of my watching VM. eg this part:
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. [commercials - but cld show us something amazing the people on the ship, the farmer plowing his fields... who must have seen something amazing - a boy falling from the sky
and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.]
... and we'd still be 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.

In a dewy-edged, painful dream sequence during this finale, Veronica imagines an alternative graduation day: Her parents are still together (in Veronica's real life, her mother, played by Corinne Bohrer, has a serious drinking problem and has left her family behind); Logan Echolls, and not Duncan Kane, is her true-blue boyfriend; and her best friend, Lilly Kane, is still alive. Everyone is happier this way, and at one point during this dream of the way things ought to be, Veronica looks at her father and catches the look of contentment on his face.
The moment represents everything she wants for him -- a recognition of the reality that part of growing up is wanting happiness as much for our parents as we do for ourselves. And Bell, a terrific actress captures that perfectly.
Her lively, intelligent eyes are always busy reading the people around her. Veronica, as a good detective always does, is always stepping into other people's shoes.
But later in this episode, when she sees that ball of fire in the sky and realizes that her father may have been taken away from her forever, there are no shoes to stand in but her own.
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.