«Veronica Mars» Season 4 – Variety



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"Veronica Mars" was a slap to the high school dramas when it first appeared on UPN in 2004. The creator Rob Thomas took the brave "who killed the beautiful teenager?" And cooked it hard, to Following a traumatized girl desperately trying to harden herself against the harsh realities of the world while she was trying to solve the case. As a heroine, Veronica (an immediately magnetic Kristen Bell) is usually pretty and blonde, but also deeply cynical, furious and stubborn. Between trying to reconcile the facts of the murder of his best friend and his own sexual assault, Veronica Mars – a name that his friends and enemies tend to say in its entirety, such is his stature – spent his evening hours in make boards with a taser in it. stock Exchange. Apart from Veronica herself, the series also took a hard look at the intrinsically unbalanced power dynamics of "a city without a middle class"; many of his stories about gentrification, corruption and privilege are still relevant.

This first season – tense and intelligent and truly thrilling – is still one of the best debuts of television to date. In fact, the initial sharpness of the series made its chapters more complicated even darker in comparison. Veronica remained Veronica, but the mysteries around her became more scattered and bulkier than the scripts could usually handle. His tortured love affair with the evil reformed (ish) Logan (Jason Dohring) has become a revolving merry-go-round. The third season finale, which began in a promising way but has ended hastily in a narrative chaos, has seriously challenged the patience of an otherwise fervent fanbase. And yet fans have helped Thomas raise funds for an independent film (released in 2014) on Veronica's ten-year high school meeting. It gave him another mystery of murder to solve, but it was mostly a sentimental parade of familiar faces and the greatest successes that gave the impression that Veronica Mars had indeed taken her course.

Fifteen years after the pilot's first broadcast, Hulu's eight-episode recovery is doing everything possible to prove that there is even more life in the franchise. Veronica has resumed her private detective activity in Neptune, but this time she is 30 and lives with Logan in a comfortable beachfront apartment. His father and colleague Keith (Enrico Colantoni) is still recovering from a devastating car accident on the movie "Veronica Mars" and is trying to determine how long he can stay in the PI game. His best friend in high school, Wallace (Percy Daggs III) teaches at Neptune High and is married and father of a child. Weevil (Francis Capra), Veronica's least likely ally, is back in his family's equipment after a run in a quieter family life. More surprising perhaps, Logan solves his anger problems in therapy – and does everything in his power to convince Veronica to join him one day on the road to true well-being.

The characters of "Veronica Mars" who sail in Neptune in old age, constitute in the eight episodes of Hulu, stories much more interesting than all the attempts of the film. Bell and Colantoni are still aces in that they exchange their returns and try to accept the deterioration of Keith's health. The once-hot chemistry of Bell and Dohring has undeniably cooled, but the new dynamic is working as Veronica and Logan re-evaluate their relationship and the often unhealthy relationships they have between them. (Thankfully, Veronica's seductive jokes with Leo, Max Greenfield's federal agent, remain perfectly intact.) And after all that Neptune has done to him, it's really nice to see Wallace's. to settle in a happy groove with her family and her work, Veronica's worried look is damned.

Aside from personal frictions, it would not be "Veronica Mars" without a thorny mystery or five to unravel – and this is where rebirth stumbles. At first, it seems that the case of a serial bomber targeting companies during the infamous Neptune Spring Break is perhaps the perfect way for "Veronica Mars" to express some of its most pragmatic comments on class inequality and the quirks of the rich. spirals in too many different directions to be consistent. J.K. Simmons and Patton Oswalt describe their roles (respectively) as an ex-convict and bomb-victim in search of attention, but their scenes quickly become repetitive. The weakest side intrigues belong to a potentially shady Congressman (Mido Hamada) called "the Muslim Barack Obama" and two friends from the Mexican cartel whose entire characters seem to be "beheaded now, ask questions later". Between them and the worrying concerns of Veronica against Weevil this season, it is disturbing to say the least, that these new stories about the few people of color shown to Neptune are so badly treated. (The exception to this rule is Kirby Howell-Baptized as a sneaky bar owner, though this is mainly due to his strength and that of his co-star "Good Place", Bell, as a team. It's unfortunate that the black detective thread of "Veronica Mars" is so confused in its permutation of 2019, although perhaps unsurprising given the impossibility of breaking the scourge that reigned in the series to following this stellar first season.

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of "Veronica Mars" 4.0 – or at least its most surprising, given the film that so enticingly seduces fans – is its willingness to push the series in directions that risk to alienate his followers. This season highlights how her heroine can be selfish, why her love story is not an aspiration and the craziness to believe that catching The Bad Guy means that the danger is gone. It does not always work, but at least it sways.

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