They call it Season Four, but it’s post-VM-the-Movie, so I suppose we’re supposed to regard the movie as Season Three Point Five?

Anyhow . . . good show, better than Original Season Three, also better than VM-the-Movie.  And like everyone else on the internet, I have opinions about That Ending.

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Actually, I think it was a good ending for the season, mostly because it could be worked multiple ways depending upon the future, if any, of the televised Mars-verse.  To wit:

If there are no more Veronica Mars series, specials, movies, or related works, then the fact that Logan died is genre-appropriate, since VM takes place in one of the sunny California suburbs of the Land of Noir, and in noir detective fiction everything always ends up sucking, especially for the detective protagonist.

If there is another series, or another movie, then the “we never saw a body” and “nobody ever actually says the ‘dead’ word” factors come into play, and more choices open up.  Again, to wit:

If they can’t get Jason Dohring to come back, or if he doesn’t want to come back, or if they just don’t feel like working with the character any more, then Logan stays dead as a string-art nail.  Dead!Logan could either just be a part of Veronica’s Tragic Past, or he could be the heart of her next investigation, since another of the rules of the Mars-verse is that nothing is ever what it seems to have been the first time around.

If, on the other hand, they do want to keep on working with the character, and we’ve got NotActuallyDead!Logan in play, then we’ve got the how and the why of that to drive a future season. The current season made a lot of hay out of Logan’s intelligence work, including sudden summonses to active duty while he was supposedly on extended leave, and references to combat experience, and the fact that he’s learned to speak Arabic — not an easy thing; Uncle Sam will teach it to you if he thinks you’ll need to know it, but the course is no picnic — and maybe it was just window-dressing, but it could also have been positional play for possible future stuff.

(And am I the only person who thinks that the tale of how Logan Echolls transformed himself from “aimless layabout with anger issues” into “responsible US Naval officer with what looks to be a good career going for him” would actually have made an interesting story all on its own?)

Also — I initially tried to hide the spoilers more subtly with a cut tag, but my html-fu wasn’t up to the task.

It’s not only future right-wing conservative Supreme Court justices who engage in youthful hijinks involving blackface; once upon a time, the young Virginia Woolf and her friends did something much the same, impersonating the Prince of Abyssinia and his entourage and convincing the CO of HMS Dreadnaught to give them a royal welcome and an official tour.

(That’s Woolf on the far left, in drag and — frankly — fairly unconvincing makeup.)

Everybody seemed at the time to regard this as a jolly good prank, with the exception of the British Navy, which was embarrassed. (What the Abyssinians thought about the whole affair doesn’t seem to have been recorded — if, indeed, they heard about it at all.)

There’s a 2017 New Yorker article about the affair that waxes pontifical about the symbolic meanings underlying the hoaxers’ acts. It makes some interesting points . . . but as far as I can tell, the hoaxers were just upperclass intellectual twits whose agenda, if they had one, could be boiled down to “make Authority look silly.”