It's now or never for ‘Veronica Mars’

Make Veronica less gullible and impulsive. She's routinely portrayed as the smartest character in the room (unless that room also contains her PI father Keith), yet Veronica jumps to conclusions with unflattering speed. She routinely accused various other characters of being responsible for the bus crash, sometimes to their faces. It’s one thing to develop a working hypothesis and seek to confirm or deny it; it’s another to act on an idea the instant it comes into your head. That’s exactly how she “solved” the mystery of the bus crash: by having one of her impulsive revelations and blurting it out to her suspect the same way she did several times before with several different suspects. The fact that she was right in the end was irrelevant. For all of her investigative skills, Veronica needs to work on actually identifying what’s evidence and what’s not.

Stop undermining the accomplishments of the excellent first season. Season one left a few open doors, such as Veronica's recently returned mother skipping town once again. But a lot of big issues were resolved in deeply satisfying ways. Lilly’s murder was solved and the killer arrested. The question of whether Veronica’s father was Keith Mars or infotech billionaire Jake Kane  — father of not only Lilly, but Veronica's former boyfriend Duncan — was answered in a way that must have made UPN’s Standards & Practices breathe a huge sigh of relief. On the whole, the first season's main stories reached their natural conclusions. The ending, where Veronica has one last dream of Lilly asking not to be forgotten before fading away, had pitch-perfect emotional resonance.

Season two started dismantling that right from the start. Instead of resting in hard-won peace, Lilly reappeared to prevent Veronica from taking the fateful bus. The acquittal of movie star Aaron Echolls for Lilly’s murder was a shocker but dramatically sound, especially for a show that models itself on film noir. But the way the show presented it suggested that maybe Aaron had been innocent all along, which would have reset the show’s progress clock back to somewhere in the middle of the pilot.

Veronica’s rape, meanwhile, was suddenly and unexpectedly revisited in the finale of the second season, despite having been resolved at the end of season one. The new resolution served no purpose beyond opening old wounds, throwing a pointless “gotcha!” at the audience and forcing an unnecessary new layer onto a storyline that had closed a full year earlier.

The above wouldn’t be worth noting if "Veronica Mars" weren’t, at its best, a superlative show. The acting by the main ensemble is top-notch, and whatever flaws there are result from ambition, not laziness. Which is another way that it fits so well with "Gilmore Girls,"  itself coming off a season that frustrated fans and saw the departure of the show’s creator and signature voice, Amy Sherman-Palladino. But whatever happens, "Gilmore Girls" is practically guaranteed the one thing that "Veronica Mars" will have to fight for: a full season. For Veronica, it’s now or never.

Marc Hirsh is a writer in Somerville, Mass.

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