#lodessa rewatches vm

[lodessa]

Doing a little season 3 rewatch of Veronica Mars to make sure things line up right in The Backup and oh boy . . .

So many of my lingering complaints immediately resurfaced there's also stuff I had forgotten about (and even some stuff that rewatching is like "oh, they were actually doing a thing") but here's a couple thoughts four episodes in:

The cast is still too jam packed, the years haven't changed my opinion on that, and it makes so many things seem forced or spread thin.

Some of this is things like spending all this time of Dick but (after an initial episode where it seemed like maybe he was going to have some actual character arc following what happened in season 2) just having him be the same old Dick. Some of it is trying so hard to make Piz matter or whatever. Some of it is no one's plotlines actually truly entertwining.

And you can definitely see the fanservicing rounding off of Logan's character happening, but hot damn I forgot I missed him. Like Rose Tyler of Doctor Who, the fannish monomania over the years has made me reflexively flinch from his very name but Logan is so damned compelling. He's so wounded and self loathing, messy, but also somehow still so tender. A victim of so much loss and abuse and he does fucked up shit and Veronica is right not to trust him sometimes, but he's also just such a damned woobie (I have not used that term in so long I almost forgot it) in the way that is so addictive (and destructive because the impulse is always ultimately to lose all the things that actually make that vulnerability interesting in the interests of saccharine perfection.

My boy, Weevil. I weep. I scream. I tear my hair. I dream of Mars, Mars, & Navarro Investigations. He's flawed and he's angry and he makes mistakes, but Eli Navarro is also so smart, dogged, insightful. He hates injustice, drugs, and abuse. He's crazy hyper competent. want someone to figure out the truth, fix the body of your car, get the AC working? He can do any of that with a facility you didn't ask for or expect. (Maybe don't have him take your phone calls though, at least not without some actual training.) And what does he really want? A chance. The opportunity to do something that matters. Someone to look at him and see something of value (because he sure doesn't right now).

Which really should have been the through line of this season and these characters. Logan is terrified of being his dad, of actually trying and failing at college, of being alone. Weevil is trying to keep his head down and get by, but it is humiliating and awful and he wants so much to prove he is more than that. Like both of them, Mac is afraid she's broken, that she can't move past what happened with Cassidy, that she doesn't know how to be close to anyone. Dick should be confronting the fact that what happened with his brother and dad did shake him and he's not impervious. Wallace's half assed plot line about struggling to maintain both school and basketball could have been so much more about the transition from high school and college and worrying that you aren't actually special or good enough. Even Keith is doubting his judgement, as a professional and as a father to a certain extent. And Veronica, Veronica is afraid that she can't move on: can't trust, can't hold on to friendships, can't move past her high school relationship. But I know that the show doesn't actually go there with any of these plotlines, so to speak. It doesn't have time to, nor does it want to.