A long time ago, we used to be friends...
*limps toward release finish line*
I still haven't seen the season finale of Heroes, onaccounta falling asleep on my couch at 9 on Monday night, and I have no idea what happened, because y'all rock. And since I caught up on Veronica Mars over the weekend, I decided to send the show off last night by watching it live.
I'm pretty apathetic about the last part of the season, and I think that colored my attitude going into the final two episodes. I had a certain... lack of patience about some things that was frustrating to myself, because the show is dead, and I think this season has had a lot of problems, a lot of inconsistency, a drift away from some of the things about it that made it what it was in the beginning and made it work, but it never became what I would describe as actively awful.
The thing that struck me about the second half of the season was how petty the stakes had become in Veronica's life. The MoTW plots have often been fairly trivial in and of themselves--campus test-selling and vandalism against the local Middle Eastern restaurant are not that different from the high school mysteries of the past few seasons in scale--but after the Dean O'Dell arc finished, the only real plot thread tying the story together has been a drawn-out romantic melodrama that has frankly started irritating the crap out of me. In previous seasons, Veronica had to deal with her own rape and her best friend's murder, then the ghosts of a bus full of murdered classmates, and those were things that tied the other characters to the story as well. I have mixed feelings about complaining about the lack of a big-stakes arc, because it does have disadvantages, and last season some of those were rather glaringly apparent, but this year, Veronica's on again-off again relationship with Logan has been the unifying thread, and I am so over that. And then Keith became sheriff and Veronica started walking the straight and narrow path in what looked to me like a really artifical and contrived attempt to launch the FBI premise (at least they tied her change in behavior to Keith's position; that's a halfway credible motivation, because Veronica loves her father and doesn't want to cause him trouble), and suddenly the Mars family wasn't on the outside anymore; they both had institutional power behind them. And until the finale two episodes, Neptune felt like it had had some of its sharp edges sanded down so that they were safer. And I utterly do not buy Vinnie Vanlowe's run for sheriff. At all. If there had been a real attempt to tie his run to the Neptune establishment's backing of Lamb-style safe sycophants and Steve Guttenburg for Mayor backers and Skull & Bones/Bohemian Grove shadow organizations, I'd buy that, because I don't believe Vinnie would have had the idea on his own, but I do see him agreeing to provide a willing and pliable figurehead. And who knows, maybe that's where it would have gone in a hypothetical Season 4.
And in a hypothetical Season 4, perhaps there would have been less of the strange cast bloat that, in my opinion, exacerbated some of the more soapy elements of the season. Ryan Hansen as a regular was terribly problematic--there was never a good explanation for why Veronica tolerated the presence of someone so directly tied to her rape while freaking out about Madison--and that trend continued to the last, when Veronica went after the other people responsible for disseminating the video but didn't much more than glare at Dick for forwarding it to everybody he knew. I was glad to see that there was something under the blandly malevolent surfer-boy exterior, that he was torn up over his father's abandonment and his brother's death, because it was a nice connection to the past, but it didn't quite smooth over the fact that Dick's ongoing presence hasn't really been justified. I'm utterly mystified about Julie Gonzalo's status as a regular, since Parker was a good vehicle for personalizing the campus rape storyline, but afterwards was just another corner of the tiresome love geometry, and it was especially dismaying to see her depart with a tirade and a flounce because while she might have gotten the short end of the stick in her relationship with Logan, she was also the victim of a sexual assault, and you'd think she'd have a little more sympathy for Veronica under the circumstances. (The campus rape storyline had problems all the way through to the end, it seems.)
So I was really relieved that the show went out on such an ambiguous and classic Veronica Mars note, with the good guys and the bad guys all mixed up together and Veronica helping Weevil fight the rich and powerful even before Keith and Veronica ended up on the outside again, more worn but a little wiser. It was in some ways hard to see Veronica reach back into the old toolkit for revenge, but it was also one of the only tools available to her in the situation, and she used it much more carefully, directing it at the people who had hurt her but taking care of the bystanders this time; I thought it was incredibly important that she didn't want Wallace to risk himself going undercover at the initiation, that he was the one who insisted, and loved that Veronica and Nish finally came full circle to a place where they were on the same side. In general, I loved that Wallace and Mac and Veronica's relatinships with both got their due. And as meh as I've been on the whole Piz/Veronica/Logan dramarama, I also liked that she was able to trust Piz enough not to jump to the conclusion that he was involved in the taping (a marked contrast to what happened when she found the camera in Logan's pool house) and to take Mac's advice and let him know that she would miss him. I especially liked the way the past turned up again in the last two episodes, the line of events from Lilly's murder on that have made these people who they are, Veronica maybe a little healthier but still hard, Logan Aaron Echoll's son to the end, mixing up love and violence until it's not clear where one ends and the other starts, Jake Kane still consumed by old obsessions and grown more and more ruthless, Keith bound to do what he thinks is right and suffer for it.
The way the show circled back to its roots made me curious about how all of these threads would have played out in Season 4, though I can't rail against the CW for cancelling the show; it had poor ratings, and the network stuck with it for quite a long time. As it is, I'm satisfied to picture Keith and Veronica back at Mars investigations, because there wasn't enough evidence to convict Keith, and Cliff is a strangely effective lawyer in his own way, but he lost the election, and now Vinnie's running things and the sheriff's department softball team has new uniforms again and has reinstituted the raffle. Keith doesn't regret it, though, not after he finds out why Veronica broke into Jake Kane's. And Veronica doesn't end up going off to the FBI, whether because of her involvement in the scandal or because she now feels like she has to help her father or for some other reason, because isn't part of the point of noir that nobody really can escape that world?
* * * * *
I have amazingly brief things to say about SGA 3.15 - "The Ark," namely: well, that was dumb. I would have more lengthy things to say about how saving a civilization that sought to preserve itself by nuking most of its citizens, and whose survivors seem more than willing to take others with them when they go, is a really morally ambiguous situation, kind of like the ethical dilemma Rodney posed at the beginning of the last episode, but if the show isn't even going to address its own themes, why should I, especially when I only end up sounding like a broken record.
I adored SG-1 10.16 - "Bad Guys" even more the second time around, though, and I liked it quite a bit the first time already. I was talking with D. on the phone this weekend and the first thing he said to me was, "This week's Stargate was awesome!" And then we agreed that a pox should be put on SciFi's houses for cancelling the show. Heh.
* * * * *
There's been quite a bit of discussion about FanLib, the venture capital-funded, for-profit fanfiction archive, in certain parts of fandom lately; metafandom has linked a lot of the discussion, and now it has made fandom_wank. But I thought I'd post a couple of pointers in case some of you who write haven't heard of the situation. There are several synopses of the issues that the site presents, and of fandom reaction to the way it's been (IMO very poorly) rolled out to fans here and here and here, and the last week or so of metafandom posts have more links. It's up to every writer to decide whether or not they want to use the site, but their ToS is, in my opinion, something that should really give any writer considering posting fiction at the site pause, if not have them actively screaming and running the other direction; this post highlights some of the real problem areas.
I still haven't seen the season finale of Heroes, onaccounta falling asleep on my couch at 9 on Monday night, and I have no idea what happened, because y'all rock. And since I caught up on Veronica Mars over the weekend, I decided to send the show off last night by watching it live.
I'm pretty apathetic about the last part of the season, and I think that colored my attitude going into the final two episodes. I had a certain... lack of patience about some things that was frustrating to myself, because the show is dead, and I think this season has had a lot of problems, a lot of inconsistency, a drift away from some of the things about it that made it what it was in the beginning and made it work, but it never became what I would describe as actively awful.
The thing that struck me about the second half of the season was how petty the stakes had become in Veronica's life. The MoTW plots have often been fairly trivial in and of themselves--campus test-selling and vandalism against the local Middle Eastern restaurant are not that different from the high school mysteries of the past few seasons in scale--but after the Dean O'Dell arc finished, the only real plot thread tying the story together has been a drawn-out romantic melodrama that has frankly started irritating the crap out of me. In previous seasons, Veronica had to deal with her own rape and her best friend's murder, then the ghosts of a bus full of murdered classmates, and those were things that tied the other characters to the story as well. I have mixed feelings about complaining about the lack of a big-stakes arc, because it does have disadvantages, and last season some of those were rather glaringly apparent, but this year, Veronica's on again-off again relationship with Logan has been the unifying thread, and I am so over that. And then Keith became sheriff and Veronica started walking the straight and narrow path in what looked to me like a really artifical and contrived attempt to launch the FBI premise (at least they tied her change in behavior to Keith's position; that's a halfway credible motivation, because Veronica loves her father and doesn't want to cause him trouble), and suddenly the Mars family wasn't on the outside anymore; they both had institutional power behind them. And until the finale two episodes, Neptune felt like it had had some of its sharp edges sanded down so that they were safer. And I utterly do not buy Vinnie Vanlowe's run for sheriff. At all. If there had been a real attempt to tie his run to the Neptune establishment's backing of Lamb-style safe sycophants and Steve Guttenburg for Mayor backers and Skull & Bones/Bohemian Grove shadow organizations, I'd buy that, because I don't believe Vinnie would have had the idea on his own, but I do see him agreeing to provide a willing and pliable figurehead. And who knows, maybe that's where it would have gone in a hypothetical Season 4.
And in a hypothetical Season 4, perhaps there would have been less of the strange cast bloat that, in my opinion, exacerbated some of the more soapy elements of the season. Ryan Hansen as a regular was terribly problematic--there was never a good explanation for why Veronica tolerated the presence of someone so directly tied to her rape while freaking out about Madison--and that trend continued to the last, when Veronica went after the other people responsible for disseminating the video but didn't much more than glare at Dick for forwarding it to everybody he knew. I was glad to see that there was something under the blandly malevolent surfer-boy exterior, that he was torn up over his father's abandonment and his brother's death, because it was a nice connection to the past, but it didn't quite smooth over the fact that Dick's ongoing presence hasn't really been justified. I'm utterly mystified about Julie Gonzalo's status as a regular, since Parker was a good vehicle for personalizing the campus rape storyline, but afterwards was just another corner of the tiresome love geometry, and it was especially dismaying to see her depart with a tirade and a flounce because while she might have gotten the short end of the stick in her relationship with Logan, she was also the victim of a sexual assault, and you'd think she'd have a little more sympathy for Veronica under the circumstances. (The campus rape storyline had problems all the way through to the end, it seems.)
So I was really relieved that the show went out on such an ambiguous and classic Veronica Mars note, with the good guys and the bad guys all mixed up together and Veronica helping Weevil fight the rich and powerful even before Keith and Veronica ended up on the outside again, more worn but a little wiser. It was in some ways hard to see Veronica reach back into the old toolkit for revenge, but it was also one of the only tools available to her in the situation, and she used it much more carefully, directing it at the people who had hurt her but taking care of the bystanders this time; I thought it was incredibly important that she didn't want Wallace to risk himself going undercover at the initiation, that he was the one who insisted, and loved that Veronica and Nish finally came full circle to a place where they were on the same side. In general, I loved that Wallace and Mac and Veronica's relatinships with both got their due. And as meh as I've been on the whole Piz/Veronica/Logan dramarama, I also liked that she was able to trust Piz enough not to jump to the conclusion that he was involved in the taping (a marked contrast to what happened when she found the camera in Logan's pool house) and to take Mac's advice and let him know that she would miss him. I especially liked the way the past turned up again in the last two episodes, the line of events from Lilly's murder on that have made these people who they are, Veronica maybe a little healthier but still hard, Logan Aaron Echoll's son to the end, mixing up love and violence until it's not clear where one ends and the other starts, Jake Kane still consumed by old obsessions and grown more and more ruthless, Keith bound to do what he thinks is right and suffer for it.
The way the show circled back to its roots made me curious about how all of these threads would have played out in Season 4, though I can't rail against the CW for cancelling the show; it had poor ratings, and the network stuck with it for quite a long time. As it is, I'm satisfied to picture Keith and Veronica back at Mars investigations, because there wasn't enough evidence to convict Keith, and Cliff is a strangely effective lawyer in his own way, but he lost the election, and now Vinnie's running things and the sheriff's department softball team has new uniforms again and has reinstituted the raffle. Keith doesn't regret it, though, not after he finds out why Veronica broke into Jake Kane's. And Veronica doesn't end up going off to the FBI, whether because of her involvement in the scandal or because she now feels like she has to help her father or for some other reason, because isn't part of the point of noir that nobody really can escape that world?
* * * * *
I have amazingly brief things to say about SGA 3.15 - "The Ark," namely: well, that was dumb. I would have more lengthy things to say about how saving a civilization that sought to preserve itself by nuking most of its citizens, and whose survivors seem more than willing to take others with them when they go, is a really morally ambiguous situation, kind of like the ethical dilemma Rodney posed at the beginning of the last episode, but if the show isn't even going to address its own themes, why should I, especially when I only end up sounding like a broken record.
I adored SG-1 10.16 - "Bad Guys" even more the second time around, though, and I liked it quite a bit the first time already. I was talking with D. on the phone this weekend and the first thing he said to me was, "This week's Stargate was awesome!" And then we agreed that a pox should be put on SciFi's houses for cancelling the show. Heh.
* * * * *
There's been quite a bit of discussion about FanLib, the venture capital-funded, for-profit fanfiction archive, in certain parts of fandom lately; metafandom has linked a lot of the discussion, and now it has made fandom_wank. But I thought I'd post a couple of pointers in case some of you who write haven't heard of the situation. There are several synopses of the issues that the site presents, and of fandom reaction to the way it's been (IMO very poorly) rolled out to fans here and here and here, and the last week or so of metafandom posts have more links. It's up to every writer to decide whether or not they want to use the site, but their ToS is, in my opinion, something that should really give any writer considering posting fiction at the site pause, if not have them actively screaming and running the other direction; this post highlights some of the real problem areas.