Neptune Confidential: A 'Veronica Mars' newsletter
This special edition of Jacob’s Letter is dedicated to one of my favorite shows: “Veronica Mars,” Rob Thomas’ teen neo-noir about a high school outcast (Kristen Bell) who moonlights as a detective for her dad’s private eye agency in the fictional town of Neptune, Calif.
It’s elementary, my dear Opal. Photo/photo illustration by Jake Harris.
Veronica’s father, Keith (Enrico Colantoni) is a former sheriff who opened up his own detective agency when he was ousted for accusing Neptune’s favorite billionaire of murder. Each episode dealt with a “mystery of the week” while also delving into a bigger, season-long mystery — the first of which is who actually killed Veronica’s best friend Lilly Kane (played by an early-career Amanda Seyfried).
It originally aired on UPN (now The CW) from 2004-2007 before it was canceled. A fourth season pilot was shot, but not ordered to series. A 2014 film was made possible by fans, who call themselves “Marshmallows” after an inside joke on the show, donating money on Kickstarter.
“Veronica Mars” was more than just a teen soap opera crossed with a mystery show. Sure, you had the requisite love interests in rich boy Duncan Kane (Teddy Dunn), bad-boy Logan Echolls (Jason Dohring) and the Lloyd Dobler-lite Stosh “Piz” Piznarski (Chris Lowell). You had the steadfast friend sidekick, Wallace Fennell (Percy Daggs III). You had the traditional trappings of high school and all of its woes.
But the show also went to some pretty dark noir places in its examinations of class, race, wealth, sex and morality in Neptune, a town where all that separated the elite socialites from the seedy criminals was a murky gray line of questionable morality.
The show was also one of the few shows I became a fanatic about as soon as I saw it, and I soon hooked Taylor on it while we were long-distance dating. We would call each other as we watched it and talk about the show live, trying to figure out whodunit together even though we were a hundred miles apart.
That fanaticism for the show helped write this newsletter, as the fourth season of the show just arrived on Hulu.
The following posts were written by me, Taylor and my former Austin 360 editor Emily Quigley, who loves the show as much as I do.
Here you’ll find a review of season four, an appreciation of Keith Mars as one of TV’s all-time greatest dads, an inquiry into Logan’s military acumen, a look at the show’s Texas roots, an admiration of the Veronica/Wallace friendship, and the usual Letter of Recommendation and News Dump segments.
You can find Taylor’s work at the Dallas Business Journal and follow her on Twitter @Taylor_Paige13.
You can follow Emily and her work and pop culture thoughts on Twitter @emquig.
With that, let’s start our investigation.
A long time ago, we used to be friends
By Jake Harris
After a long wait for “Veronica Mars” fans, the fourth season of the neo-noir dropped a week early at San Diego Comic-Con on July 19. This was while Taylor and I were deep in the throes of our semi-annual “Veronica Mars” re-watch, so we held off on watching the season until we had finished the rest of the series and the movie.
When we finished the fourth season, our thoughts were…mixed. The more we talked about it, the worse we felt about it. I missed the earlier, mystery-of-the-week feel of the show and didn’t think that the new season’s ending was done for any reason other than to shock and awe; Taylor agreed with me on the ending, and also hated creator Rob Thomas’ rationale for the final scene of the season.
You can check out my review of season four at Book & Film Globe.
Either way, we both concluded that we’d still watch a season five, if it happens, and that “Veronica Mars” as a whole, even as a mixed bag, is still better than a majority of the rest of the shows out there. Keep reading for some more thoughts on the show.
Who’s your daddy? We all wish it were Keith Mars
A guest post by Emily Quigley
In the first episode of the excellent second season of “Fleabag,” Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s titular character turns to camera and tells us, “This is a love story.”
“Veronica Mars” is also a love story, yet the central relationship isn’t Logan-Veronica (despite their “LoVe” portmanteau and gaggles of shippers everywhere). The father-daughter dynamic of Keith and Veronica Mars is at the heart of the story line, season after season.
For years, TV dads often fell into one of two categories: harried, browbeaten men who bumble any sort of domestic tasks (think Al Bundy or Homer Simpson) or stoic, father-knows-best patriarchs (Ward Cleaver or Bill Cosby, though that character hasn’t aged too well). Keith represents a more nuanced version of TV dad: strong but soft, downtrodden but determined, as quick to joke as he is to jump in and fight for his child — or to fight with his child if he thinks she’s gone too far.
Keith and Veronica are extremely close, but he hasn’t crossed that boundary of “I want to be your best friend instead of your parent.” He might turn a blind eye when she stays out late on a school night for a stakeout, but he’ll also run a background check on her date — and preemptively cancel any hotel reservations that boy might have made.
From the very start of the series, Veronica is far more involved in her dad’s detective business than any teen girl probably should be. And Keith is torn by this. He wants a normal life for his daughter but is also damn proud of how clever she is and is grateful to have her as a partner. He also recognizes that this is her passion; he might tell her to stay home, to not follow a certain lead, but inevitably she will, and inevitably he’ll be there to help her out if she gets in a jam.
Time and again, Keith makes sacrifices for Veronica. His attempts to find a girlfriend after Veronica’s mother, Lianne, leaves the family are foiled, either directly or indirectly, by his daughter. But he always puts Veronica first. He waits to see how she wants to handle the question of whether he really is her biological dad before telling her the results of a paternity test. “You think that charm of yours is learned behavior? That's genetics, baby!” Keith says.
The man literally runs through fire to save his daughter at one point.
Season three ends with Keith violating his own standards and jeopardizing his chance to become sheriff again when he tampers with evidence that shows Veronica breaking into a house. That break-in causes the two to have one of their bigger blowups. Veronica refuses to tell him why she stole a hard drive. She refuses to answer her phone when Keith calls, trying to warn her that this might not be an escapade she can wiggle out of with just her wit and smarts.
When it’s all over, Veronica comes home to find Keith cooking gumbo. He doesn’t ask for an explanation. She doesn’t know that his election chances are about to go down in flames. He simply says, “Good, you’re home.”
Veronica: “You know I love you, right? More than anything.”
Keith: “Of course, honey. I never doubt it.”
Season four finds the two on more equal footing, as adults and business partners, but that unconditional love — love that forgives, love that values a person for who they are, warts and all, love that’s always there — continues, and it’s what makes the relationship between Veronica and Keith so special, and what makes Keith the dad so many of us wish we had.
One of the biggest mysteries of ‘Veronica Mars’: How the cuss did Logan Echolls get into the military?
A guest post by Taylor Tompkins
As we collectively mourn the biggest loss* in “Veronica Mars” history, I would like to take a look back at the mystery that looms the largest for me over the course of the series.
How the cuss did Logan Echolls ever get into the military?
When we first see Logan in his full dress whites in the “Veronica Mars” movie, we were all enraptured with how his life turned around. It’s a tale as old as time. The angry kid got it together after finding routine and solace in the military.
But most angry kids aren’t Logan Echolls.
As Neptune High’s resident “obligatory psychotic jackass,” Logan committed his fair share of crimes. He organized bum fights as a junior in high school. If no legal trouble came of it, at the bare minimum, it’s something that would come up on a Google search. Hell, Logan would have a hard time getting a job giving guided Segway tours in the age of the internet.
But let’s say that was just a kid’s mistake. Maybe the Navy can forgive him for that. I mean, he did volunteer at that soup kitchen after the bum fight incident, after all. And as the son of a famous actor, he “comes from a good family.”
But we’re just getting started.
There’s a very public and well-documented history of depression in Logan’s family, and we all know how the military feels about mental illness.
Him being a suspect in two separate murder cases (he is a suspect in season one and season two) while still in high school was without a doubt included in his background checks, but the case was dismissed. Let’s hypothetically say the Navy let that one slide.
Logan’s legal troubles in that year alone didn’t end with his case, though. He served as a witness in his dad’s murder trial, where he admitted to destroying key evidence. He may have received immunity from related charges, but did the Navy just skip over that part of the transcript?
Let’s not forget that he was left holding a gun on the rooftop that Cassidy Casablancas jumped from not even a year after he was the prime suspect in a murder case. The Neptune sheriff’s department is dumb, but are they so dumb that not even Sheriff Don Lamb thought that was a little suspicious?
There was also that one time Logan CASUALLY TOOK A BAT TO A COP CAR. If that doesn’t properly scream “problems with authority,” maybe the fact that he did so just so he could get into jail to beat the living daylights out of a rapist might set off some alarm bells.
So at this point, we are to assume that somewhere along the intervening nine years before Logan sees Veronica again, a Navy recruiter sat down with some mediocre coffee and Logan’s case file — which I’m envisioning as being kept together by rubber bands, paper clips and industrial binder clips no one ever really had a use for, with sheets of police reports and photo evidence of his transgressions via paparazzi photos cascading to the floor as the officer attempted to open it — and thought, “You know what, I have a quota to meet, let’s get this kid a government-issued gun and make him an intelligence officer”?!
But this is “Veronica Mars,” so yes, I will suspend my disbelief and blissfully agree that Logan was allowed to join the military. I mean, look at the character growth that the Navy and a little bit of therapy got him in season four.
...That suspension only lasts for about 42 seconds though, because he’s then suspected in yet another brutal murder case (in the “Veronica Mars” movie) and isn’t even put on administrative leave. His phone doesn’t even ring when a SEX TAPE of him and the woman he’s suspected of murdering is blasted around the internet (granted, it’s PG, but c’mon, Veronica still gets asked about her college sex tape a decade later).
In season four, Logan also takes a politician bodyguard contract job while on leave (still on active duty) — a clear violation of the military’s stance on politics while serving. Who’s this guy’s commanding officer?
I think this a mystery that even Mars Investigations would pass on. But I‘ll let it be, if only for the one glorious scene where Logan is in full fatigues.
*Yes, Logan’s death is bigger than Lilly Kane’s. Change my mind.
Don’t California my Texas: On the Texan roots of ‘Veronica Mars’
By Jake Harris
In-N-Out vs. Whataburger. The University of Southern California vs. The University of Texas. Big government vs. limited government. Austin vs. San Francisco. The feuds between California and Texas run deep and wild, and with more and more Californians moving to the Lone Star State, it doesn’t look like two of the biggest states in the nation will ever stop fighting like the Hatfields and McCoys.
And yet, while the noir genre is typically a California trope, it’s been popping up in works about other states for years (“Winter’s Bone” and the first and third seasons of “True Detective” are some more recent examples).
“Veronica Mars,” despite its California setting, actually has deep Texas roots.
For starters, the show began in Texas. Creator Rob Thomas first started working on “Veronica Mars” as a YA novel in 1996 while he was teaching high school English and journalism at Austin’s John H. Reagan High School. Back then, the draft was simply called “Untitled Teen Detective.”
The story revolved around a male teenage detective named Keith, who goes to the wealthy (and, unlike Neptune High, very real) Westlake High School. When he’s not helping his dad with cases, he’s pining for the affections of a popular girl said to be dating a UT football player.
In the original version, Keith’s dad was the former Travis County sheriff who quit the force to open a private eye agency, and Keith helped his dad with cases. The original case the two tried to solve wasn’t the murder of the main character’s best friend — instead, it was inspired from the headlines.
Keith discovers that the reason his dad left the police force is because he knowingly sent the wrong men to Death Row for involvement in Austin’s “Chocolate Shop Murders case,” a name which bears a striking resemblance to the real-life, still-unsolved Austin yogurt shop murders from 1991.
Obviously the show took a different turn, but its genesis was very much Texan to its core.
That makes sense, as Thomas grew up in Texas. He is a 1983 graduate of San Marcos High School, and his father was a vice principal at Westlake High School (where Thomas attended) through the early 1990s. He went to Texas Christian University (Go Frogs) on a football scholarship before transferring to UT and graduating in 1987.
And if that weren’t enough, Thomas (known to play in numerous bands throughout his life) used a lot of Austin bands to soundtrack the show and the movie. Liberty Lunch (RIP) mainstays The Wayouts played the first song heard in the show. Spoon made multiple appearances, and frontman Britt Daniel even showed up and sang karaoke at one point. Other Texas artists included Alejandro Escovedo (who shows up as a street busker singing the show’s theme song in the movie) and the Wild Seeds.
Thomas also named lots of characters after Austin music references. Sheriff Don Lamb (who went to Southwestern Texas State University, eat ‘em up cats) is named for the lead singer of 1990s Austin post-punk band Doctor’s Mob. Other characters were named for Thomas’ former bandmates. Many characters wear UT or Texas-related clothing.
The show continued to make other sly Texan references throughout its run. In season three, Logan Echolls tells a kid he’s babysitting (just go with it) that Amy’s Ice Cream is the superior ice cream joint. Also in season three, Stosh “Piz” Piznarski is in charge of a show happening on campus at Liberty Lunch, named for a former Austin live music venue. Other businesses named during the show’s run, like Sugar’s Uptown Cabaret, Oilcan Harry’s and Kane and Abel’s, were prominent Austin businesses during Thomas’ time at UT.
The eyes of Texas are upon season four as well, with the season’s Spring Break Bombings plot being directly inspired by the Spring 2018 Austin bombings.
So while the California “invasion” of Texas continues apace, there’s a little bit more Texas in California in “Veronica Mars” — at least in fiction.
When Veronica met Wallace: The start of a beautiful friendship
By Jake Harris
Early in the first episode of “Veronica Mars,” we see a high school kid stripped to his underwear and duct-taped to the school flagpole, with the words “Snitch” written on his bare chest.
That kid is Wallace Fennell (Percy Daggs III), a new kid at Neptune High. He was put on that flagpole because he ratted on a motorcycle gang who robbed the convenience store he worked at. Veronica, never one to put up with high school drama, promptly cuts him down. And thus, one of the show’s most central platonic friendships is born.
Most shows aimed at teens would have used this incident as the jumping off point to pair Wallace and Veronica together. Not “Veronica Mars.” In return for helping Wallace down from the flagpole, all Veronica wants is his inside knowledge to help with a case, a dynamic that continues as the show goes on. He obliges, and Wallace even gives Veronica her “marshmallow” nickname at the end of the first episode.
Throughout the show’s run, a romance between Wallace and Veronica is never hinted at. (Their parents do eventually get together, but that’s another matter.) Instead, the show uses the Wallace/Veronica friendship to prove that men and women can be good friends who respect each other. (According to one article, Daggs apparently wanted the show to explore any romantic attraction the two may have had toward each other, but was vetoed.) Wallace was one of Veronica’s only friends in season one.
Wallace also acts as a foil to Veronica in some instances: Where she’s jaded, he’s optimistic; where she’s more serious-minded, he’s light-hearted; where he’s loyal (sometimes to a fault) and is usually willing to give the benefit of the doubt, she’s more quick to judgement.
Their dynamic eventually evolved, with Wallace becoming aggrieved that all he did was run errands for Veronica (another note from Daggs). He was one of the first characters to call her on her BS when she needed it. Like all longtime friends, they had disagreements and fights. Also like all longtime friends, they had each others’ backs when it counted.
In the process, the show gave its viewers something rare: A platonic male/female friendship that felt natural and lived-in, like real life.
As Wallace tells Veronica the day of their high school graduation: “I’m glad I met you. It was worth getting taped to a pole.”
Letter of Recommendation: More ‘Veronica Mars’ material
TV: Obviously, watch the show. All seasons are available to stream on Hulu right now, and the first three seasons are available on DVD. Personally, my rankings for the quality of the seasons is 1>2>3, 4 (the last two are tied right now; that may change). But the first season is on my Mount Rushmore of perfect TV seasons, alongside the first seasons of “Friday Night Lights” and “Lost” and the second season of “Fleabag.”
Also, for more of that Rob Thomas feel, check out his show “iZombie,” which shares more than a few of “Veronica Mars” guest stars and theme DNA. It’s available to stream on Netflix and the CW app and is available on DVD.
Movie: The “Veronica Mars” movie is an interesting piece of pop culture. It is a movie in name and length and distribution, but the plot feels like a TV special. There’s also the fact that the movie was funded entirely by fans through Kickstarter, so it couldn’t stray too far from what the fans wanted.
But it’s also a fun distillation of the elements that made the show great, and could be argued was the impetus for a fourth season. It is considered canon, with events that have ramifications in the Hulu season, so if you’re wanting to get the full experience, I recommend it.
It’s available to stream on HBO or available to rent on Amazon Prime, iTunes, YouTube, Vudu, Google Play, the PlayStation Store and Redbox. Also available on DVD or Blu-Ray.
Music: The show’s theme song, “We Used To Be Friends” by the Dandy Warhols, evolved and was covered multiple times throughout the show’s run. Here are all of the different versions of the song:
Seasons 1-2:
Season 3:
Movie:
Season 4:
Books: In between the movie and the fourth season, Thomas and Austin author Jennifer Graham put out two “Veronica Mars” books set in Neptune, Calif. that continue the story of Veronica. Thomas has said that while Graham wrote 90% of those books, he considers them canon. (For those keeping track at home, the “Veronica Mars” chronology is: S1>S2>S3>Movie>Books>S4.)
These two books, “The Thousand Dollar Tan Line” and “Mr. Kiss and Tell,” are more adult than the show or movie could be, and they are the perfect beach read (which is how Taylor and I started reading them, to each other). Plus, if you get the audiobooks, Kristen Bell narrates.
For the more academically inclined, there’s also an unauthorized Smart Pop essay collection called “Neptune Noir: Unauthorized Investigations into ‘Veronica Mars’” that is edited by Thomas and features various articles about the show’s themes.
Friday News Dump: ‘Veronica Mars’ edition
A list of online stuff about “Veronica Mars” that y’all should check out:
This oral history of the show is fantastic. (via Marc Freeman in Vanity Fair)
I agree with the top spot of this ranking of all of the show’s episodes (via Constance Grady in Vox)
“Veronica Mars” had a ton of great guest stars. This ranking lists all of them. (via Shirley Li in The Atlantic)
The explosive season four finale was divisive. Here’s a spoiler-y conversation with both a defender of the ending and a detractor. (via Dan Solomon and Emily McCullar in Texas Monthly)
That’s all, folks. If you liked what you saw here, click that subscribe button (promise I won’t send any annoying emails) and tell all your friends!
This newsletter is written by me and edited by my favorite person, Taylor Tompkins. Views expressed here are my own and don’t reflect the opinions of my employer, yadda yadda yadda.
If there’s anything you want to see covered in a future newsletter, let me know!
You can find me in other corners of the internet as well, if you so choose. There’s my personal website (which focuses on pop culture, faith and my journalism clips), a Twitter account and a Letterboxd account. Subscribe away.
See you next week,
Jake