Endings and Giveaway Winners

I’ve gotten a bunch of emails in the last few days asking me what I thought of the finale for Gilmore Girls and of the fact that they are canceling Veronica Mars.

Okay, confession time: I don’t watch Gilmore Girls. Well, that’s not entirely true. Last fall, my friend Marathon Girl, who is a huge GG fan, thrust the Season One DVD set in my hands and said, “Just watch it.” So I did. I’ve also seen the second season by now. Oh, and I’ve seen one episode from a later season where Rory is at Yale and Paris is dating Jonathan from Buffy.

I know this may sound shocking to GG fans who wonder how I can be writing a Yale-set book without watching a television show set at Yale, but there it is. No, I haven’t seen the series finale of the show. In my world of Gilmore Girls, Rory is a high-schooler flirting with Peter Petrelli. That is probably my favorite part of the show, except for that Lauren Graham is an astounding talent who I hope EXPLODES on the scene now that she’s on the open market. I also like some of the funny townspeople, like Kirk and Michel (Michele? Michael?).

(In passing, why the hell did Rory have to get her “Harvard application” in the mail? Last I checked, Harvard used the Common Application, and she can download it from the internet.)

Okay, moving on. One of my college roommates emailed me yesterday to give me the news about V. Mars. This woman has exquisite taste in in television shows, by the way. She was the one who introduced me to Buffy. The year I graduated from college, and we lived down the street from each other in Astoria, we used to throw Buffy watching parties in our apartments on Tuesday nights. (It was sixth season, and the musical episode party was a really wild one.)
Yeah, I know, most people at that time were throwing Sex and the City watching parties. We were watching Buffy. Says so much, doesn’t it?

I digress (remember my fried brain). So Veronica Mars is canceled. My friend is bereft. I am…untroubled. I think one of the commenters, piekid, put it best on the above article when he/she commented:

All they did was put a dying animal out of its misery. VM hasn’t been the same since the first season. Hell, it hasn’t been the same since the second season. It isn’t half the “smart show” it used to be. I’ve been a die-hard fan since day one and I say thank you for cancelling my show before I became ashamed of it. I’d rather it go out with a bang than go out with a shrug.

True ‘dat, piekid. Look, no one loves this show more than I do. I’m totally obsessed. Remember my love letters to Logan? I watch the DVDs for this show far more often than I have watched DVDs for any show I own DVDs for — Buffy, The West Wing, etc. — and I’ll tell anyone who stands still long enough that the first season of Veronica Mars is the best season of television I’ve ever seen.

The third season has been a big let-down. All of the things I loved so much about the show, Veronica’s bottomless can of kickass and capability, her unstoppable wit, the fact that she outsmarts EVERYONE, ALWAYS… gone. I mean, we’re talking about a girl who, post head injury-creating car accident in season one, had the wherewithal to hide the tapes WHILE on the run from the homicidal maniac… this girl has in sesason three morphed into a past roofie victim who, on a campus where a serial rapist has run amok, does not keep an eye on her drinks. We’re talking about a highly sketchy and morally corrupt love interest whose only foray into lovable psychotic jackass land this season was his (admittedly awesome) attack on an innocent and empty police cruiser. A rich cast of uber-talented secondary characters whose stories were all intricately intertwined with Veronica’s mysteries as well as the main season arc has been reduced to flat sidekicks who get sent on group scavenger hunts to get them out of the way. And the biggie: this was a show that wasn’t afraid to make people complicated, unlikeable, difficult. They’ve gotten scared, they’ve gotten simple. It’s just not the same.

The only thing I hope is that the finale is worthy of a series finale, or is somehow retrofitted to become so. I haven’t seen the finale of Angel, but my old college roommate tells me that they didn’t think it was to have been a series finale until the last moment and so were not prepared to wrap up all the storylines. In this case, I think the Veronica Mars people have already filmed the finale, so there probably won’t be any wrap up at all. Shame.

Speaking of Veronica Mars, I have a special, Neptune-related surprise for you guys next week. You’ll love it!

Onto the giveaway: this week’s winner is: ANNE.