Normal has always been the watchword: character growth, resistance to change, and 'Veronica Mars'.
Today's essay contains references to and spoilers for all of season one of 'Veronica Mars', as well as the first part of season two, focusing primarily on 'Normal Is the Watchword' and 'Driver's Ed'. There are no spoilers for unaired episodes of 'Veronica Mars', or spoiler-based speculation on where the series is going, although there is some thematic speculation relating to and tied into the way Rob Thomas tends to treat character growth and resistance to change.
1. Are you content with where this story ends? / There was a time when all of us were friends.
You can call the end of the first season of 'Veronica Mars' a lot of things -- shocking, satisfying, jarring, unfair, visceral, too much, not enough -- but you can't really call it a happy ending. Veronica got what she thought she always wanted; she uncovered Lilly's killer, and saw to it that justice would be done, her father's name would be cleared, and her life could return to something resembling what it was before -- in short, to a state she could call 'normal'. We see Veronica's isolation throughout the season, along with her association of the loss of everything from her life-with-Lilly to the solving of Lilly's murder. Find out who killed Lilly Kane, and her father can have his position in the community back. People will stop blaming her for backing him. Possibly, the mystery of why Duncan left her will finally be resolved. In short, finding out who killed Lilly will actually restore Lilly: find her killer, and Lilly comes home.
This isn't an uncommon sort of reaction in someone grieving deeply for a loved one, especially not when that loved one died under unusual or extreme circumstances. 'Lazarus, come forth' becomes a very tempting phrase. If you find the hit and run driver who killed your son, everything will be repaired. If you find the flaw in the fabric of the world that allowed this impossible thing to happen, God may take it back. A great number of public service organizations have been founded on the irrational, unspoken belief that if something can be rendered impossible, it will somehow be retroactively repaired; it will be taken back. The first season of 'Veronica Mars' is, in a way, a year-long attempt on Veronica's part to get Lilly Kane back where she belongs, and thus get herself back where she belongs. Prove that it shouldn't have happened, and perhaps the universe will finally repair itself.
There are two major issues with this plan. First, and most glaringly, the dead don't come back just because you say the magic words and unmake the accident. (Not unless you're in a Stephen King novel, and sometimes, dead is better.) So the subconcious 'I can fix everything that has been broken' that was very likely a motivator is something that can never, unfortunately, play out.
Second, and more insidiously, the reason that they say 'you can't go home again' is that it's true, because things change and are changed by the forces that act upon them. Through the very act of trying to fix what has been broken, Veronica has changed. Before Lilly's death, the loss of her mother, the loss of Duncan, and the effective loss of her innocence, Veronica was a very different person -- something pointed out not only by the living, but by Lilly herself, both through flashbacks and through dream sequences. Veronica becomes more Lilly-like through her actions, but always lacks both the thoughtlessness and the willingness to play with the hearts of the people around her that Lilly displayed. If anything, Veronica has managed to become a synthesis of the two, taking on many of the best -- and worst -- aspects of both personalities. Can you see the reasonably meek, demure Veronica Mars who played lily-maid to Lilly Kane pulling off some of the setups our current Veronica has gone for? Before she was forced to learn to be Lilly, such actions simply weren't taken.
(Please note that I am not canonizing Veronica, who has, as I noted above, also taken on many of the negative aspects of both personalities -- while she lacks Lilly's thoughtlessness, she does have a strong degree of 'I matter, because I am doing right, and you do not, because you're in my way' self-righteousness that can arguably be attributed either to the influence of our dear Miss Kane, or to her own natural inclinations, inherited from her father. In this world, after all, nature tends to trump nurture. Veronica is flawed, yes, but that is not the topic we are addressing today.)
So Veronica's 'home', symbolized in the form of Lilly Kane, is gone forever, and cannot be reclaimed, no matter how much she might wish that it were otherwise; furthermore, Veronica herself has been so transformed by her time away from home that, even were she to somehow go back, she would be unable to stay. Consider, if you would, the case of one Miss Dorothy Gale, a little Kansas girl who -- when she was swept away from home by a force of nature as sudden and unexpected as the death of a beloved friend -- wanted nothing more than to go back, to go home again. And, if we leave her after a single story, she achieves what she claims to want; she gets back to Kansas. If, however, we return for the later books in the series, we find that Dorothy has been so transformed by her time in Oz, by what she's seen and done and been forced to do, that Kansas can't contain her anymore. Eventually, after several attempts to normalcy, she gives up, and returns to Oz forever.
Veronica, like Dorothy, has been to see the Wizard, and has been transformed by the things she's seen, done, and caused to happen. She can go back to Kansas if she likes, embrace the monochrome as much as she wants, but the only chance she had at getting her normal life and a normal ending wasn't a chance at all; it was closing the book after the first story, and that's not so much 'the end' as 'I refuse to let the rest of the tale unfold'.
For Veronica, the state of 'normal' has changed. She just doesn't know it yet.
2. Come and be normal with me.
For Veronica, in a pre-Lilly's-death world, normal was at least partially defined by a certain level of playing the follower. She followed Lilly with devotion, and while she wasn't slavishly devoted to her desires (she refused the velvet dress, after all, until it became a symbolic part of her transformation into a more Lilly-like role), she was more inclined to take the easy road, and obey. She followed Duncan with all the passivity of a stereotypical teenage girl indulging in her first love. (I am aware that not all teenage girls are sheep just because they have boyfriends, having been a deeply stubborn teenager; Veronica, however, seemed to believe that being in love with Duncan meant being a character out of a stereotypical YA romance novel, all doves and flowers and flowing draperies.) She followed orders from the adults around her, and had very little reason to exercise a moral code, even though she clearly had one. She was, in short, exactly the sort of girl who hangs with the popular crowd in every high school, but is forgotten ten minutes after graduation, because they were just hangers-on.
It thus makes sense that a return to normalcy would involve a return to a more passive role, at least for someone whose standards for 'normal' were originally set the way Veronica's were. Her trading Logan for Duncan isn't just a matter of 'one of them is being batshit crazy and the other one is actively wooing me'; it's trading the active for the passive. How did Logan win her? By punching a man, by racing to her defense in forum after forum, by actively attempting to keep her from harm, and by initiating acts of physical affection. How did Duncan win her? Through passivity. He comes to the coffee shop, he presents himself as harmless, he gives her gifts, and he slowly nudges the world around to where their actual reunion is an anti-climax. By picking Duncan, Veronica picked both a return to the past, and a return to the passive. Life with Logan may not be any better or any worse, but it would be undeniably active, and finding Lilly's killer means that she has the right to turn her back on the future, at least in her own eyes, at least for now.
Duncan's relatively heartless-seeming exchange of Meg for Veronica can be directly rooted into this same syndrome. Meg was, after all, in many ways his substitute for pre-Lilly's death (shortened from here on out as 'pre-LD', because I'm lazy) Veronica: she was popular, pretty, not from one of the better-to-do families in town, on the pep squad, and reasonably willing to be a follower instead of a leader. Her evident devotion to Duncan was enough to allow her to fill the Veronica role to at least enough of an extent to make it worth trying. When Veronica seemed to be returning to 'his' Veronica, however, the urge to return to a more peaceful time made her seem like the more appropriate choice, and so he fled back to her, looking for a girl that no longer existed. His discomfort with this exchange becomes evident fairly quickly, as Veronica is rather clearly playing a part that she's no longer any good at, but too much has been disrupted in his life; too many pieces have been knocked out, and won't be coming back, no matter what he does. Giving up Veronica, even after the disturbing changes that have been made in her by the past year, would be too much like giving up on Lilly completely.
Let me note that I am not questioning whether Duncan and Veronica love each other, or whether they did love each other at one time: it is quite possible to love someone based entirely on a person that they no longer are. I don't think that Duncan has changed all that much; really, I think the emotional stasis that he's forced himself into is a great deal of the problem. Duncan is a constant state of 'is', with no option for change, because he won't allow it. Duncan is in love with Veronica. Never mind that she's become a stranger; he knows that he is in love with her, and he can't let that be false, because to allow it to be false would be to admit that he's different now, and that's the last thing he wants to do. So he remains in love with someone he can't fully comprehend, and things just keep getting worse between them.
Veronica, meanwhile, is someone who is in love with Duncan Kane, and moreover, can see fairly clearly that he really hasn't changed. Ergo, since she's back to normal, back to her pre-LD life, and she hasn't changed, she must still be in love with Duncan. It's not negotiable.
Logan is also suffering from this urge to return to the norm, although to lesser degree than the others. Veronica is, after all, a Lilly cognate by the end of season one, and while I do feel that Logan, having witnessed this change with clearer eyes than either Duncan or Veronica herself, is genuinely in love with who Veronica is, the fact that she doesn't know that person means that their relationship is fairly doomed, and that much of Logan's attraction, at least initially, is very likely founded on her similarities to Lilly. Unlike the others involved in this little circuit, however, he's more aware of it, and thus has more of a shot at still loving Veronica once she's found out who she is...and once he learns that fact for himself.
3. Once you become a Queen Bee, you can't go back to being a worker.
Oddly, it's the character of Jackie that throws the changes in Veronica into the sharpest, and most undeniable, light. Jackie is, after all, arrogant, bitchy, pushy, and utterly convinced that she's going to get her own way in all things. She's an alpha female, very much like Lilly was, and it's only the undeniable affection felt towards Lilly by most of the cast that saved her from being as unlikable a character as many have found Jackie. (Well, that, and the fact that we really see Lilly only at her best, through flashbacks. We never actually see Lilly being as heartless as her position in the local social structure would have sometimes -- often, even -- forced her to be.) Given Veronica's pre-LD position in the social structure, she should have welcomed Jackie with open arms, and gladly changed positions to follow her. That is, after all, what she's claiming to want.
Only she doesn't do it.
While protesting that she's just another drone in the great hive of Neptune High, Veronica sets herself up to face off against Jackie as only another Queen Bee would dare to do, questioning her choices, undermining her embryonic authority within the circle that, under natural circumstances, she would eventually come to rule. Veronica is, in short, resenting a new Queen coming to town -- not just because Jackie would be taking Lilly's place in the social structure, but because Veronica, on some level, has lost the ability to follow. The changes she has made in herself run too deeply, and her rejection of Jackie shows that her vaunted normalcy is really just a veneer slapped over the surface of the 'true' Veronica.
Veronica's apparent selfishness is also supported by this contradiction. In her pre-LD life, she would have had Lilly to check and balance her -- basically, to tell her 'no' and set firm limitations. With Lilly gone, all those limitations were lifted in a way that didn't seem all that bad; they had been lifted by Lilly, in leaving, and because they had been lifted, she could do what was required to get Lilly back. Solving the mystery would, in some way, return the limitations, because it was going to make everything exactly the way that it used to be. Only it didn't quite work out that way; Lilly didn't return, and the only person actually setting limits on her -- Keith -- is someone whose limits she spent the last year learning to ignore. Duncan doesn't expect Veronica to need limits, because he always associated with her in tandem with Lilly, who limited her naturally. Wallace and Mac have never been in a position to put those limits down.
The two characters most likely to act as a functional limiting factor on Veronica, given the social constraints that already exist, are Weevil and Logan. Weevil because he's outside the social hierarchy, and has no qualms about questioning her actions or blind acceptance of 'the way things are'; Logan because, despite his own dependence on the past, he has previously lived with and been in a position to place some limitations upon a full-blown Lilly. Even in her Queen Bee state, Veronica's selfishness and tendency to demand her own way has nothing on the behaviours we've seen from and heard attributed to the late, lamented Lilly Kane.
People have questioned the reasons for including Jackie, a character who didn't really seem to have a role, in the cast. I say that her role was a very simple one. Just as Meg represented Veronica's original, innocent state, Jackie represented the darker parts of being Lilly, and of following a Lilly. Veronica, for all her protests of normalcy, can't be fully devoted to either of them. She can neither become Meg, nor embrace Jackie.
The world has moved on, and the only people trying to pretend that it hasn't are Veronica, and Duncan. They're the ones trying to freeze themselves in time and space, and are thus, inevitably, the ones that are going to fail.
4. Where do we go from here?
The lie of normalcy -- the illusion the normal is the ideal, and is something that can be achieved just by trying hard enough -- is one that, like all lies in the world of Neptune, is inevitably doomed to failure. We can see the cracks forming well before we hit the climactic events of 'Driver's Ed'; they're present every time someone reminds Veronica that for the past year, she wasn't normal, and every time we see her trying to force herself back into a role that she has, quite frankly, outgrown. For the moment, however, it remains a necessary role, because lies only die in Neptune when you prove that they're not the truth. If Veronica walked away from 'normal' right here and right now, before proving to herself that it no longer worked, she'd never get over it, just like Duncan couldn't get over her without getting her back, and no one could get over Lilly without closure.
Right here and now, Veronica is in an abusive relationship, and the name of her partner is 'The Status Quo'. But just like the death of a loved one can deify them and make them impossible to move beyond, the way she lost her original, normal state has been romanticized to such a degree that the only way to say 'y'know, maybe it's better off gone' is to get back together, play through the emotional abuse, and finally come to the breakup on her own terms.
The breakup is coming. It's coming fast, and it's coming hard, because Veronica is starting to understand the limits of her chosen place in society. It's not going to take that much more to make her realize that while she doesn't have to be Lilly, the Veronica she's pretending to be died, quietly, in her sleep, at some point over the last year.
And really, that's for the best.
1. Are you content with where this story ends? / There was a time when all of us were friends.
You can call the end of the first season of 'Veronica Mars' a lot of things -- shocking, satisfying, jarring, unfair, visceral, too much, not enough -- but you can't really call it a happy ending. Veronica got what she thought she always wanted; she uncovered Lilly's killer, and saw to it that justice would be done, her father's name would be cleared, and her life could return to something resembling what it was before -- in short, to a state she could call 'normal'. We see Veronica's isolation throughout the season, along with her association of the loss of everything from her life-with-Lilly to the solving of Lilly's murder. Find out who killed Lilly Kane, and her father can have his position in the community back. People will stop blaming her for backing him. Possibly, the mystery of why Duncan left her will finally be resolved. In short, finding out who killed Lilly will actually restore Lilly: find her killer, and Lilly comes home.
This isn't an uncommon sort of reaction in someone grieving deeply for a loved one, especially not when that loved one died under unusual or extreme circumstances. 'Lazarus, come forth' becomes a very tempting phrase. If you find the hit and run driver who killed your son, everything will be repaired. If you find the flaw in the fabric of the world that allowed this impossible thing to happen, God may take it back. A great number of public service organizations have been founded on the irrational, unspoken belief that if something can be rendered impossible, it will somehow be retroactively repaired; it will be taken back. The first season of 'Veronica Mars' is, in a way, a year-long attempt on Veronica's part to get Lilly Kane back where she belongs, and thus get herself back where she belongs. Prove that it shouldn't have happened, and perhaps the universe will finally repair itself.
There are two major issues with this plan. First, and most glaringly, the dead don't come back just because you say the magic words and unmake the accident. (Not unless you're in a Stephen King novel, and sometimes, dead is better.) So the subconcious 'I can fix everything that has been broken' that was very likely a motivator is something that can never, unfortunately, play out.
Second, and more insidiously, the reason that they say 'you can't go home again' is that it's true, because things change and are changed by the forces that act upon them. Through the very act of trying to fix what has been broken, Veronica has changed. Before Lilly's death, the loss of her mother, the loss of Duncan, and the effective loss of her innocence, Veronica was a very different person -- something pointed out not only by the living, but by Lilly herself, both through flashbacks and through dream sequences. Veronica becomes more Lilly-like through her actions, but always lacks both the thoughtlessness and the willingness to play with the hearts of the people around her that Lilly displayed. If anything, Veronica has managed to become a synthesis of the two, taking on many of the best -- and worst -- aspects of both personalities. Can you see the reasonably meek, demure Veronica Mars who played lily-maid to Lilly Kane pulling off some of the setups our current Veronica has gone for? Before she was forced to learn to be Lilly, such actions simply weren't taken.
(Please note that I am not canonizing Veronica, who has, as I noted above, also taken on many of the negative aspects of both personalities -- while she lacks Lilly's thoughtlessness, she does have a strong degree of 'I matter, because I am doing right, and you do not, because you're in my way' self-righteousness that can arguably be attributed either to the influence of our dear Miss Kane, or to her own natural inclinations, inherited from her father. In this world, after all, nature tends to trump nurture. Veronica is flawed, yes, but that is not the topic we are addressing today.)
So Veronica's 'home', symbolized in the form of Lilly Kane, is gone forever, and cannot be reclaimed, no matter how much she might wish that it were otherwise; furthermore, Veronica herself has been so transformed by her time away from home that, even were she to somehow go back, she would be unable to stay. Consider, if you would, the case of one Miss Dorothy Gale, a little Kansas girl who -- when she was swept away from home by a force of nature as sudden and unexpected as the death of a beloved friend -- wanted nothing more than to go back, to go home again. And, if we leave her after a single story, she achieves what she claims to want; she gets back to Kansas. If, however, we return for the later books in the series, we find that Dorothy has been so transformed by her time in Oz, by what she's seen and done and been forced to do, that Kansas can't contain her anymore. Eventually, after several attempts to normalcy, she gives up, and returns to Oz forever.
Veronica, like Dorothy, has been to see the Wizard, and has been transformed by the things she's seen, done, and caused to happen. She can go back to Kansas if she likes, embrace the monochrome as much as she wants, but the only chance she had at getting her normal life and a normal ending wasn't a chance at all; it was closing the book after the first story, and that's not so much 'the end' as 'I refuse to let the rest of the tale unfold'.
For Veronica, the state of 'normal' has changed. She just doesn't know it yet.
2. Come and be normal with me.
For Veronica, in a pre-Lilly's-death world, normal was at least partially defined by a certain level of playing the follower. She followed Lilly with devotion, and while she wasn't slavishly devoted to her desires (she refused the velvet dress, after all, until it became a symbolic part of her transformation into a more Lilly-like role), she was more inclined to take the easy road, and obey. She followed Duncan with all the passivity of a stereotypical teenage girl indulging in her first love. (I am aware that not all teenage girls are sheep just because they have boyfriends, having been a deeply stubborn teenager; Veronica, however, seemed to believe that being in love with Duncan meant being a character out of a stereotypical YA romance novel, all doves and flowers and flowing draperies.) She followed orders from the adults around her, and had very little reason to exercise a moral code, even though she clearly had one. She was, in short, exactly the sort of girl who hangs with the popular crowd in every high school, but is forgotten ten minutes after graduation, because they were just hangers-on.
It thus makes sense that a return to normalcy would involve a return to a more passive role, at least for someone whose standards for 'normal' were originally set the way Veronica's were. Her trading Logan for Duncan isn't just a matter of 'one of them is being batshit crazy and the other one is actively wooing me'; it's trading the active for the passive. How did Logan win her? By punching a man, by racing to her defense in forum after forum, by actively attempting to keep her from harm, and by initiating acts of physical affection. How did Duncan win her? Through passivity. He comes to the coffee shop, he presents himself as harmless, he gives her gifts, and he slowly nudges the world around to where their actual reunion is an anti-climax. By picking Duncan, Veronica picked both a return to the past, and a return to the passive. Life with Logan may not be any better or any worse, but it would be undeniably active, and finding Lilly's killer means that she has the right to turn her back on the future, at least in her own eyes, at least for now.
Duncan's relatively heartless-seeming exchange of Meg for Veronica can be directly rooted into this same syndrome. Meg was, after all, in many ways his substitute for pre-Lilly's death (shortened from here on out as 'pre-LD', because I'm lazy) Veronica: she was popular, pretty, not from one of the better-to-do families in town, on the pep squad, and reasonably willing to be a follower instead of a leader. Her evident devotion to Duncan was enough to allow her to fill the Veronica role to at least enough of an extent to make it worth trying. When Veronica seemed to be returning to 'his' Veronica, however, the urge to return to a more peaceful time made her seem like the more appropriate choice, and so he fled back to her, looking for a girl that no longer existed. His discomfort with this exchange becomes evident fairly quickly, as Veronica is rather clearly playing a part that she's no longer any good at, but too much has been disrupted in his life; too many pieces have been knocked out, and won't be coming back, no matter what he does. Giving up Veronica, even after the disturbing changes that have been made in her by the past year, would be too much like giving up on Lilly completely.
Let me note that I am not questioning whether Duncan and Veronica love each other, or whether they did love each other at one time: it is quite possible to love someone based entirely on a person that they no longer are. I don't think that Duncan has changed all that much; really, I think the emotional stasis that he's forced himself into is a great deal of the problem. Duncan is a constant state of 'is', with no option for change, because he won't allow it. Duncan is in love with Veronica. Never mind that she's become a stranger; he knows that he is in love with her, and he can't let that be false, because to allow it to be false would be to admit that he's different now, and that's the last thing he wants to do. So he remains in love with someone he can't fully comprehend, and things just keep getting worse between them.
Veronica, meanwhile, is someone who is in love with Duncan Kane, and moreover, can see fairly clearly that he really hasn't changed. Ergo, since she's back to normal, back to her pre-LD life, and she hasn't changed, she must still be in love with Duncan. It's not negotiable.
Logan is also suffering from this urge to return to the norm, although to lesser degree than the others. Veronica is, after all, a Lilly cognate by the end of season one, and while I do feel that Logan, having witnessed this change with clearer eyes than either Duncan or Veronica herself, is genuinely in love with who Veronica is, the fact that she doesn't know that person means that their relationship is fairly doomed, and that much of Logan's attraction, at least initially, is very likely founded on her similarities to Lilly. Unlike the others involved in this little circuit, however, he's more aware of it, and thus has more of a shot at still loving Veronica once she's found out who she is...and once he learns that fact for himself.
3. Once you become a Queen Bee, you can't go back to being a worker.
Oddly, it's the character of Jackie that throws the changes in Veronica into the sharpest, and most undeniable, light. Jackie is, after all, arrogant, bitchy, pushy, and utterly convinced that she's going to get her own way in all things. She's an alpha female, very much like Lilly was, and it's only the undeniable affection felt towards Lilly by most of the cast that saved her from being as unlikable a character as many have found Jackie. (Well, that, and the fact that we really see Lilly only at her best, through flashbacks. We never actually see Lilly being as heartless as her position in the local social structure would have sometimes -- often, even -- forced her to be.) Given Veronica's pre-LD position in the social structure, she should have welcomed Jackie with open arms, and gladly changed positions to follow her. That is, after all, what she's claiming to want.
Only she doesn't do it.
While protesting that she's just another drone in the great hive of Neptune High, Veronica sets herself up to face off against Jackie as only another Queen Bee would dare to do, questioning her choices, undermining her embryonic authority within the circle that, under natural circumstances, she would eventually come to rule. Veronica is, in short, resenting a new Queen coming to town -- not just because Jackie would be taking Lilly's place in the social structure, but because Veronica, on some level, has lost the ability to follow. The changes she has made in herself run too deeply, and her rejection of Jackie shows that her vaunted normalcy is really just a veneer slapped over the surface of the 'true' Veronica.
Veronica's apparent selfishness is also supported by this contradiction. In her pre-LD life, she would have had Lilly to check and balance her -- basically, to tell her 'no' and set firm limitations. With Lilly gone, all those limitations were lifted in a way that didn't seem all that bad; they had been lifted by Lilly, in leaving, and because they had been lifted, she could do what was required to get Lilly back. Solving the mystery would, in some way, return the limitations, because it was going to make everything exactly the way that it used to be. Only it didn't quite work out that way; Lilly didn't return, and the only person actually setting limits on her -- Keith -- is someone whose limits she spent the last year learning to ignore. Duncan doesn't expect Veronica to need limits, because he always associated with her in tandem with Lilly, who limited her naturally. Wallace and Mac have never been in a position to put those limits down.
The two characters most likely to act as a functional limiting factor on Veronica, given the social constraints that already exist, are Weevil and Logan. Weevil because he's outside the social hierarchy, and has no qualms about questioning her actions or blind acceptance of 'the way things are'; Logan because, despite his own dependence on the past, he has previously lived with and been in a position to place some limitations upon a full-blown Lilly. Even in her Queen Bee state, Veronica's selfishness and tendency to demand her own way has nothing on the behaviours we've seen from and heard attributed to the late, lamented Lilly Kane.
People have questioned the reasons for including Jackie, a character who didn't really seem to have a role, in the cast. I say that her role was a very simple one. Just as Meg represented Veronica's original, innocent state, Jackie represented the darker parts of being Lilly, and of following a Lilly. Veronica, for all her protests of normalcy, can't be fully devoted to either of them. She can neither become Meg, nor embrace Jackie.
The world has moved on, and the only people trying to pretend that it hasn't are Veronica, and Duncan. They're the ones trying to freeze themselves in time and space, and are thus, inevitably, the ones that are going to fail.
4. Where do we go from here?
The lie of normalcy -- the illusion the normal is the ideal, and is something that can be achieved just by trying hard enough -- is one that, like all lies in the world of Neptune, is inevitably doomed to failure. We can see the cracks forming well before we hit the climactic events of 'Driver's Ed'; they're present every time someone reminds Veronica that for the past year, she wasn't normal, and every time we see her trying to force herself back into a role that she has, quite frankly, outgrown. For the moment, however, it remains a necessary role, because lies only die in Neptune when you prove that they're not the truth. If Veronica walked away from 'normal' right here and right now, before proving to herself that it no longer worked, she'd never get over it, just like Duncan couldn't get over her without getting her back, and no one could get over Lilly without closure.
Right here and now, Veronica is in an abusive relationship, and the name of her partner is 'The Status Quo'. But just like the death of a loved one can deify them and make them impossible to move beyond, the way she lost her original, normal state has been romanticized to such a degree that the only way to say 'y'know, maybe it's better off gone' is to get back together, play through the emotional abuse, and finally come to the breakup on her own terms.
The breakup is coming. It's coming fast, and it's coming hard, because Veronica is starting to understand the limits of her chosen place in society. It's not going to take that much more to make her realize that while she doesn't have to be Lilly, the Veronica she's pretending to be died, quietly, in her sleep, at some point over the last year.
And really, that's for the best.