I find it very interesting that every press release says how this upcoming "Piz" character will be so irresistable and middle class. Well, *I'm* middle class and I'm actually looking for a little variety. Logan is obviously not worthy of Veronica yet, but he provides another world perspective. Clashes are good in TV drama, if not everywhere else.

aver | September 17, 10:28 CET

I am soooooo looking forward to S3.

Bronzethumb | September 17, 10:49 CET

Pointy is my own personal BDH for givin' the Joss gist spoiler-free. I am fighting as hard as I can to remain unspoiled for VM S3, so I would never have read this article. Cheers, dude! :-)

*goes off to trademark the phrase "Joss gist"* ;-)

billz | September 17, 11:44 CET

*sigh* My hero!

Seriously, though, Pointy-one, thanks. I managed to make it through this whole year pretty spoiler-protected for VM2, just so's I could buy 'em & watch 'em all together & commercial-free. Just finished watching them (alas) and don't know whether I can pull that off again, but certainly don't wanna hear about VM3 before the season starts. (And I found season 2 a little less noir-ish than season 1 -- sadly but not a deal-breaker.)

BTW, just watched the VM2 gag reel and Joss's stream-of-manager-pedagogery-and-egotism ad-libs to the hapless car-rental employee are doggone knee-slapping -- I don't know how she kept it together. S'all I'll say in case anyone's still not there yet...

"That's all I can tell you, except for one last thing: Veronica Mars will still be on. Veronica Mars will still be on. We clear about that?" -- Joss, TV GUIDE: Guest Columnist Joss Whedon Eyes the Future of TV," January, 2006

QuoterGal | September 17, 11:58 CET

billz, QuoterGal: Live (Spoiler) Free Or Die!

Pointy | September 17, 12:06 CET

Very New Hampshirean, Pointy -- I used to live in Boston and drive behind those plates all the time. It always made me nervous, like if you crowded them too much they'd go all road-ragey and suicidal.

QuoterGal | September 17, 12:12 CET

billz, QuoterGal: Live (Spoiler) Free Or Die!

Yeah! So rockingly Independent of you, Pointy -- we ain't the Browncoats for nothin', ya dig? ;-)

billz | September 17, 12:53 CET

Word!

nixygirl | September 17, 14:27 CET

I'll really miss the principal. I enjoyed him a lot. I thought he played just the right balance of liking and trusting Veronica and still realizing she was a teenage kid who did not always make the best decisions.

Lioness | September 17, 15:05 CET

Although the "spoilers" in this article don't really spoil anything - they just address a thread that was left obviously dangling in Season 2.

crossoverman | September 17, 15:28 CET

Thomas mentions some thing that are going to happen in S3, things that do not necessarily have to happen based on S1 & S2. I'd like to un-read the article myself.

Pointy | September 17, 15:43 CET

Quotergal said:

I always find the irony of "Live Free or Die" stamped out by convicts particularly entertaining myself. (I'm a current Bostonian)

deirdre | September 17, 18:19 CET

Spoilers....must avoid....oh god this is hard.

Thanks for stripping it of spoilers though.

Ashley | September 17, 19:54 CET

This article didn't tell me anything I didn't already know. My policiy is if the creator of a show doesn't mind me knowing something, it's not a spoiler.

electricspacegirl | September 17, 21:57 CET

Interesting article. One of the strengths of Buffy and Angel was the fact that they could evolve so oragnically over the years. In retrospect I think that when Buffy entered season four it must have been a difficult stage for Mutant Enemy, but it was executed so perfectly that it didn't seem like that big a change at all when you're watching it. I think the "high school is Hell" metaphor was certainly important to Buffy's early seasons, but merely changing the setting didn't change that because we still had the supernatural influence in Sunnydale and the characters struggling with their personal problems.

I think it was great that high school was such an important part of the show for the first three seasons, mainly because so much of the action and plot revolved around it. Then college and the Initative became the emphasis, then season six with it's lack of direction for Buffy, simply a stuggle to survive the harshness of the world. Then in season seven, the theme of going back to the beginning, where we saw a new Sunnydale High, which really served to point out how far the characters had actually come.

And Angel took such risks as well. Season one was based around the three lead characters, and mainly standalone plots. With each following season more main characters were introduced until we had an excellent ensemble cast and an increasingly complex storyline. Again season five was a breath of fresh air, not because I was disappointed with the previous few seasons, but it was just great to see Mutant Enemy go in a completely different direction and totally change the emphasis of the show.

Just imagine how many twists and turns the Firefly-verse would have taken, had it never been cancelled.

I'm currently watching season one of Veronica Mars on DVD and really enjoying it, so much so that I'm not watching the episodes too quickly because I really want them to last as long as possible and watching each episode a couple of times to really appreciate everything.

I think Rob Thomas has definitely tapped into something great, and I can't wait to see more. I'm also glad that they have decided to have season three see Veronica move into college, whereas in other series such as Smallville it was only in season five where Clark finally went to college, which was really testing believability more than anything on the Lost island. Same with The OC. It seems that in the better written shows, such as Joss' work and Veronica Mars, the showrunners are keen not to get stuck in a rut and have so many ideas that they are eager to move onto something new. Whereas in the other shows I mentioned there are an awful lot of repetitive plots.

I think it's interesting that The OC finally killed off Marissa, although it was about two seasons too late. Maybe now there will be focus on some of the more interesting, believable characters. I also think reducing the speed of some of the storylines would also work in it's favour- I know it's meant to be almost satiricial at times of the ridiculous plots favoured by soap operas, but I think actually making some of the plots a little more believable and developing them over time might make it a better show.

Razor | September 17, 23:15 CET

I don't like how Rob Thomas casually drops spoilers for his shows. At comic-con he ruined both of the seasons for any potential new viewers.

Dolphin Tamer | September 18, 00:00 CET

Don't you think it ws reasonable for Rob to think that if you were at a panel for Veronica Mars at Comic Con that you had already watched seasons 1 and 2? They aren't spoilers if the shows have already aired.

IrrationaliTV | September 18, 00:33 CET

I didn't see any spoilers...

pat32082 | September 18, 01:07 CET

Here's what I think are spoilers and why. Tell me why they're not and I'll take the spoiler tag off. (Inviso-text, don't fail me now.) Thomas says, "Veronica is going through sorority rush, but she'll soon say, `I'm not one of these people, I don't like them, I don't want to be them.'" How can anyone already know she's not going to join a sorority? One would assume she won't, but that's not knowing.
The story goes on: Her fictional hometown campus, Hearst College (where one of the trustees will be played by the real life heiress Patricia Hearst) will be terrorized by a serial rapist.
We know about a rapist in S2, but that doesn't mean we know Veronica will have to solve the case in S3, does it?

Pointy | September 18, 01:14 CET

Um, to the first potential spoiler, well, that's kind of not that big of a leap, is it? We know what type of person Veronica is, so obviously she wouldn't like those particular things. And as far as spoilers go, that's pretty weak, anyway.

As to the second one, yes, we did. Rob Thomas said after that episode that it was going to resurface in S3, and it's been mentioned in every article about Season 3, from TV Guide on down the line. Also, considering how that ended in S2, one could easily deduce that it was going to be revisited, with or without official or media say-so.

As far as I'm concerned, if the creator is openly mentioning these things, then spoilers they're not.

[ edited by pat32082 on 2006-09-17 23:31 ]

pat32082 | September 18, 01:27 CET

We don't know how big a deal he's going to make out of the former, and the way we know about the latter is via previously published spoilers by Thomas.

I'll leave the spoiler tag and mention up top that there's debate over how big the spoilers are.

Re: Whether a creator can spoil his own work, I noticed in the Runaways thread that Joss refered to something mentioned there (including in one of his own posts) as a spoiler. And it was something already published. So I'm on the side of caution.

[ edited by Pointy on 2006-09-17 23:53 ]

Pointy | September 18, 01:35 CET

Considering VM BtVS similarities, I've previously commented on the parallels with the two love interests - Duncan all dark and broody, good guy with a demon inside, and Logan, bad boy sass and attitude, who falls hard for the blonde heroine. I take it that Duncan is gone for good, which is just as well 'cause he was really boring, but it doesn't have to be the end of the character. They could totally rehabilitate him by having a spin-off series where he opens his own detective agency in Australia, after having been befriended by a strange lowlife named Dylan who gets visions from dead Lily (we already know she speaks from the beyond, because she saved Veronica from getting on the doomed bus), who wants Duncan to use his fortune to assist people in trouble (she tells him to "Give hope to the helpless").

They are joined by Madison, who has been kicked out without a penny by her long-suffering family for outright bitchiness while traveling in Australia, and has to earn her own fare back and who latches on to Duncan as the only person she knows and becomes his office manager, and eventually develops both a conscience and a sense of humor. After the tragic but heroic death of Dylan, the fledgling group is joined by none other than Dick Casablancas who, having been shocked out of his mind by the most recent in the line of family betrayals, sets off on a journey around the world to find himself, and accidentally encounters Duncan in the middle of a case. At first Dick seems to be the same irresponsible, ne'erdowell, but over time he develops into a surprisingly competent, and darkly layered individual.

They could call the show "Duncan."

barboo | September 18, 02:09 CET

Hey, Duncan was the MAN in the finale, okay? It's not his fault they gave him a soap-y storyline to go out on.

They should've had Meg die in the bus crash, and her baby. Then Duncan should've still found out later that Meg was pregnant, giving him a much darker arc, that eventually drove him and Veronica apart, and that would've been something to see.

[ edited by pat32082 on 2006-09-18 00:25 ]

pat32082 | September 18, 02:20 CET

barboo, I like your plot a lot, but I'm having the oddest sense of deja vu! ;-)

pat32082, I like your plot, too. That would have been very cool, but maybe Mr. Thomas wanted Veronica to get Duncan out of her system through her own self-sacrifice and choosing to let him go on his own path, instead of a plot where she would decide he had ended up too damaged by all the bad things that happened to him for her to feel comfortable continuing to love him (which was initially what happened between her and Logan, until he earned a second chance). I like both versions. :-)

I support keeping the invisotext and spoiler tags because there are so many people on Whedonesque who are saying they're just watching the DVDs now, or they are just getting it overseas, etc. OTOH, I can see that Rob Thomas might have a good reason to give out a few spoilers in interviews: to try to capture the interest of new viewers who haven't watched the show on air or bought the DVDs. If someone unfamiliar with the show reads about some coming plot development that sounds interesting, they might tune in for the first time! ;-)

[ edited by billz on 2006-09-18 02:16 ]

billz | September 18, 04:14 CET

Thanks, billz, but I could swear I heard someone else say that.

I have to go with the not really spoilers camp. Point number 1 seems a throwaway to me, not much more than saying, in effect, Veronica will meet new people in college and interact with them. As for point 2, that was completely telegraphed in Season 2. Without having read anything about it in the media, it was obvious to me where that was going. I mean who HASN'T figured out that after having her heart torn to pieces by a boyfriend who couldn't keep his inner demon in control, girl computer whiz Mac is going to join a Wiccan circle and embark on a lesbian relationship?

HaHa (evil laugh). Just joking.

barboo | September 18, 06:49 CET

If there's references (no matter how small or tenuous) to a season that has not yet aired in the States, then it is a spoiler. And that's the official Whedonesque position. Here endeth the lesson.

Simon | September 18, 13:52 CET

Amen! ;-)

billz | September 18, 14:08 CET