Veronica Mars Season 3 DVD in stores today!

Ahh...Veronica Mars, you have no idea how much I miss you.

In a TV season full of disappointments (Moonlight), sophomore slumps (Friday Night Lights) and lackluster programing (Bionic Woman), I can't help but wish Veronica Mars still aired on the CW. The show, which was never a ratings success, was in danger of being canceled season after season but managed to make it to three seasons (network mergers and all). Pretty impressive for a show with about 2 million viewers. Though Veronica Mars never succeeded in quantity (viewers, ratings, etc.), it more than made up for it in it's quality. In my years of watching prime time television, there have been very few shows which have captured my interest the way Veronica Mars did and still does. (Freaks and Geeks, Buffy and Battlestar Galactica come to mind) If you've never watched Veronica Mars before do yourself a favor and buy the Season 1 DVD. I promise you, you will not regret it.

Anyways, Season 3 of Veronica Mars hits stores today. While most would agree that season 3 was the weakest of the three, it was still better than a lot of that crap on television. The DVD includes a 20 minute bonus feature which basically shows what Veronica Mars would've became had the show been renewed for a fourth season. Ahh...Veronica Mars.

There was going to be a world where Veronica Mars was issued a sidearm, and the CW network didn't think that was a good idea. What fools these mortals be.

The Veronica Mars season-three DVD box set is full of Veronica's world-famous wit and wisdom, put on glowing display in the 20 episodes set during her first year at Hearst College, but it is also radiantly visible in the bonus features, most notably the 20-minute presentation pilot for season four. To the ultimate disappointment of Veronica's voracious fans, the presentation is fantastic. What a tease—to see what might have been when Veronica Mars became an FBI special agent—and then to have it taken away just as quickly.

The 20-minute pitch looks as finished as a regular episode, and Veronica's typical noir has an added gloss thanks to the luxuries of federal financing. There's no sign of Veronica's high school or college friends, or her beloved dad, but somehow that's okay. Had the show been picked up, we no doubt would have been treated to insights on what became of Wallace, Piz, Logan and Mac, not to mention the pleasure of Thanksgiving dinners at the Mars homestead.

In the meantime, saucy Veronica has plenty of interpersonal challenges at her FBI branch office, where the kids are just as snippy as they were in Neptune, only lots smarter. But these are no longer the freaks and geeks and '09er rich kids of Balboa County—these are the best and brightest, and among smart, good-looking, dedicated federales, Veronica is finally in her element.

It's a pleasure to watch, because tiny though she may be, Kristen Bell gives Veronica the surplus of gravitas necessary to make her believable as a federal agent. Somber, pulled-together and charming as ever, FBI Veronica was no doubt on the fast-track to her own criminal task force. What a pleasure it would have been to watch her work with the FBI's resources at her fingertips—not to mention the gun.

You see, when Veronica was a mere minor, not to mention under the anxious tutelage of an overprotective single father, she was generally restricted to protecting herself with a taser, mace or a pit bull named Backup. ("Always take Backup.") In Veronica's hands, those weapons were effective and potentially lethal, but it's something else altogether to see her armed with a semiautomatic weapon.

It's a damn shame that fans won't get to enjoy a series about this very gifted young woman working at her full potential, because, as an FBI agent, Veronica fully becomes the badass we always knew her to be.

As a consolation prize, however, you can watch and rewatch the 20-minute season-four pitch on the season-three Veronica Mars DVD, due out tomorrow, Tues., Oct. 23.

Smarter, funnier and better than everything else on the CW combined, Veronica Mars remains a worthy investment. [x]

Final Thoughts: Watching the season four material on Veronica Mars: Season Three raises an interesting question - if the next season of VM was going to flash-forward four or five years and reach a point in the series that creator Rob Thomas claims he wanted to get in that many real-time years, who's to say the door is completely closed? With shows like Family Guy and Futurama coming back, what if Thomas, Bell, and the rest of the gang found someone to take Veronica Mars: Season Four in 2010 or 11? It doesn't seem out of the question, as the three seasons of this show now available on DVD are likely to build the cult following year after year. We may not have seen the last of Ms. Mars. [x]

Long live Veronica Mars!