Kristen Bell explains why that Veronica Mars surprise had to happen
Warning: This post contains a major spoiler from the finale of the Veronica Mars revival. Read at your own risk!
When Veronica Mars premiered in 2004, Veronica was the social outcast of her high school. Thanks to her father’s actions following the Lilly Kane murder — as the local sheriff, he pointed a finger at Lilly’s father — Veronica found herself falling out of the school’s “cool crowd.” And at the center of that cool crowd was Logan Echolls. He was Lilly’s ex-boyfriend and the ultimate jerk. And yet, over the course of the season — and years to follow — Veronica (and fans) started to see another side to Logan and somehow, the two of them became the ultimate couple. But would they end up together?
That wasn’t a simple question to answer, not even for Veronica, who turned down Logan’s marriage proposal in the first episode of season 4. But in the episodes that followed, Veronica discovered that Logan was the man for her, so much so that the two tied the knot in the season finale. If only that had been the end of their story. Instead, their happy ending was the very reason for Logan’s demise. After a season of trying to catch the Neptune bomber, Veronica was successful in putting Penn Epner (Patton Oswalt) behind bars. But it turned out he had one final trick up his sleeve: He’d planted his final bomb in Veronica’s car, a fact that she realized just after Logan got into her car to move it on street-cleaning day. Before she could say anything to Logan, the car exploded with him inside.
“After we decided we were taking a fourth season to the streaming networks, [Rob Thomas] said, ‘I have an idea in my head, let me work on it for a month and I will pitch it to you,'” star Kristen Bell says of Logan’s shocking death. “He pitched it to me over the phone — the entire mystery and gave me the spoiler at the end — and he said, ‘I know this seems crazy or harsh but Veronica is at her best when she’s an underdog and I don’t know that there’s much to root for if she’s now got a perfect relationship. I need to keep her fighting and I need to keep her a little bit uncomfortable in order to have a show. There’s nothing funny or interesting about perfection.'”
When it comes to the end of Veronica and Logan’s story, Bell says, “As it turns out, Logan and Veronica were in love, they were the perfect couple and because we discovered that, unfortunately, we had to tear it down.”
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