It’s probably not true that the movie paved the way for season 4. The movie didn’t make money. (Or to be precise, it made money in the sense that the fans donated its entire production budget, so anything after what the studio put in for marketing was pure profit to them . . . but it didn’t show it was profitable for…

I don’t think that’s an unfair question to ask, but I don’t really think Mayer’s piece is doing much to grapple with it. Because if you unpack what “pushed out purely out of political expedience” means . . . the Democrats pushed Franken out because they thought that they had to draw a strong contrast between Rs and Ds…

I meant “revive” creatively. He has a very narrow lane he’s stuck to over the past decade; sometimes it works okay and sometimes it doesn’t, but it would be nice to see him do something more innovative.

It’s just bizarre that she framed it as “the untold story” behind Tweeden’s allegations, when almost none of the story she was telling about Tweeden was new. It was all rehashed in depth at the time; the idea that it was politically motivated, and spread by people with political agendas, and that parts of her story…

The actual numbers don’t really suggest that it’s more common on a cruise ship than it is in everyday life, just that it’s more common on a cruise ship than other crimes. As one of the articles Fishbein linked pointed out, there were 82 reported sexual assaults on cruise ships in 2018 out of 12 million total…

Like I said, I’m not a starred commenter, and my response didn’t take him out of the grays. I don’t have the power to do that. Only starred commenters can lift responses out of the grays.

He’s him. Hope this helps.

Yeah, I think he could revive his career if he opened himself up to directing other people’s scripts or even just co-writing. He has talent as a director, but he’s long since hit his limits as a writer. He’s too much of a control freak to ever cede that power, though.

Now she’s in her 30s. Is it really so hard to see why people expect some character growth?

I’m not starred either; I have no power to enable anyone!

I disagree with Rob Thomas that characters who are happy or in stable relationships are inherently uninteresting. (The world is full of counterexamples to that!) But I think people who are looking for that in this series and this character are fundamentally looking in the wrong place. From the beginning, Veronica has…

If Thomas were being true to the characters, I think this is the ending we would have gotten. And it’s the ending I would have preferred.

Oh, Weevil, Keith, and Wallace have definitely tried to call Veronica out. But she mostly ignores them. The only person she ever even occasionally listens to is Logan.

Yeah, this is where I’m at, too. I understand the motive behind ditching Logan, but not all of the other stuff Thomas says he wants to get rid of in season 5.

I guess what I mean isn’t that she should never be allowed to grow, nor do I think that’s Thomas’s goal. In fact, the end of this season suggests an attempt to let her do that, although I think using Logan’s death to propel that growth is a bit hacky.

I think you could write a version of Veronica that evolves enough to have a healthy relationship, but not without making it into a completely different show.

Yeah, I don’t blame anybody who’s upset that Logan died—it was a compelling relationship to watch, and Logan played an important role to the show (in being the only one Veronica let call her out on her shit). But the sheer number of comments that ask why the show won’t let Veronica be happy or grow as a person make me…

I read an interview where Rob Thomas confirmed Logan is dead, but did anyone else think it was weird she never explicitly says he died?

I think this season was all about showcasing how unhealthy their relationship still is. Veronica prefers the version of Logan who’s compulsively jealous and has anger management issues to the one who’s working on managing that stuff in therapy, and she openly baits him into acting the way she wants. (And he calls her…

I think they kind of painted themselves into a corner with Movie Logan, and there was no easy way out of it. The central conceit of Logan and Veronica’s relationship has always been that they’re both dysfunctional, and that’s both what draws them to each other and why they never actually work out long term. You can…