Logan Echolls: Knight maybe, but definitely no shining armor

Have you been following along with Veronica Mars Week?

Be honest … Did any of you expect, after watching the first hour of Veronica Mars that Logan Echolls would turn out to be the character that he turned out to be? I’ve said it once already this week, but the words “obligatory psychotic jackass” were used to describe him in the pilot. I know I didn’t see him as the “epic romance” soul mate to Veronica that he turned out to be. So how did Logan go from public enemy number one to Veronica’s snuggle buddy in one quick season? Maybe he wasn’t all that far from where he ended up in the first place.

When taking a look at what makes Logan tick, there is only one place to start: Daddy dearest and movie star extraordinaire, Aaron Echolls. Verbally abusive? Check. Mentally abusive? Check. Physically abusive? But, of course! And this was just in (and prior to) the first season. Plus, let’s just throw in sleeping with, and then murdering, Logan’s girlfriend Lilly Kane. How the hell do you respond to that? I’m definitely in the nature over nurture camp, but it is easy to look at paternal influence as an explanation.

To me, though, the answer has a whole lot less to do with Aaron, and more to do with Logan’s reaction to what he did. Lilly was a hurricane, a girlfriend that only comes around once in a lifetime. High school is all about heightened emotions, and to lose that kind of love at that age, combined with his home life, would be, put simply, devastating. Lilly’s love for Logan may have been on-again, off-again, but Logan loved her completely.

What “stability” that a relationship with Veronica brought was pretty much blown away during the second season. Aaron in jail, his mother’s suicide a still too recent memory, and Weevil’s PCHers start a war. What’s a spoiled rich kid to do? An affair with an older woman is always the way to go (a quick aside: this show was always brilliant, but Logan’s line to sister Trina and girlfriend Kendall, “Rode Hard meet Put Away Wet” might just be the best piece of dialogue on television ever). Logan helps his father’s defense in a roundabout way, which eventually leads to Aaron’s acquittal. Their reunion was short lived, as Duncan reached out from hiding to exact revenge on his sister’s murderer in the form of Clarence Weidman’s gun (instantly the only interesting thing Duncan ever did).

Dad? Murder. Mom? Suicide? Half-sister? Waste of space … So, when Logan discovered in season three that had a half-brother he wasn’t aware of, caution should have been the watchword. Disappointment would, yet again, follow as the man he met was just a reporter, who paid Logan’s real half-brother for the in. Logan, still a kid, has been disappointed in one way or the other by every member of his family.

It is no wonder that he and Veronica were never really able to make their relationship work. Two people, put through their own personal varieties of hell, had to do quite a bit more growing before they would finally be able to trust each other. Their last scene together was enough to give shipper fans like me hope … Dysfunctional as always, Logan exacting a little revenge on a classmate who’d wronged Veronica. I guess it ain’t nothing but a family thing after all.

Or, maybe he was all screwed up from dating Paris Hilton.

Clacked by Ivey West
on Dec 15, 2010 @ 11:00 EST5EDT