![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Veronica Mars Is Smarter Than the Others.
May. 8th, 2006 07:48 amYeah, another shot as Lost. It's important, for reals.
See, last year, one of the most fascinating things about Veronica Mars was the way it took one big mystery and left it in view for the entire season. Slowly, viewers learned more about the murder of Lilly Kane until there were several reasonable suspects, several reasonable motives, and several reasonable opportunities. In the days before the finale, fans started putting together their theories about which match of suspect and motive would turn out correct.
This week, nobody's doing that, because while there are plenty of reasonable suspects, there aren't any very satisfactory motives.
Watching the last episode, I finally started to understand how the season had been constructed. ( Spoilers for last week's episode )
That view of the last episode translates to the entire season. Everything in the season has been leading up to getting things in place for the finale, so that the finale can be an amazing blowout that fits everything together. In order to do that, the writers had to start from the finale and work backwards. "We need so-and-so to be doing such-and-such, so we'll lay the seeds for that in episodes 5, 8, and 15, then make it happen in episode 21."
And when you look at what's still going on in Neptune, it's clear that there's too much. There are too many players, too many loose ends, and too many unconnected mysteries. There's no way that they can address them all separately in one final episode.
Therfore, they have to address all (or nearly all) of the mysteries of the season as part of a single larger mystery.
It's really a Lost approach to the plotting. There's an Big Mystery, but it's so big it can't be understood. But it is the source of several smaller, apparently unrelated, mysteries. What do polar bears have to do with numbers have to do with Others have to do with hallucinations have to do with disease have to do with magnetism have to do with curing cancer? Nobody knows, but the implication is that solving one of the smaller mysteries, is a path to the Big Mystery, which will simultaneously solve all of the others.
Of course, Lost wants to keep its Big Mystery mysterious for as long as possible. (And, of course, there's no guarantee that the writers know what it is.) On the other hand, Veronica Mars wants to keep the Big Mystery under wraps for about 21.5 episodes. And to do that, they choose their big mystery first, and then they find smaller mysteries to come out of it. Then they keep the focus on the smaller mysteries. The smaller mysteries contribute to the Big Mystery, but we can't see how, because we can't even understand what the Big Mystery is. Moreover, for fairness' sake, the Big Mystery is kept in the background of the season as something that's just part of normal life. It's not a surprise, it was just so Big that there was no reason for anyone to look at it.
Which leads to my speculation:
( Speculation based on the entirety of Season 2, but no other spoiler information. )
It's probably silly of me to try to analyze the ending of the season before it's finished, but I feel like I should get my prediction out there, because if I hit one out of the park, it'll look fantastic. Still, there's a lot of room for me to be wrong, even if there's not a lot of room in the actual episode.
Enjoy the show, guys.
MonNYTX: 4:15.
See, last year, one of the most fascinating things about Veronica Mars was the way it took one big mystery and left it in view for the entire season. Slowly, viewers learned more about the murder of Lilly Kane until there were several reasonable suspects, several reasonable motives, and several reasonable opportunities. In the days before the finale, fans started putting together their theories about which match of suspect and motive would turn out correct.
This week, nobody's doing that, because while there are plenty of reasonable suspects, there aren't any very satisfactory motives.
Watching the last episode, I finally started to understand how the season had been constructed. ( Spoilers for last week's episode )
That view of the last episode translates to the entire season. Everything in the season has been leading up to getting things in place for the finale, so that the finale can be an amazing blowout that fits everything together. In order to do that, the writers had to start from the finale and work backwards. "We need so-and-so to be doing such-and-such, so we'll lay the seeds for that in episodes 5, 8, and 15, then make it happen in episode 21."
And when you look at what's still going on in Neptune, it's clear that there's too much. There are too many players, too many loose ends, and too many unconnected mysteries. There's no way that they can address them all separately in one final episode.
Therfore, they have to address all (or nearly all) of the mysteries of the season as part of a single larger mystery.
It's really a Lost approach to the plotting. There's an Big Mystery, but it's so big it can't be understood. But it is the source of several smaller, apparently unrelated, mysteries. What do polar bears have to do with numbers have to do with Others have to do with hallucinations have to do with disease have to do with magnetism have to do with curing cancer? Nobody knows, but the implication is that solving one of the smaller mysteries, is a path to the Big Mystery, which will simultaneously solve all of the others.
Of course, Lost wants to keep its Big Mystery mysterious for as long as possible. (And, of course, there's no guarantee that the writers know what it is.) On the other hand, Veronica Mars wants to keep the Big Mystery under wraps for about 21.5 episodes. And to do that, they choose their big mystery first, and then they find smaller mysteries to come out of it. Then they keep the focus on the smaller mysteries. The smaller mysteries contribute to the Big Mystery, but we can't see how, because we can't even understand what the Big Mystery is. Moreover, for fairness' sake, the Big Mystery is kept in the background of the season as something that's just part of normal life. It's not a surprise, it was just so Big that there was no reason for anyone to look at it.
Which leads to my speculation:
( Speculation based on the entirety of Season 2, but no other spoiler information. )
It's probably silly of me to try to analyze the ending of the season before it's finished, but I feel like I should get my prediction out there, because if I hit one out of the park, it'll look fantastic. Still, there's a lot of room for me to be wrong, even if there's not a lot of room in the actual episode.
Enjoy the show, guys.
MonNYTX: 4:15.