Content warning: This article contains mentions of rape and sexual harassment that can be disturbing and/or triggering for some readers.
“Welcome to Neptune, California. A town without a middle class,” snarks 16–year–old Veronica Mars (Kristen Bell) at the start of the first episode of the 2004 cult TV show Veronica Mars.
The voiceover, class politics, and the eponymous main character’s simmering rage at the world around her would all become staples over the course of Veronica Mars’s four seasons and movie. The first episode aired a little over 20 years ago, and though the show drove off a cliff in the later seasons, the first season is a pretty perfect encapsulation of contemporary class, race, and gender politics—all while being a wildly entertaining and watchable hooking neo–noir.
Season one of Veronica Mars does an impressive job of taking the viewer through three whodunnits per episode. Each episode has a self–contained mystery that Veronica, a blonde, Californian, hard–boiled–teen–girl detective, spends the episode solving, usually with the help of her father, disgraced ex–sheriff Keith Mars (Enrico Colantoni), and her best friend, new–in–town sweetheart Wallace Fennel (Percy Daggs III).
But outside of the standard procedural process, two other questions linger over the whole first season: Who killed Lilly Kane (Amanda Seyfried), Veronica’s best friend and sister to Veronica’s ex–boyfriend, Duncan Kane (Teddy Dunn)? And who roofied and raped Veronica at Shelly Pomroy’s party last summer?
“You want to know how I lost my virginity?” Veronica asks the audience after a classmate makes a joke about her alleged promiscuity. “So do I.”
Rape isn’t an undercurrent in Veronica Mars—it’s the whole show. The actors do not shy away from it. And they certainly don’t shy away from the broader structures that facilitate sexual violence, especially with (spoiler) the mid–season reveal that Duncan and Veronica slept together while Duncan thought that they were half–siblings (they’re not). From Veronica’s boyfriend being okay with potential incest to Lilly’s killer being a grown man exploiting her sexually to a (peeking into season two) reveal that Veronica’s rapist was a victim of molestation by the town’s mayor, Veronica Mars goes out of its way to enforce and reinforce the idea that rape is not about sex—it’s about power, who has it, who wields it, and how other dynamics (like class, race, and trauma) surrounding it play out.
But the true greatness of Veronica Mars’s first season comes in Veronica’s abject, outright, unhidden hatred of her surroundings and the world around her.
Sure, there are a few good apples in Neptune. Wallace, for example, is particularly stellar. But he’s an outlier, and, crucially, an audience–proxy outsider: new to town and the eternal damsel in distress to Veronica’s knight–in–shining–hideous–2000s–fashion–armor. He’s the softer set of eyes through which we see Veronica’s world—and even he doesn’t look so fondly on it.
Keith, Veronica’s dad, is another such good guy. He and Veronica have one of the most complex, touching, and authentic father–daughter relationships ever put to screen, and the two of them stand together frequently against a community that has grown to detest them. Keith’s nicer than Veronica, less jaded, and his teeth are not so sharp. But he’s still on her side—and we know that, because he, like Wallace, like Veronica’s rich–bitch future boyfriend Logan (Jason Dohring), like her best friend Mac (Tina Majorino), like her begrudging ally Weevil (Francis Cordero Capra), absolutely despises what Neptune has done to the few good people who live in it.
Veronica hates Neptune, and, by extension, Veronica (and the audience, through her eyes) hates everything that Neptune stands for. She’s a seething ball of teenage angst and anger, mad at her classmates, mad at injustice, mad at the town’s racist, sexist elites. Neptune’s a microcosm of the country; it’s far from a different planet.
It’s still a place worth fighting for, though, and boy, does Veronica fight. She bruises her knuckles and splits her lip throwing punch after punch, dragging the town, kicking and screaming, toward social progress.
But she’s no martyr, and she’s no “perfect victim." Veronica is, to put it plainly, a massive asshole. She’s mad. She lashes out. She hurts people around her, especially those she loves, and those who love her. Her associates are losers and criminals. She’s a flawed, messy, thorny girl who wants love, sex, and closure. Sure, maybe underneath her “angry young woman shell” she’s a bit of a marshmallow, but she knows how to wield her words like a knife—and how to taser the hell out of people, too.
Veronica is a complicated person, and that’s because Veronica Mars knows that its teen–girl detective is, in fact, a person first before she’s a victim or a survivor. Veronica absolutely hurts people. Veronica openly struggles with sex but still wants it. The show never treats Veronica’s rape like a plot device for her backstory. It is the whole story, and it’s realistically complicated and hard for Veronica and for the people in her life to truly grapple with.
There’s no grand reckoning when Veronica’s classmates realize that she’s been right all along and that they’ve been mistreating her, and that they should be so, so sorry and give her an award for all she’s done to help them out, all while getting blow after blow from the universe. That would be too shiny, and noir thrives in the shadows.
Veronica remains pretty much a pariah, and though she’s central to Neptune’s functioning as the town’s never–seen detective/vigilante, she’s happy to lurk on the outskirts. Society kicked her out—it’s not like she exactly wants back in with a group that turned their back on her when she was struggling the most. The people who matter love her, and the people who love her see her for who she is, not for some victim–blaming made–up story about a girl giving it up at a party. She has love and community and a relationship with her father that most people, let alone teenagers, would probably kill for.
Ultimately, the best thing about Veronica Mars is that it doesn’t mince words and it doesn’t cut corners. It’s as blunt as Veronica’s choppy early season one haircut and as direct as one of Veronica’s stinging insults. It tells you straight to your face: The world is not a fair place, but there are people fighting to make it a slightly fairer one. It’s a hard fight, and it’s a fight that might feel futile in moments, but things change, eventually. They always do.
“A pamphlet’s not gonna cover it. It’s just gonna suck,” Veronica tells a fellow rape survivor in one of the later seasons when asked about how to get through something like this. “And then it’s gonna suck less.”
And it does. Veronica Mars doesn’t pretend that a person, especially a young person, can just ‘get over’ something traumatic. The Veronica we see during the show’s timeline isn’t the same Veronica we see in flashbacks; she’s never going to be that person again.
But she doesn’t mourn a death, and she doesn’t romanticize a transformation—she just keeps going, and she quietly assures everyone around her (and everyone watching) that whatever it is they’re struggling with, with time and friendship, it’ll suck less for them eventually, too.
