Nine years after the cancellation of the super teen sleuth, Veronica Mars series, the much-anticipated follow-up film hit theatres. The movie picks up Veronica’s story after years of hard work and top notch education, as she interviews for swanky jobs in New York City.
Her teen detective past? “That’s the old me” Veronica adamantly insists. She doesn’t do that anymore, and more specifically, that’s not her anymore. Or so she would have us believe, until she is pulled back to Neptune, back to mystery solving, back to interrogating 09ers and butting heads with high school nemeses.
Dropping in on Neptune High’s class of ’04 10-year reunion, viewers are offered a glimpse into the lives of many of our old favourites from the Golden Age of Veronica Mars… except, despite Mac’s fancy new job and exciting haircut, Weevil’s sexy wife, and Veronica’s alleged abandonment of all things sleuthy and dangerous… not a whole lot has changed.
In fact, despite Veronica’s adamant insistence that she is different, the entire film works to prove that she’s not – that detective work is in her blood and soul and that she cannot, and will not, be rid of it.
Similarly, despite the decade since high school, characters not only fall back into old roles, but appear never to have left them. Madison is bitchy and bitter, Dick is blazed and blasé, Gia is… well, Gia.
The fact that after nine years, Weevil is voted “most changed” for a) being married, b) having a daughter, and c) dropping out of the gang of teenagers in was in as a teenager is absurd!
Nine years is a long time for no one in Neptune to have changed, grown, or at the very least grown nostalgic for those good old days and let bygones be bygones.
You know what else happened nine years ago? I graduated from high school. I know how much things change, from those last moments partying together, to ten years on when half your class have kids, and the other half have dispersed across the globe.
Granted I come from a far more rural community where folks follow in the footsteps of their fathers on family farms, and start producing babies by the age of 21. But the point remains. People grow. Add a little time and distance and old enmities should not come so readily to the fore. Veronica has a right to dread reuniting with her old class, but her dread (and their same-ness) evoke a year or two apart at most, not an honest-to-goodness decade!
I loved getting the chance to re-visit Veronica’s Neptune with all my fellow fans, but the nine-year gap could not have been more stilted. Cramming some education and a few jobs into that time-line sort of proves that something happened in between then and now. But really, nothing (or at least nobody’s) changed. Perhaps it was meant to be comforting, all those call-backs to the high school years we loved. But to me it felt disconcerting. After years of wishing nothing but to leave high school behind, Veronica settles right back in. And it’s not just detective work, it’s old grudges, old flames, old quips. High school shows may be about growing up, but we don’t stop there; people continue to grow after high school… er, usually. Apparently not in Neptune.
