As I just described, Logan was the second main character of Veronica Mars, the person whose internal motivations and dynamism drove the series after Veronica’s. By making him largely a supporting player in the season, some of that was negated, to be sure. But across the the course of the series, Logan made choices, and the narrative responded to those choices. Yet his death had nothing to do with any kind of choice of he made. All he does is decide to move the car at the time when the bomb goes off. He is a passive observer to his own death.

Logan doesn’t make a “good” choice to help out, and die a hero. Nor does he make a “bad” choice, one that puts him in a place where death becomes at some level expected. He’s just kinda there when a bad thing happens.

To make matters worse, the net effect of his death seems to be to push Veronica forward. Throughout the series and especially the fourth season, Veronica is shitty about therapy, seeing it as weakness or something to be abused, not something that can actually help her genuinely traumatic life. Logan’s death finally gets her to take it seriously. In other words, Logan Echolls, once a dynamic, three-dimensional character, is treated merely as a prop in Veronica Mars’ life.

Hell, even Veronica doesn’t participate in Logan’s death. There is nothing in the season to suggest that anything other than her believing that solving the bombing case would be a good idea is responsible for Logan’s death. There’s not even a runner about how she’s forgetting clues (like the bag that holds the bomb) or drinking too much or doing too many drugs (she very much does, somewhat oddly, but the idea that it might affect her work is ignored.) Logan’s death just…happens.

If you were to turn off the season with those ten minutes or whatever the exact timestamp is, you wouldn’t actually miss the conclusion to any major component of the show. Some of the monologue about what’s happened in the year since the bombings is interesting for how it affected Neptune as a town, yes, but Logan’s death doesn’t flow from anything that came before to the point where it feels like it’s actually connected to the season.

So Logan Echolls’ death has no thematic connection to Season 4, and virtually no narrative connection to the season. It is detached, and detachable. That’s never a good sign.

Ah, but it gets worse! The death seems to be deliberately cruel. It’s not just cruel to Veronica, who’s dealt with more than enough trauma in her life, but it’s cruel to viewers. Specifically shippers (for LoVe, i.e., Logan and Veronica), who’ve been an essential, and arguably overwhelming, part of Veronica Mars fandom almost since its inception. For a detailed examination of this, I recommend checking out Vox’s Contance Grady on the subject, but suffice it to say, there’s a complicated metatextual relationship between the producers of Veronica Mars and its fans. That relationship was thoroughly abused in the fourth season.

Some examples of how this has worked across the show’s run: The first season ended with a cliffhanger, yes, but not over the two central mysteries of who killed Lilly Kane or who raped Veronica, nor about Veronica’s survival when the killer came after her. No, the cliffhanger was “who’s at the door?” with the implication that whichever of her two potential love interests, Duncan or Logan, came to her apartment after she almost died, was Veronica’s OTP.

Logan and Duncan

The second season premiere, “Normal is the Watchword”, had fun with this premise, veering back and forth between the two boys via misdirect after misdirect before landing on Duncan, the obviously less satisfying choice. While some of this angered shippers, I personally am on the record multiple times as finding it exhilarating and hilarious, the sort of shipper-trolling I can get behind.

This continued across all forms of the show, seemingly reaching its peak during the run-up to the crowdfunded Veronica Mars Movie. During filming and marketing for the film, Veronica Mars production kept asking if fans were #TeamLogan — the bad boy who defined the show almost as much as Veronica, and whose fans formed the core of the audience — or #TeamPiz. Piz was a love interest introduced in the much-maligned third season, a nice hipster boy portrayed as the anti-Logan, despised by most fans for either getting in the way of LoVe, or just for being that boy in college who never shuts up about his vinyl collection. Only the fact that actor Chris Lowell had become a beloved face on underdog TV shows had Piz get redeemed at any level whatsoever.

So by acting like this false choice between beloved dynamic character Logan Echolls and much-hated hipster Piz was actually a choice, Veronica Mars kept fandom flames stoked, even as everyone knew that Veronica would choose Logan, as she did across the course of the film.

Leo and Veronica

A similar sort of thing happened with the filming of Season 4, when it got announced that Max Greenfield would be reprising his role as another of Veronica’s exes, Deputy Leo (now with the FBI, but always Deputy Leo in my heart). During filming, it got leaked, almost certainly deliberately, that there was a raunchy sex scene with Greenfield — and who else would it be with if not Veronica? And what other reason to leak it other than to stoke fandom flames even more? Again hilariously, the sex scene in question turned out to be a dream — yet another textual or metatextual obstacle in the way of Logan and Veronica’s relationship.

That complicated relationship between show and shippers turned downright abusive in the final episode of the season, however. The episode, which had Logan planning out the paperwork for the wedding as, unbeknownst to him, Keith and Veronica chased down the bomber and his bombs, again kept throwing obstacle after obstacle in Logan’s, and in a sense, the fandom’s way. Logan meets an ex in line, and follows her out of the room when she leaves? Perhaps he’s returning to his bad boy ways! Logan seems to have second thoughts in therapy? Perhaps he’s not the bad boy after all, but instead a good man realizing his girlfriend might not deserve his emotional support.

And then, most damning of all, as Veronica and Keith and Wallace wait for Logan for the simple ceremony they have planned, he’s late. Veronica starts to panic, as military Logan is NEVER late. A single text saying “sorry” shows up and they wave the notary home…only for Logan to actually show up, apologizing and saying the second text didn’t go through. All three of things are deliberate attempts, using how conventional television works, to toy with viewers’ (especially shippers’) emotions. They are deliberately genre-savvy manipulations, knowing that this is how television should be “read” by people, in a way that turns a relatively simple story of two people having a courthouse marriage into a roller coaster.

It is all the “will they/won’t they” of over a decade of Veronica Mars compressed into a few moments. And it seems to fit the pattern of “Normal is the Watchword” where the deception is revealed, the shippers have been teased and tortured, and then the resolution is introduced: this one, seemingly happy. And then it’s all torn away in a brief scene of realization for Veronica.

But wait, like a shitty infomercial, there’s more! Logan’s death isn’t actually shown on-screen, and the year-later scene seems to deliberately go out of its way to avoid saying exactly what happened to him. Those few minutes of Veronica explaining how Neptune had changed seems to want to continue torturing fans desperate for information about exactly what happened when that bomb went off. The implications are that Logan died, but without having seen his body, or seen his grave, and with all those things being avoided, it seemed like the show was trying to have the bad twist be untwisted in the end: Logan would be injured but mostly okay; Logan would be in a coma; Veronica would have changed because she came so close to losing him, not because she actually did.

It doesn’t. The show, genre-savvy as ever, deliberately keeps that information as long as it can, but it eventually leads to the idea that yes, Logan is dead, and Veronica is moving on. But by telling and not showing, it teased fans desperate to see Logan not be dead, to the point where the official twitter account actually retweeted Jason Dohring saying that his character was totally dead, as Coma Logan was the fan theory du jour. I genuinely don’t think those fans were wrong to read the text, as presented, as saying that — another really bad sign for how well the death was portrayed.

And even after that…it gets worse. I’ve deliberately avoided saying the name of that final episode, because it’s such a blatant provocation to fans. “Years, Continents, Bloodshed” is the title of the episode, and it’s a summary of Logan’s great monologue, linked above, that defined the entire relationship and in many ways the show. Any fan, seeing that title, would immediately expect dramatic events involving those two most dynamic characters. And as the episode progresses, focusing almost entirely on the hunt to find the bomber and his bombs, it becomes clear that the episode isn’t about that relationship, but instead that something external happens to that Veronica-Logan relationship. There is a wedding, yes, but a wedding that lasts all of five minutes before it’s blown into bits seems, once again, like deliberate cruelty; the act of a set of creators who want to burn their bridges.

And, well, they do. But that’s a story for the second piece, on why Rob Thomas and the Veronica Mars team did it, and why their explanations don’t merely fall flat, but actively make the decision worse. But even before then, this was terrible, infuriating storytelling from a season that had done almost everything right until that point.