This article contains spoilers for Veronica Mars season 4
Veronica Mars made its triumphant return for a revived fourth season on Hulu this month. The kick-ass female detective – played by Kristen Bell for three seasons during the show’s original network TV run and later in the Kickstarter movie that wrapped up a lot of the remaining storylines from the series’ cancellation – was back on the beat to track down the insidious Neptune bomber, and to find out why they were turning her beachside community into their own personal horror movie.
The fifth season ended on a shocking twist – one that devastated fans and made a lot of people very angry – Veronica’s boyfriend-turned-husband Logan Echolls was killed in a car bomb attack; one last nasty surprise from Patton Oswalt’s twisted pizza delivery man, Penn Epner.
Creator Rob Thomas talked about the decision-making process behind the death of one of Veronica Mars‘ most beloved characters with THR.
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“That has been something that we mulled probably over the five years since the movie,” he revealed. “Here’s the thing that it revolves around. If I didn’t want to do more Veronica Mars, if I would have been happy to say, okay, this is our last Veronica Mars, then I would have been happy to land on them being married and living happily ever after. But our hope is that we get to tell more Veronica Mars mysteries, and if we do get to do that, we want it to exist as a mystery show, Veronica Mars as a P.I. out in the world, solving mysteries. And doing that with a boyfriend or a husband just felt less interesting, less sexy, less noir.”
When Thomas broke the news to Jason Dohring, who has seen his character Logan transform during a very satisfying arc over the lifetime of the series, he said the actor “wasn’t happy” but “he understood.”
Thomas has also been having a think about where Veronica Mars will go if Hulu decides to renew it for season 5:
“What I would like to do, and I think if we get to do another one, I think the next one may be away from Neptune. I want to make it possible and I want to make it believable that Veronica starts getting cases from all around the country. And yes, we could go back to Neptune, but we could also go anywhere in the world because people have heard of her, particularly now that she has done this Neptune bombing case and there was some sort of Making a Murderer-like show about it that she may have enough notoriety to get called in places wherever a cool mystery could be.
“This is a true story — in Vanity Fair, there was a really interesting detective case in which a P.I. got called in and he solved it. And then they did another story on him three or four years later and in that article he talked about “yes, since that first article I get calls from everywhere.” And so I’m sort of adopting that for Veronica. I want the ability for us to be able to tell a Veronica Mars story anywhere we want.”
He also teased “putting Veronica in a very Agatha Christie-like, though modernized, setting” as a plot device that he and his team are considering for a potential fifth season.
Would you like to see Veronica Mars continue on, or are you done? Let us know in the comments!