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Day 06 - Favorite episode of your favorite TV show
How can I pick just one episode of Veronica Mars? I love them alllll (well, most of them. Certainly I can’t think of any that I would chuck out of season 1), and also everything in the show is so dependent on everything else that it’s hard to pluck just one episode out and say “This one. This is the best.”
The pilot packs a stunning amount of backstory, character detail, and sheer awesomeness into one episode, and I love it for that, but I think I would have to choose the season 1 finale as my favorite episode. It’s harder to land a good ending than a good beginning (as so many shows which start well then peter out show), and VMar’s first season finale is not merely good but practically perfect.
(I say “practically” because one could argue that Veronica ought to be more sensible, and then the climactic sequence need never have happened. But I’m not sure which show you’ve been watching if you think that “sensibly asking for help” is within Veronica’s emotional repertoire.)
The finale ties together all the different subplots of the season, offers an utterly satisfying, psychologically plausible, and yet still surprising solution to the season’s mystery - and, even as it weaves this utterly satisfying solution, preserves a certain essential bittersweetness. For all that Veronica Mars is a detective show, it is not a show about fixing things; it’s a show about learning how to live in a broken world.
There’s a tug-of-war in Veronica’s character, because part of her would like to heal, and part of her sees that as a kind of betrayal. It’s a betrayal of Lilly, because healing will mean forgetting (at least in the sense that Lilly will no longer be in the forefront of Veronica’s mind), but also in a way Veronica would be betraying herself by accepting that the world is unjust, and no. She just can’t.
How can I pick just one episode of Veronica Mars? I love them alllll (well, most of them. Certainly I can’t think of any that I would chuck out of season 1), and also everything in the show is so dependent on everything else that it’s hard to pluck just one episode out and say “This one. This is the best.”
The pilot packs a stunning amount of backstory, character detail, and sheer awesomeness into one episode, and I love it for that, but I think I would have to choose the season 1 finale as my favorite episode. It’s harder to land a good ending than a good beginning (as so many shows which start well then peter out show), and VMar’s first season finale is not merely good but practically perfect.
(I say “practically” because one could argue that Veronica ought to be more sensible, and then the climactic sequence need never have happened. But I’m not sure which show you’ve been watching if you think that “sensibly asking for help” is within Veronica’s emotional repertoire.)
The finale ties together all the different subplots of the season, offers an utterly satisfying, psychologically plausible, and yet still surprising solution to the season’s mystery - and, even as it weaves this utterly satisfying solution, preserves a certain essential bittersweetness. For all that Veronica Mars is a detective show, it is not a show about fixing things; it’s a show about learning how to live in a broken world.
There’s a tug-of-war in Veronica’s character, because part of her would like to heal, and part of her sees that as a kind of betrayal. It’s a betrayal of Lilly, because healing will mean forgetting (at least in the sense that Lilly will no longer be in the forefront of Veronica’s mind), but also in a way Veronica would be betraying herself by accepting that the world is unjust, and no. She just can’t.
