Veronica Mars Re-Watch: Pilot (Season 1 Episode 1)

Welcome to Neptune, everyone! If you’re a returning re-watcher like me, I hope you’ll tag along on my full series re-watch of this wonderful show that was way ahead of its time. If you’re a Neptune newbie that isn’t afraid of a spoiler or three, jump on in as I review a series so beloved by its fandom that it pulled off one of the greatest, most celebrated Kickstarter coups of all time to return in movie form.

Veronica Mars premiered just over 11 years ago, on September 22, 2004. The funny thing is, the only part of the series that appears dated is Veronica’s terrible haircut (fun fact: that choppy bob thing was the result of star Kristen Bell growing out her “tortured” mullet haircut after starring as a kidnapped young woman in a David Mamet movie).

The series was helmed by veritable teen dramedy genius, Rob Thomas, one of my favorite show runners. Unlike a few other teen shows also airing on or around The CW at that time, Kristen Bell’s smart, witty teenaged sleuth and her incredibly engaging story have stood the test of time.

It is smart, well-written, excellently plotted, and oh so bingeable. Though it was beloved by critics from the moment it first aired, the series did less well with the viewers at home, leading to its sudden and all-too-soon cancellation at the end of the third season.

Other well-known and highly regarded writers sang the show’s praises as well — Stephen King, Joss Whedon, and Kevin Smith are three diverse examples of this phenomenon (in fact, the latter two loved the show so much they sought out guest spots on the series!) What could possibly be a higher compliment to a showrunner than the awestruck admiration of your fellow writers?

As an aside (and in further praise of the wonderful Rob Thomas), if you are a fan of Veronica and her crew, you absolutely must check out Thomas’ other currently airing series iZombie. It is one of my all-time favorites to have aired in the past few years. There are so many tonal similarities between the two series without the later show feeling derivative at all. Both are fantastic.

Enough generalized gushing from me! Let’s turn to the thing itself — the subject of today’s review is the very first episode of Veronica Mars.

(Just kidding– there will for sure be tons more gushing in this review. Prepare yourself.)

We are thrown right into the world of the show (the opening scene features Veronica spying overnight on a cheating spouse and segues directly into Veronica literally stepping out of her car and walking into her high school), and the pilot does a fantastic job of highlighting right off the bat what is important in Veronica’s town and Veronica’s life.

What’s important is the town’s serious wealth disparity and its fundamentally corrupt law enforcement officials.

Neptune High is essentially the mecca of the whole thing, a perfect distillation of what’s wrong with all of Neptune as a whole. You have on the one hand students like Weevil and his biker gang. Seated across from them in the courtyard are groups of kids like Logan Echolls, Madison Sinclair, Shelly Pomroy– the show calls them the “09ers” (those uber-rich folks living in the 90909 zip code).

In short, they are the beautiful people: the kids who have pizzas delivered to them on campus, drive luxury cars, and talk on brick-sized early 2000’s cell phones.

The pilot also does a great, quick job of setting up who Veronica is as a person. This is another major facet of the series– our protagonist as a character, how she grows and behaves and reacts. Contemporary critic Joyce Milliman wrote in her early review of the show for The Phoenix that Veronica Mars was “a character study masquerading as a high-school drama.”

The series is chock full of incredible, fully-realized characters with intensely complex relationships, and the first episode does a great job of demonstrating these relationships that will serve as the backbone of the series.

I love the father-daughter relationship between Keith Mars and Veronica. They have a great, natural, familiar rapport. It is a testament to their unique relationship (Keith treats her as an adult much of the time; they are essentially intellectual equals) that Keith “allows” Veronica to assist with their cases, though he claims ignorance.

Two other fan favorite relationships are the Weevil/Veronica and Wallace/Veronica friendships. Both are highlighted in the premiere and arguably, both relationships start in the premiere (though Veronica and Weevil are clearly already acquainted by the start of the show, their friendship only really starts after she gets his “boys” off on their robbery charges).

I particularly love these relationships because they are completely platonic (despite Weevil’s crude “passes” at and sexual comments to Veronica, which seem more like verbal tics of his than actual romantic/sexual intent). It’s an unusual thing for a show to maintain friendships between opposite sexes for that long and have them remain totally unromantic, which is another credit to how great these characters are.

Veronica earns Weevil’s respect and Wallace’s undying gratitude when she orchestrates an epic, multi-part plan that manages to take down several of her adversaries, get Weevil’s biker bros off the hook, and clear up a case for Mars Investigations all at once. She does this by coordinating with several of her contacts (both at Neptune High and in the community at large).

She has Corny create a bong that she plants in Logan’s locker (taking her revenge on her very awful ex-friend for his consistent bullying abuse of her), uses said bong to set off a small fire in the sheriff’s department, convinces her contact in the fire department to switch out an evidence tape(*), thereby destroying the state’s shoplifting case against Weevil’s friends and assisting shady lawyer/friend of the Mars clan, Cliff McCormack, with his stripper case.

(*)This seems super illegal. Why the heck would this guy risk doing that? That bit always bothered me.

This series of events characterizes Veronica so perfectly. She is incredibly smart (to the point where she can recite Pope while half-asleep and respond to her teacher’s questions on it,” she is unendingly resourceful, and perhaps most importantly: she’s efficient.

Cliff McCormack: I heard your dad’s out tracking down bail jumpers half the time and yet somehow all the cases that come in here still get handled. How is that?
Veronica Mars: We’re efficient.

The episode ends with Weevil becoming something of a protector to Veronica, confronting and stopping Logan when Logan wrecks her car. Wallace and Veronica end the episode well on their way to becoming the best friends they will eventually be. At the same time, the relationship between Veronica and her father is not in a good place, as she finds out that he’s been lying to her about two very important things (her mother and his investigation of the Lilly Kane case).

This Wallace vs. the Bikers thing is the “main” plot of the episode, which gets resolved within the same hour. But the show manages to set up its two major, season(s)-long plot-lines within the same time-frame– Veronica’s rape at the 09er party, and the murder of her best friend Lilly Kane.

The latter of the two is the main focus of season one of the show, as Veronica finds out in this premiere episode that her father is still investigating Lilly’s death, thought to be a closed case as the man found responsible sat behind closed bars.

I’ll confess: I am not a Lilly fan. I mostly found the character to be obnoxious and grating (which, yes, is totally weird given that she appeared solely in flashback- or spirit-form), and even after the true cause of her death is revealed, I was never quite able to sympathize with Veronica (or even really care at all) about her best friend being gone. Lilly was kind of a terrible best friend! And a completely terrible girlfriend, as we uncover over the course of this season.

That said, the Lilly mystery provides a fantastic backbone for the show and sets up a lot of fantastic character interplay (particularly between Veronica and Logan, Lilly’s boyfriend at the time of her death and Duncan’s best friend). The parsing out of pertinent information (it’s not front-loaded, which is important– there is a lot of backstory unloaded throughout the hour) throughout the course of this episode (and the season at large) is fantastically done.

Finally, we get a peak at Veronica’s in-shambles love life. We meet Duncan Kane, Veronica’s sturdy and silent ex and Lilly’s brother, who suddenly/suspiciously broke up with her right before Lilly was killed. Duncan and Veronica don’t have much (or any) present-day interaction in this pilot episode. That’s fine by me, as I always thought (and still think, this time around) that the two have zero chemistry.

Another fun fact: apparently Jason Dohring originally auditioned for the role of Duncan, and Teddy Dunn auditioned for the role of Logan. I am so glad things shook out the way they did, because I can’t imagine anyone else but Dohring as Logan, and I definitely can’t picture him as the bland-as-bland-could-be Duncan Kane.

Logan and Veronica (LoVe) on the other hand– fireworks. They say that hatred is not the opposite of love, and that’s really key here. That said, Logan’s treatment of Veronica in this episode and the first few of the series always startles me. He is just so outrageously cruel to her, firing on all cylinders, going for the jugular. It’s uncomfortable to watch.

The slow-burn, tense, and yet somehow perfectly sensible development of their romantic relationship is truly magical, and I’m always impressed by it when I remember just how far apart they started off. In the pilot, they are well and truly enemies, so it’s crazy to remember that they end up having this intense, “epic” love story.

Stray Observations:

• I forgot how much I dislike Sheriff Lamb. This bit really brought it all back for me:

Sheriff Lamb: Is there anyone in particular you’d like me to arrest or should I just round up the sons of the most important families in town?

• Good god, Lamb is insufferable, disgusting, and completely without any redeeming qualities. He is definitely high on my list of all-time hated characters– which is a credit to his portrayer, Michael Muhney, who really brought Lamb’s sneering, morally despicable idiocy to life.
• The subplot of Veronica’s rape becomes very important in the second season, and the portrayal of the assault in the pilot always gets me. All of the flashback sequences were well-implemented, but this one was the most wrenching by far. Kristen Bell’s performance is phenomenal and understated as she wakes up in bed the morning after she is raped at an 09er party. It is insane to me that she was never awarded anything for this role. Crazy!
• I somehow never noticed the small detail that Weevil and his crew had spelled “snitch” incorrectly when they wrote it on nearly naked Wallace and tied him to the pole.
• Another thing I never noticed: the whole “who’s your daddy” shtick (which also becomes really important later this season, when momentary doubt is cast on Veronica’s paternity).
• Speaking of Veronica’s parents, I never found Lianne Mars to be a particularly engaging character and I still don’t. I understand Veronica’s need to search for her mother and reunite her family, but it was always the least interesting aspect of the first half of the first season, for me.

That’s all for now, folks! What did you think of the series premiere of Veronica Mars, having watched it for the first or fiftieth time? Share your thoughts with us by commenting below!