More Words, Deeper Hole

Hmm. You do have a point about Wallace . . . his gut reaction are more useful than everyone else's, I'd say . . .

Maybe I need to watch S1 again but in S2, it seemd to me like Wallace spent the season stumbling from one bad move to another. No process of making decisions appeared to work well for him (Leaving aside "turn to Veronica for help" because she has an unfair advantage, since she is the protagonist).

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resolute.livejournal.com

My memory could also be fuzzy -- my recollection is that his gut reactions, of loyalty, of reaching out to people, tend to work out while his thinking fails him.

But, honestly, I couldn't back that up at all.

:)

Perhaps we both ought to watch it again . . . .

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Oh, nooooo. Please don't make me watch VM again.

It would make a nice break from LOST S2 and my ongoing urge to slap them all silly. Jesus, Locke, the weaselly stranger starts suggesting that your penis is smaller than Jack's and you fall for it? What does he need to do, burst into flames and start ranting about being the Morning Star?

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jwgh

There's a lot of unmotivated stuff in Lost Season 2 that bugged the hell out of me.

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I imagine it goes like this:

[Writers] Crap, we've written the characters so that they are cooperating. How ever can we think of an episode plot where a group of diverse but cooperative people deal with Bad Place island, a stack of mysteries and several opposing groups? Better make someone do something to piss off the rest of the group.

THIS WEEK ON A VERY SPECIAL EPISODE OF LOST: Sawyer kills and eats Walt.

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jwgh

I buy that there would be lots of disagreements and stuff, but a lot of times people seemed to be hiding important information from other people just for the hell of it.

For some characters it makes sense that they would hold things back (Hurley doesn't tell people what's going on because he doesn't want people to think he's nuts and generally doesn't like to rock the boat), but why wouldn't Kate tell Jack about the ... well, not to be too spoilery ... the question mark?

Anyway, I'm still planning to watch season three (for a while at least).

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He trusts Jackie and I think we were supposed to see that as a good move, even if the romance was doomed [1]. My impression is that the VM production team was a little surprised at much the audience didn't love Jackie.

1: Which is par for the course on VM. Are there any happy couples at all? Don Lamb and his GF, I guess. Oh, wait, Manipulative Lesbian girl and Outed Lesbian Girl were happy when last we saw them, although who knows if that survived MLG explaining to Outed who outed her.

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Which is par for the course on VM. Are there any happy couples at all?

Not just VM, not just television, it's a fundamental flaw/feature of all serial fiction. And one that I have decreasing patience with as I get older...

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But Veronica pegs the meter because
SPOILERS

I wish cuts worked in comments.

SPOILERS

Every single one of VM's boyfrieds commit felonies, up to and including homocide. All of them. In fact, just knowing that a guy is dating VM should be grounds for an arrest.

IceTwin is a drug dealer. Logan commits assault, arson and has the tapes stolen. Leo stole the tapes. Duncan... We all know what he arranged, don't we?

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Is this maybe just another genre thing? What regular character *hasn't* committed at least one felony?

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I guess Deputy Doofus doesn't show up often enough.

Let's run through the cast (courtesy of wikipedia):

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS Both Seasons

Veronica Mars: Where to start?

Keith Mars: See above.

Wallace Fennel: Were any of the favours he did strictly speaking illegal? I guess stealing files is.

Logan Echolls: Assault, arson and so and so forth.

Eli “Weevil” Navarro: GTA, assault, arson, arguably murder.

Dick Casablancas: Rapist.

Don Lamb: Blackmailer.

Cindy “Mac” Mackenzie:

Stosh “Piz” Piznarski: Nothing so far but VM characters often save their felonies for after they first appear.

Parker Lee: See above.

[edit]

Former
Mallory Dent: Nothing that I can recall.

Duncan Kane: Murderer.

Cassidy "Beaver" Casablancas: Murderer.

* Jackie Cook (Tessa Thompson) (Season 2) — Romantic interest of Wallace and daughter of a famous baseball player.

[edit]

Recurring characters
[edit]

Family

Kendall Casablancas: conman.

Terrence Cook: Illegal gamblng.

Aaron Echolls: Murderer.

Lynn Echolls: Nothing that I can think of.

Trina Echolls: Credit card fraud?

Alicia Fennel: Nothing that I can think of.

Celeste Kane: Being Celeste isn't a felony but should be. She had to have been part of the cover-up in S1.

Jake Kane: Obstruction of justice.

Lilly Kane: I guess accessory to statutory rape isn't going to fly, is it? Do Americans imprison teens for underage sex yet?
Pretty minor stuff, like drinking age violations and maybe a little dope?

Lianne Mars: Theft

Leo D'Amato: Evidence tampering in a federal case.

Woody Goodman: Rape.

Abel Koontz: Obstruction of justice.

Cliff McCormack: You'd think Cliff would know the law well enough to stay within it.

Deputy Sacks: useless but nothing illegal I recall.

Vinnie Van Lowe: B&E, various invasions of privacy beyond what the law allows.

Clarence Wiedman: Murder, obstruction of justice.

Van Clemmons: Nothing illegal that I recall.

Vincent "Butters" Clemmons: Nothing that comes to mind.

Corny: Illicit drug user.

Hector Cortez: Well, I'm sure PCHers get to break a number of laws but do we see Hector in particular go farther than lame-ass assaults.

Tommy "Lucky" Dohanic: B&E, stalking.

Gia Goodman: Nothing that I can think of.

Hannah Griffith: Who?

Rebecca James: Nothing that I can think of.

Meg Manning: Nothing that I can think of.

Eduardo "Thumper" Orozco: Murder, violation of Disney's IP rights.

Madison Sinclair: The trip to the dentist thing, is it illegal given what it led to?

Felix Toombs: Aside from assault and implied GTA, nothing.

Troy Vandegraff: Pusher.

OK, what say we rent a Morris Minor to ship all the non-felons out of town, then build a wall around Neptune to keep everyone else in?

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Wallace: withholding evidence about a vehicular homocide, IIRC.

You didn't list anything for Mac, but I'm sure there was some illegal hacking at some point.

Kendall has at least skirted the line of prostitution. (Which is a dumb thing to criminalize, but it is illegal.)

Lynn Echolls: Suicide is actually illegal.

Alica Fennel: Maybe fraud, related to her marriage?

Corny: Also was part of the massively illegal evidence-tampering in the first episode (made the bong-bomb).

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Wallace: withholding evidence about a vehicular homocide, IIRC.

The victim lived but was paralyzed.

Alica Fennel: Maybe fraud, related to her marriage?

Hmmm. Except you'd think Weidman would have noticed that.

Corny: Also was part of the massively illegal evidence-tampering in the first episode (made the bong-bomb).

Yeah, true.

Neptune really is a hive of scum and villainy, isn't it?

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Neptune really is a hive of scum and villainy, isn't it?

Like I said, I think it's just a genre thing. If you tell 20+ crime stories a year with (mostly) the same cast, most of them will end up doing a crime eventually.

It's the same principle by which most superheroes, at some point in their careers, go evil and/or come back from the dead.

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* Jackie Cook (Tessa Thompson) (Season 2) — Romantic interest of Wallace and daughter of a famous baseball player.

Are those really felonies?

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Yes. Women can either date Wallace or have a famous sports athelete father.

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I'd agree with that; but then, Xander wasn't allowed to be good at anything else, so he kind of had to focus on growing up.

The thing I noticed about Buffy et al was that they were almost purely reactive -- they would respond whenever a Big Bad did something, but Evil always took the initiative and the Scoobies were therefore always on the defensive. They'd eventually come up with some plan for defeating the Big Bad, and it would work; but then they'd lapse back into passivity and just sit around waiting for something else to crawl out of the woodwork. That's no way to win a war.

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In the board game, Evil always moves first, too.

But how proactive can they be, in the absence of a threat to respond to? Buffy had patrols as her regular job. They're not fighting a winnable war, they're keeping a lid on vampiric crime or apocalyptic terrorism by free-lancers. Kill one vampire and another one will come. But it's good to kill that one.

Well, proactive might get into public service announcements: "hey, vampires are real! Here are some tips!" But that'd break the conventions of the show/genre.

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Well, the Hellmouth makes nice bait. Maybe they could turn Sunnydale into the world's large roach motel for monsters. Start the Evil Plans themselves, recruit minions, send minions to horrible doom.

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That, and/or try to figure out ways to permanently cauterize a Hellhole.

And, genre conventions aside, why don't they blow the public whistle on the whole Supernatural Beasties business? In a place like Sunnydale, collecting a superfluity of compelling evidence should be a trivial procedure. Yeah, there are Supernatural Beasties entrenched in high places, but can they really control all the media?

I don't remember if the show ever explored whether vampires were affected by a UV lamp; but they did demonstrate that you could reliably detect vampire body temperature at range with a handheld gadget. If you can get those into mass production then vampires are pretty much toast; I bet the general public could cull the vamp population by at least 90% within a couple of months.

In the commentaries on the Buffy S4 DVDs, a writer explains that one of the things they were trying to show was that when science goes up against magic, science gets its butt kicked. I wanted to shake the TV and yell, "How can you write these episodes yourself and not see that they're making exactly the opposite point?" The Initiative was doing quite well -- starting slowly, compared to Buffy, but they were figuring things out as they went instead of having centuries of experience advising them -- but they were handling the monsters pretty handily until they were taken down from inside by deranged mad-scientisting. Science was making a darned good showing for itself, really.

(Sorry; got a little ranty there. Ahem.)

Anyway, an alert populace could handle most of the run-of-the-mill threats themselves, leaving the rogue gods and whatnot to the Slayers, agents of the PTB, and other forces of Goodness. And even those guys could benefit from being able to call in the odd artillery strike or two.

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schizmatic.livejournal.com

Caveat: I know that Whedon was never big on internally consistent world-building. That said...

Both Buffy and Angel make it pretty clear that as a last resort, the best way to defeat evil is a judicious application of high explosives (cf. the Judge, the Mayor, etc.). With that principle established, they still wind up backing away from the natural consequences of it.

The Slayer may be preternaturally strong, The Chosen One, etc., but in the end, she is one person. An infantry platoon could pretty well deal with just about every threat that Buffy faces.

Of course, I do appreciate that Whedon was setting up the idea that you really can't trust the State, but the solution to such untrustworthiness doesn't strike me as the unaccountable lone Slayer. The solution would be a more accountable military/law enforcement unit.

I will sandwich this comment again by saying that I am well aware that Whedon is all about the relationships rather than the internal consistency of his worlds. I just don't think that the two have to be mutually exclusive.

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Is there anything Sunshine didn't improve? The effects of high explosives on her Buffyesque vampires was I think unspecified, but targetting would be clearly a problem. They're fast, and have the enthrall on eye-contact thing going for them. As for lair-searching[1], the vamps can't kill in daytime, but their other mojo might work, and daytime guards are mentioned in an ominous fashion, though for all we know those were just hired humans with guns[2]. Plus it's not clear there'd be any mortal entrance to a mastervamp lair. So the human gov't knows about vamps and has our tech and some magic, but it's still at best an even fight.

[1] I forgot to mention in my other entry: there were various occasions on Buffy where I thought "look, you know where the lair is. Go knock holes in the roof during daylight. Or burn it down."

[2] I still love the image of master vampires hiding in their basements and lurking on the Internet. It's up there with S1 Buffy: "Whoosh, they're gone." "Vampires can fly?" "They can drive."

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Oh yeah. I did start wondering how Sunshine would fall on the VM/Buffy scale. Most of the book is Sunshine's internal monolog, she's fairly introspective in some ways. But some of the introspection is along the lines of "la la la I don't want to think about that" or "my, I never did wonder what happened to my father's family, did I?" Very emotionally reactive, and impulsive when she does do things.

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Ah, consistency, wouldn't it be nice...

Thing is, the Scoobies were able, as a team, to take out a fair number of anonymous vampires. I think Buffy shows up one episode to save them from getting slaughtered by a more competent vamp. The Initiative captured a fair number of vamps, including even Spike by surprise. But we see Angel and Buffy each taking out a whole Initiative team.

Might still be able to take out run of the mill vamps, but there could also be a strong selection effect for vampires not as dumb as dirt, or even more training of new vamps.

They may have been inconsistent on the body heat thing; I don't remember.

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Joss Whedon was never particularly troubled by that hobgoblin, no.

I think one of the benefits of a general populace alerted to the vampire problem would be some wholesale changes in funeral practices. Cremation might become mandatory; or if not, a precautionary stake hammered through the heart before the body is laid to rest. That should cut way down on the incidence of people killed by vampires rising up to become vampires themselves. Vamps who want to create baby vamps would have to not only turn the victim, they'd have to hide the body until it rises.

It's true that the older, stronger, less dumb vampires could probably dodge or slaughter a lot of the mobs of normals armed with body temperature detectors and stake-firing shotguns. But those detectors could do a good job at flushing many entrenched vampires from their cushy -- and influential -- positions as captains of industry or wealthy gadabouts or whatever they're posing as.

Or heck, you don't even need the fancy-schmancy detectors, now that I think about it -- crosses seem to be universally dangerous to Buffyverse vamps. (A fact with theological implications which were never explored, but I digress.) Scatter checkpoints around everywhere where you have to put your bare hand on a cross for a few seconds, and then display your lack of a burn mark. Cheap and easy.

The vampires may be individually quite powerful, at least the older ones. But they have severe and distinctive vulnerabilities, we outnumber them several million to one, and we can build useful gadgets to exploit their weaknesses. I still say that if the whole population went knowledgeably after vamps, we'd get most of them in pretty short order. Not without casualties, of course; but hey, can't make an omelette without losing a few civilians along the way.

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Thing is, the Scoobies were able, as a team, to take out a fair number of anonymous vampires. I think Buffy shows up one episode to save them from getting slaughtered by a more competent vamp. The Initiative captured a fair number of vamps, including even Spike by surprise. But we see Angel and Buffy each taking out a whole Initiative team.

Maybe it works like Fenf Shui, where unnamed mooks have half the hitpoints of named characters.

I'd talk about what we see in ANGEL but either ANGEL is set in a slightly different universe or Sunnydale is the occult version of a sunset town.

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Sunnydale is the occult version of a sunset town.

[*]

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Towns where black people had to vamoose by sundown or risk arrest or beatings.

In Angel's LA, there are non-humans who are just folks. In Sunnydale, everyone knows demons are just evil stake-bait.

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In Sunnydale, everyone knows demons are just evil stake-bait.

Well, not everyone in Sunnydale knows that demons even *exist*. And there are plenty of exceptions, even in Sunnydale. Willy's place was allowed to operate for a long time, no-one suggests killing Clem, etc. Plus, what we see of Sunnydale is centered on someone whose profession is all about killing demons; Angel *is* a demon, and has a mission statement of "Help the Helpless" -- this is bound to have an effect on the kinds of people they respectively meet.

There certainly are different tones between L.A. and Sunnydale, but they seem in keeping with the standard differences between large urban metropolises and small suburbs.

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I wonder if there is a subtext on Vernonica that unthinking reaction = finding one's self nose deep in excrement, with a case of the hiccups coming on, helps explain why VM's ratings are so awful? If I recall correctly, VM's best season was S1, with 2.5 million
viewers. Buffy, which embraces the feel but not the think [1], never was lower that 2.7 million and hit a high of 4.1 million.

1: See, for example, what happens to thinkers like Wesley.

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I've seen others say they don't like Veronica because she's supposed to be so clever. For me, that's a plus--the character is a thinker and a doer.

On Buffy, the times when Buffy did any thinking were usually played as a surprise.

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Not that you said this but Buffy isn't stupid. She just rarely is put in a situation where she needs to resort to thinking.

This is, I think, typical of Whedon's fiction in general. Thinkers do not come off well on his shows, with the possible exception of Giles, but the doers are not therefore morons [1]. They can think, they just resist the temptation.

Say, this seems to tie into something Nancy once said. Let me think about this....

1: With the possible exception of Jayne.

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Oh no, they make it explicit that she's smart, right down to her quite respectable SAT scores.

It's partly a matter of genre, of course. Veronica doesn't often run into situations that require lots of axe work. Buffy doesn't usually have a long list of suspect with lots of secrets to hide.

Personally, I think the complexity of the season-long arc combined with the age of the protagonists is what works against VM. There aren't a lot of grownups who want to watch high school age kids [1] and the younger audience seems much more interested in complex romantic relationships, not criminal relationships.

[1] For television values of high school age

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Veronica doesn't often run into situations that require lots of axe work.

Sure would have been handy for the finale of S1 and the episode where she meets the Fitzpatricks

Buffy doesn't usually have a long list of suspect with lots of secrets to hide.

She does, I think, but she also has a support team who will take care of that stuff for her.

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One thing that surprised me about VM (in that "Oh, this is how things really are" sort of way) is the way Veronica felt physically threatened by the villains in the show. I'd gotten so used to seeing little actresses kickbox their way out of trouble, that it was startling when it didn't happen.

Just another way real life fails to live up to the fun of TV life, I guess.

Anyway, as wish-fulfillment fantasies go, VM is about being incredibly sharp and utterly unconcerned with the unfavorable verdict of your peers. Seeing Veronica get up onstage and sing bad karaoke at the whim of her mysterious informant, I immediately thought: this is a fantasy of a teenager without the teen hangups that adults wish they could have shed. She is not afraid of anything except physical violence.

I'm not sure how well that goes over with the general crowd.

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One thing that surprised me about VM (in that "Oh, this is how things really are" sort of way) is the way Veronica felt physically threatened by the villains in the show. I'd gotten so used to seeing little actresses kickbox their way out of trouble, that it was startling when it didn't happen.

And it has an interesting effect on her father's characterization as well. Most father figures in drama who say to a heroine "Don't do that, it's too dangerous" are seen as domineering and patriarchal. Keith Mars, by contrast, is honestly trying to protect her from situations that clearly *are* extremely dangerous for her to be in.

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...little actresses...

I walked into the mall near my house at some point last year, and was startled to find the cast of Veronica Mars doing a signing. (Why were they in a random mall in Seattle? I have no idea.)

Anyway, you know that cliche that actors always look smaller in real life? Wossername who plays VM doesn't exactly look like a giant on TV, but in person I swear I could put her in my pocket. She's a little 'un.

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For television values of high school age

I pretend that they all look 17 rather than their ages because what I have read about the career paths of young actors leads me to think casting them is generally not doing them a favour, if that makes sense.

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Perfect sense.

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