In the wealthy, seaside community of Neptune, California, the rich and powerful make the rules. Unfortunately for them, there’s Veronica Mars, a smart, fearless 17-year-old apprentice private investigator. In season two, the Mars family finds themselves embroiled in another season-long mystery hitting closer to home, following a new local tragedy. Meanwhile, after a summer of surprises and sordid murder trials, Logan and best friend Duncan Kane find themselves at odds, while Veronica must deal with her increasingly complicated romantic life and a whole new school year with familiar and surprising fresh faces.The second season of Veronica Mars showcases the series’ crackling-sharp writing and topnotch acting of star Kristen Bell and the rest of the cast. Veronica still struggles with the class wars in sunny Neptune, Calif., trying to find a balance between high school, love, helping her dad as a private eye, and doing the right thing. The ongoing thread of season 2 is the aftermath of a horrifying tragedy, and as Veronica and dad Keith try to find out what caused it, mysteries only compound. Shifty Sheriff Lamb, town powerbrokers, and various high-school cliques seem to undermine Veronica at every turn. Thankfully, Veronica has more chutzpah than Phillip Marlowe, and the side-of-the-mouth one-liners to match: “Well, actually,” Veronica says dryly to a bad guy, “despite popular opinion, you really can’t beat the truth out of someone.” Some of the show’s broad strokes echo the stellar Buffy the Vampire Slayer, yet Bell’s Veronica doesn’t need the supernatural to tackle a challenge. She’s a real girl, conflicted, prickly, lovesick, yearning, sometimes even scared. As Veronica tries to solve the mystery, she must also handle her own heartbreaks, and the moral stumbles of those closest to her. Happily, she’s got a great best pal, Wallace (the effervescent Percy Daggs III), and possibly the coolest, most understanding TV dad ever (Enrico Colantoni). The boxed set includes 22 episodes (many with deleted scenes), a behind-the-scenes mini-doc, a cute gag reel, and a short profile film, Veronica Mars: Not Your Average Teen Detective. You can say that again. –A.T. Hurley
Buy “Veronica Mars: The Complete Second Season” For Only $9.54
May 7, 2008
#1
I cannot tell you how disgusted I was with this show! It stars a very cute girl Kirsten Bell. Thats not the bad part. In the very first episode was shocking. A gang talks shockingly to her and she is not even the least disturbed about it! Instead she talks disgustingly back at them! The show continues to be incredibly sleezy for a teen show! I must advise you not to by this set or the first season. Instead by the series of Monk. A few episodes are bad but I have never seen anything this bad! I hope that someday a studio will make an appropriate show!
May 8, 2008
#2
The first season of “Veronica Mars” was refreshingly free of politically correct cant. The second season continues the first season’s fine acting and production values, but the scripts, alas, are much more conventionally “Hollywood” than those of the first season. Race, class, religion and sex get the standard Left Coast treatment; there is even an inept homage to “Twelve Angry Men” in which wise Hispanic and black jurors (and, needless to say, Veronica) overcome prejudiced middle-class whites. The lowest blow is the depiction of Meg Manning’s Christian parents. I’m only halfway through Season 2 on DVD, but I half expect it will turn out that the Mannings blew up the bus. Of course, in Hollywood’s view, to be a believing Christian is per se to be a neurotic, sexually repressed, child-abusing, life-hating menace. And guess what, that’s what Meg’s parents are! They lock their youngest daughter in a closet after making her write “The path to God is paved with righteousness” hundreds of times. (How these folks raised such a nice girl as Meg is unclear.) In typical fashion, these characters are never described as “Christians,” only as “religious.” Hollywood is arrogant but not courageous; it likes plausible deniability. But the Mannings show little resemblance to Jews or Muslims; it’s not hard to guess the precise nature of their “religiosity”. I hope, when he’s a bit older, to watch this show with my son, and explain how it illustrates the bigotry and prejudice with which those of our faith are depicted by the Rob Thomases of the world. Then perhaps I’ll also explain to him how the path to God is indeed paved with righteousness, both Christ’s and (imperfectly) ours. Take that, Veronica Mars.
May 8, 2008
#3
Veronica Mars was a great show… the first season. Second season was a huge disappointment. The mystery is extremely convoluted with a lot of plotlines that end up going nowhere. Season one was one of the best seasons of any television show ever because the character relationships were compelling and believable, the mini-mysteries each episode were fun, and the season-long mystery was brilliantly plotted out so we made progress each episode toward an extremely satisfying ending.
In season two the dialogue is still sharp and the acting is good, so it’s still kinda fun to watch. But the season-long mystery is a mess that gets so complicated you need a spreadsheed to keep up and the character relationships feel tired and phony. If you haven’t watched this show, just get season one. If you’ve watched season one, be warned that you’ll be disappointed by season 2.
May 8, 2008
#4
Loved season one, i got really dissapointed with season two. In a nutshell: this season is all over the place. The mane story line (the bus crash)dosent get much atention as last season mane story line did (lillys death). It started off good but then around episode 6 or 7 it got confusing, the bus crash episode were so far away you couldnt remeber what was going on. and to top it off, the characters this time around lack the heart, soul and charisma they had last season.
I would rent this season before buying.
Hope that season 3 gets better. Fingers cross.
May 8, 2008
#5
I was totally looking forward to watching the second season of Veronica Mars but it turned out to be a huge disappointment. I think you really need to watch it twice to understand most of what’s going on because the writing doesn’t direct your attention to a lot of the things that you’re supposed to take note of that become relevent later on. It’s more immediately concerned with having Veronica always following dead-end leads to keep the mystery going, so by the time she actually gets on the right track you don’t know what pieces of information are still relevent. Like in episode 1 when Veronica asks her dad to look up the shareholders of Boatloads Of Fun Corp, I had no idea where she got that name from or why she thought they were involved. Watching it a second time I realised that one of the athletes who was framed for drug use mentioned earlier to Veronica that the company was sueing her parents, but it didn’t register as a pertinent piece of information because at the time there didn’t seem to be any reason to think they were a suspect.
There are also moments of lazy writing that has characters behavior serving to progress a plot point without having any internal logic. Like the part in episode 1 where the cop shows up at Veronica’s door to arrest Logan like he knows Logan is there and Veronica is harbouring him. If the cop thinks Logan is guilty of murder why would he assume Logan told Veronica anything about what happened on the bridge, and why would he assume Logan would more likely be at Veronica’s than have just left town or even the country?
Then there’s the ipod switch in episode 3. Seemingly Veronica had the ipod she gave Kendall rigged to take pictures, but there’s so much there that goes unexplained, like how Kendall wouldn’t have immediately realised the music on the ipod wasn’t hers and chased Veronica down to get hers back before she even left the gym, or why Kendall would have the ipod out in the open all day for it to take all those pictures when she was meeting with people, rather than putting it in a bag or her pocket or something.
Then there’s some things that just never make sense, like in episode 5 the sheriff is trying to blackmail Jackie’s dad into buying 1000 tickets to an annual fundraiser. Apprently Terrence has gambling debts, but how exactly the sheriff or cop was using this against him remains unclear. It seems like the sheriff was threatening to tell his creditors his wherabouts, but if Terrence was hiding out from his creditors in Neptune why would he make a public appearance at the baseball stadium to talk to the students? And didn’t his creditor later turn out to be the owner of a local casino? So if his debts were local anyway obviously he wasn’t hiding out in Neptune. Maybe the cop was threatening to arrest him for illegal gambling, but if that was that case shouldn’t the cop have shown what evidence he had?
The characters even seem duller this time around. Veronica’s Buffyesque sarcastic lines are still in effect, but in this season she’s more conservatively righteous than the first season where her moral compass seemed to allow her more freedom to get the job done. Weevil looks about 30 and the kid who plays Wallace is about the least charismatic actor to ever disgrace tv screens.
If you have an explanation for any of the things I’ve said don’t make sense, post it.