Veronica Mars: Complete Second Season
Studio: Warner Home Video
Rated: NOT RATED
WorkNameSort: Veronica Mars: Complete Second Season
If the second season of the teen noir Veronica Mars suffered, it was only in comparison to its first, easily the most lacerating class-war ‘novelâ?� not written by Ross Macdonald and starring the most complex heroine not inked by Joss Whedon. The moral rot eating away at the show’s sunny Bush-America’microcosm town of Neptune is still here, and amateur sleuth Veronica (Kristen Bell, in the most acutely observed performance on network TV) and dad Keith (Enrico Colantoni) are still digging in the high-society dirt, this time to find the perps behind the bus-crash mass killing of seemingly random kids. It’s riveting stuff, but creator Rob Thomas casts his net a bit too wide, addressing in quick glances the slippy race politics threatening Veronica’s friendship with her African-American pal Wallace (Percy Daggs III), the rotten lot afforded Latino biker Weevil (Francis Capra) and the monstrous pathologies powering this season’s villains. (Who knew Steve Guttenberg could be terrifying?) Still, the concluding episodes are a Xanax-friendly, traumatic crescendo of hideous rolling revelations, crushing defeats and minor victories, apropos for a show about not losing heart when the worst people almost always profit from their malfeasance, where every attempt to shed light on lousiness is met with a smirk from the corrupt and the law. All that’s stopping Veronica’s earned cynicism from curdling into the big badness her enemies embrace is wit and love. Despite some lapses, she remains the signature heroine for the heartless Oughties.
This article appears in Oct 4-10, 2006.