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susanmichelin replied to your post: I had completely forgotten how awful menswear was...
You’re welcome.
SO if I say, like, out loud, right now I wonder if SUSAN knows where I can find archival photos of 1989 menswear collections photos of said menswear will just appear in all their satanic boxy suited glory?
@nightlocktime said: what is this? why are you attacking me so early in the morning?!!!
I COULD STOP.
@susanmichelin said: Are you writing something new??? Please say yes, please say yes.
Yes! Maybe!
@susanmichelin said: Oooh is this for this years VMHQ/VM Fic Recs Smut-a-thon: Electric Smutaloo???
I have NO idea what that is lol
susanmichelin replied to your post “I got to the realization that Kerry Bishé (Halt and Catch Fire) would...”
You know she dates/lives with Piz, right?
WHAT?!
Woah that's a weird coincidence. If it wasn’t for Glow that restored Chris for me I’d be upset lmao.
He’s really lucky she’s amazing.
violetobsession replied to your post “VM Season 3 Polls!”
Are we not meant to be able to see the poll results yet?
Yes.
susanmichelin replied to your post “Attention, marshmallows!”
Nice gloves. You headed to the parlor to strangle Colonel Mustard after this?
susanmichelin replied to your post “Attention, marshmallows!”
Woof. You should seriously consider going pro in that.
All suggestions included, my lady!
supernaturalbigirl replied to your post “Attention, marshmallows!”
I'm on season 2 myself but in general I consider anything Logan Echolls related pure gold
Oh, there’s plenty of Logan on the list :)
susanmichelin replied to your post: “Rat Saw God”:
Rats Saw God was the title of a YA book written by Rob Thomas and, the close up of the thing taped to the bottom of a bus seat that you couldn't identify is a dead rat.
Ah, okay. Dead rat = Rat Saw God.
Also, a dead rat causes the bus to stink, as commented on by Little Dick and others. Petty revenge on the part of someone who couldn’t go? Or a deliberate attempt to get people off the bus? Was the bus supposed to be empty when it went over?
I assume the bus crash wouldn’t be a season-long story if the end result was going to be some sort of mechanical failure so my immediate assumption would be someone sabotaged the bus. To what end? Need more information.
susanmichelin replied to your post: “Clash of the Tritons”:
Hey, just an FYI -there wasn't supposed to be an episode in between An Echolls Family Christmas and this one. It was supposed to be Silence of the Lamb, Echolls Family Christmas, and then Clash of the Tritons. They switched the aired order so Echolls Family Christmas could be shown in December.
leuberpwnage replied to your post: “Clash of the Tritons”:
Quick note: the cliffhanger at the end of 1x10 was supposed to go just before this episode. 1x10 and 1x11 were aired backwards because Christmas and dumb tv network rules etc. etc...
I probably should have guessed that was the fact. Although it’s weird that they didn’t rearrange them on the DVD box set... but, whatever, right?
Thanks for the replies.
[Somewhere along the way @susanmichelin had a birthday. Not sure when, but I hope she will accept this (somewhat downer of a post) as a belated gift.]
Logan and Aaron in Season Two
Although there are many contenders for best scene partners in Veronica Mars (aside from the obvious), these three encounters between Logan and Aaron are among the most quietly intense between any two characters during of the second season.
Speaking just for myself, it is so easy to focus on Bell, Dohring, Colantoni and other “good guys” that I forget to give Harry Hamlin enough credit for his remarkable performance as Aaron Echolls. It is not just that he successfully plays Aaronas loathsome (though he does). Nor does the brilliance necessarily lie in Hamlin making Aaron more sympathetic or giving us Aaron’s point of view or whatever – however you cut it, we despise Aaron.
It is hard to find the words for what Hamlin does that is so great, so please forgive my inevitable verbal missteps. Aaron comes off as evil, but, despite the epic nature of, for example, the climactic scenes of the first season finale, Aaron is at the same time a “normal” evil. Aaron Echolls is not the “thinks he is really doing the right thing” sort of villain (not that there is anything wrong with that sort of villain in the right context). When Aaron does awful things, it is not because he thinks it is for the greater good, it is just to benefit himself, and he knows this. That sort of person is difficult to imagine as someone who could successfully function in society, yet Aaron has mostly managed to make it work, and Hamlin makes the sociopath (in the mansion) next door believable.
Then we have Dohring, and enough has been said and written about his brilliant performance in Veronica Mars that I need not go into detail. In the VM Rewatch, others have said that Dohring has great chemistry with everyone. Put him with a so-so actor, and the scenes are still good. Put him with an excellent actor like Bell or, yes, Hamlin, and the results are spectacular.
We often give credit to the actors for scenes like the above, and rightly so. We should also acknowledge that the the writing and (probably direction is excellent as well. The dialogue is thick with complex emotion without being bombastic and lapsing into cliche.
What is particularly compelling is that the scenes do not give the viewers what we might think we want, any more than get the big scene of Aaron being found guilty, or Veronica, Keith, or even Logan himself predictably killing Aaron in self-defense (Aaron’s actual demise is a whole different topic). In these three confrontations, Logan does not get one over on his father, proclaim his hatred and walk away. While Logan has every reason do that, he just can’t. In the first two scenes pictured, Logan does not gloat, or even look pleased with the situation. Logan calls Aaron out and snarks, but it comes off as false bravado. Logan may not be afraid of Aaron any more, but he clearly is not sure how to feel, or react.
Logan surely hates Aaron (he is not lying when he says so to Keith in 2x10), but he just as surely struggles with other feelings – including the the love he has feels for his father, a love he still struggles to understand.
Even while Logan scoffs at Aaron’s attempt to pin things on Duncan, he is half-hearted. Especially effective in the scene from 2x6 (“Rat Saw God”) is, in response to Aaron saying “I don’t expect any sympathy from you,” Dohring’s delivery on “That’s good.” It is not that Logan does feel sympathy. It is that he does not know what to feel, yet he cannot remain indifferent. He does get angry, but even at his loudest, Logan is relatively soft-spoken and reflective. When Aaron again tries to get sympathy (“You don’t believe me. Why should a jury believe me? Maybe my life is over.”), Logan does not reassure him, but neither does he revel in the situation of the abusive father who slept with and murdered the love of his life, then tried to kill Veronica (one of the other “loves of his life.” Hey, if Logan is, as Wallace and Veronica postulate in 2x16, a cat, then he’s got nine lives, and thus can have up to nine loves of his life. So far in canon, he’s had three.).
It is made all the more difficult by Aaron’s seeming concern that Logan not throw his own life away. (One interesting question is whether Aaron thinks Logan was guilty or innocent of killing Felix; perhaps Aaron is trying to “bond” over the situation.) This makes things even more painful for Logan – as many times as he has seen Aaron display concern, as easy as we might think it would be for him to dismiss it as, this is still his father.
Aaron even seems to get the last word here. Logan rejects his advice and (self-destructively or otherwise) insists that he has a lawyer in Cliff (his public defender), but Cliff shows up and agrees with Aaron. Despite it all (Logan’s possible reasons for sticking with Cliff would be a great post in itself), Logan manages to express his oppositional defiant disorder once more (“Well, you’re kind of winning me over”) to end the scene on a strangely smiling note. The emotional turmoil remains.
In 2x21 (“Happy Go Lucky”), Logan goes to see Aaron. Whether Logan initiated the contact or Aaron requested the visit before Logan’s testimony is not clear, but again, there is no real gloating on Logan’s part. Once again, it is easy for us to dismiss Aaron’s concern for Logan as self-interested, as it surely was, but it is not clear to me (or, more importantly, to Logan) that it is merely self-interested. No matter how much Logan knows his father is a phony, he cannot simply ignore Aaron. Once again, Logan starts with a sneer (“You know, if you would’ve given Lilly the performance you gave today, she might’ve given you the Oscar.”), but once again, it feels half-hearted.
What might from seem seem to be indifference on Logan’s part (and perhaps he is trying to feign that) comes off more as emotional exhaustion. Logan has had to listen to attacks on his friends and loves in court, has to hear his father’s lies that he knows to be lies, yet Logan is still drawn to the jailhouse to talk to his father, perhaps for the last time. Logan’s sarcastic “because I want so desperately for you to be free so we can be a family again?” is delivered in a way that not on conveys his anger and bitterness, but it contains underlying truth – Logan wants to have had a family, wants to have had a real father who loved him like a father should, and not just any father, he wants Aaron to have been the person Logan needed him to be. No matter what the outcome of the trial, that will never be.
Logan leaves, as we see in the cap above. This is clearly meant to be a final goodbye. Instead of Logan telling his father he hates him, saying everything about what Aaron should have been, gloating about their relative situations, Logan just gives a half-hearted wave of goodbye from his life. The moment conveys not vindictiveness, but the emptiness and loss Logan feels even as he breaks free of his father.
Logan and Aaron’s final exchange happens in 2x22 (“Not Pictured”). There is important foreshadowing in the “Going down?” “No, Up” (make your own joke about this being the only time Logan refuses to go down) exchange, but again there is so much more to the scene. Aaron tries to make small talk, Logan snarks about Aaron’s time in prison and gets angry about murder. Even now, Logan does not get a moment of vindication.
In contrast to the prior two encounters in which Logan was sad and reflective when he seemingly had the upper hand, now that Aaron is on top again and does not need his son for anything but self-congratulation, the father shows his own true self, responding to Logan’s rejection of his overtures by reminding him that he “has the purse strings back… You’re my dependent again, son.”
More disturbing, despite the promise of the down/up exchange, is Aaron’s “I never stopped being your father and I never will.” Not only is this a reminder of the mark Aaron will always have in Logan’s life and person despite Aaron’s utter failure in his parental role, but it points to Logan’s worry that he is doomed to be like his father. He has struggled with his father’s shadow over his life throughout the first two seasons even as he tries to overcome it. Even in season three, when he spends much time actually being haunted by Lynn’s ghost (another future write up), he still battles, especially at the end of the third season, Aaron’s legacy of rage and violence.
These are the last words the two ever speak to each other.
Logan never “wins” in the face of his father, at least not in a way that either of them recognize. We are denied that satisfaction, and however one views Aaron’s death, the intense but simmering nature of these exchanges make perfect sense of Veronica’s (surprisingly insightful) understanding that, despite his outward comments, Logan took Aaron’s death “badly.”
I realize that @susanmichelin went through a lengthy process of reconstructing the floor plans of the Echolls Mansion, and we should be grateful. However, I have unearthed the authentic, original floor plan, seen above.
