This post discusses episodes 15 and 16 of the first season of Veronica Mars.

After a crackerjack pair of episodes in our previous outing in the Veronica Mars Television Club, I thought this week’s were a bit of a downshift, creativity-wise. But that’s okay, given where they got us emotionally. Much of Veronica Mars is about long-standing emotional commitment, whether Veronica is searching for her mother, unable to let go of the question of who killed her friend Lilly, or carrying a torch for Duncan. And these two episodes did a nice job of looking at what it means to sacrifice something for someone you love, or to stand by someone who’s behaved in a way you find reprehensible, but who is still bound to you, or simply to do something you think is silly for someone who means a great deal to you.

First, there’s Veronica’s relationship with Logan. I joked on Twitter earlier today that there’s an extent to which Logan is the Jaime Lannister of Neptune High School, and the more I think about that comparison, the more I think it’s true. Logan is a privileged guy who does enormous damage to the people around him, inspired in part by the treatment he receives from his emotionally detached, image-obsessed father, and who resists efforts to understand him better, even when such efforts might rehabilitate his reputation. And “Ruskie Business” has a lot of emotion parallels with Jaime’s journey on this season of Game of Thrones, with Veronica playing Brienne of Tarth, minus the need to fight an actual bear.

Over the course of this season, we’ve gotten to know Logan primarily through two losses: the death of Lilly Kane, his on-again-off-again girlfriend, and the presumptive suicide of his mother, inspired by his father’s philandering. The lost of Lilly is in the past, and he and Veronica first team up to honor her real memory, rather than the white-washed image Lilly’s parents prefer to present to the community. But the loss of Logan’s mother is fresher and more immediate, and the power of that wound inspires him to seek out Veronica to try to track her down.
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I was sorry to read yesterday the news that Donald J. Sobol, the creator of the iconic children’s book character Encyclopedia Brown, had died at 87. Created in 1963, Encyclopedia and his best friend and detective agency business partner Sally Kimball were terrific models models of genre-busting characters— Encyclopedia is smart rather than a fighter, while Sally is effectively a ten-year-old action hero—and wonderful illustrations of the pleasures of exercising intellect and strength.

One of the things that the Encyclopedia Brown books do that’s somewhat rare in children’s stories is give us a hero who understands how the world reacts to his extraordinariness. The stories are always careful to point out that while Encyclopedia helps his father, the chief of police, solve mysteries, his assistance is a closely held family secret, on the grounds that Encyclopedia’s assistance might seem implausible or open him to resentment for ridicule. It’s not that Encyclopedia is pretending to be dumb, but he is aware that his intellect can be a way of alienating people rather than bring him closer. In one story, in which little old ladies ask him for help on their crossword puzzles, we learn that “He always waited a moment. He wanted to be helpful. But he was afraid that people might not like him if he answered their questions too quickly and sounded too smart.” And certainly bully Bugs Meany’s enmity for Encyclopedia is rooted in a dislike of his intelligence, the fact that Encyclopedia’s living a life governed not by the rules of kid-land, but by his ability to function in the adult world.

But even though the stories are cautionary, they’re full of feedback loops that emphasize the pleasure of using your brain. Every story ends with a teaser that encourages the reader to spot what Encyclopedia did, too, a mechanism that lets you feel the satisfaction of noticing what others don’t. Even if the book can’t fully immerse you in Encyclopedia’s victories, that setup gives the reader direct access to at least some of his emotions. In the text itself, Encyclopedia’s wins give him access to all sorts of status, whether it’s the ability to do good in his community, the respect of his family, and a relationship with the most attractive girl in town precisely at the time when such friendships between boys and girls are becoming fraught and complicated.

And oh to be Sally Kimball, whose looks are always mentioned in the context of her physical prowess, as in “Sally was the prettiest girl in the fifth grade and the best athlete.” She’s a constant combatant of Bugs Meany, who “would have liked to get even with Encyclopedia by punching him in the eye four or five times. But he didn’t dare—for two reasons. The first reason was the quick left fist of pretty, ten-year-old Sally Kimball. The second reason was Sally’s right. It was evenq uicker than her left. One day Sally had seen Bugs bullying a Cub Scout. ‘Stop it!’ she had creid, hopping off her bike. ‘Go powder your nose,’ Bugs had jeered. Zam went Sally’s right.” Watching Sally stand up not just to Bugs, who is a jerk, but to the idea that she should pack away her strength at a certain age and go be pretty instead, is a delight. And as much as Sally champions Encyclopedia, he gives back to her, too, as in stories where he realizes that a boy has been staging fake fights to impress Sally. Maybe their friendship will last into high school. Maybe it will falter, or turn into something else entirely. But I love the idea of a boy and girl who have each other’s backs against both immediate threats to their town and to more insidious threats to the idea that they should value their own best qualities.

As a new Judge Dredd convert, and a big fan of innovative action movies, I’m actually starting to get excited about Karl Urban-starring Dredd even though the production’s hit some difficulties. What really got my juices going was the news that Olivia Thirlby’s going to be playing Judge Anderson, which I would guess mean that the Big Bad in the movie is going to be Judge Death and the Dark Judges, who hate crime so much they’ve decided the best way to stop it is to wipe out all life in the universe. Now, there’s no question that the Judges are totalitarian, but I kind of appreciate the idea that the movie will show what the end consequence of a policy aimed at getting crime to zero.

I also appreciate that apparently, Judge Dredd and Judge Anderson will work together, but won’t kiss, staying faithful to a narrative in which the big emotional reveal is that Judge Dredd considers Judge Anderson his friend. That’s a welcome diversion from the standard stressful situation=smooches narrative, and it’d be nice to have a story where men and women actually get to focus on building their professional relationship and friendship rather than figuring out when they’re going to get down. Of course wartime romances are a thing But if you’re going to really go in on building the world the Judges live in, it makes sense that the standard emotional narratives that operate in that realm would be different. And cutting the Judges off from a range of human experiences emphasizes both the unnaturalness of what they’re being asked to do and their distance from the people they pass judgment on.

I haven’t read Caitlin Flanagan’s Girl Land yet, but her appearance on On Point yesterday, particularly her breathtaking condescension to Salon’s Irin Carmon about the latter’s high school dating life, has to be heard to be believed. During the hour, she spends a lot of time defending the idea that brutish teenaged boys are out to take advantage of teenaged girls. And while I’m in absolute agreement with Irin that if we want to keep girls physically and sexually safe, it makes as much sense to focus on boys as on girls, and with critics who argue that Flanagan has absolutely no insights into non-straight girls, I think there’s another broad exception to that dynamic. Flanagan seems to have no sense whatsoever that boys and girls can be friends, and that encouraging those relationships could help women build better relationships with male bosses, and male coworkers, and male friends.

My male friends are among the most important in my life. The friend I’m most in touch with from high school is a man, who introduced me to action movies and hung out with me after work and at debate team practices. There’s no question my love of campy movies like Starship Troopers and Hackers is a legacy of our friendship, and part of the reason I’m a critic. My best friends in college were the guys I worked on political campaigns with, lived with during my summer in New Haven (contra Flanagan’s domestic ideals, we survived mostly on fried chicken, pancakes, and deeply terrible takeout Chinese), and argued about movies and music with. It wasn’t that I didn’t have female friends — the women I met in college have been critical to my adult life — but there’s no question that these men were formative to my artistic, social, and moral development.

At one point during the interview, Flanagan says, “Girls are hugely interested in boys. That isn’t ever going to change.” But what she — and a lot of the culture she decries — misses is that there are a lot of different ways to be interested in boys. I would hope she’s raising her sons not just to avoid being sexual predators, but to see women as potential friends as well as lovers and wives. And I hope she wouldn’t see their adolescence as failed if they emerged from it with female friends who would last a lifetime instead of having had a bunch of girlfriends.