Nancy Drew, err “Veronica Mars” entered its third season with major changes for the cast and crew. Veronica has left behind her seaside home of Neptune, California for Hearst College luckily she’s not alone her posse including boyfriend Logan has followed her along to this new institute of higher learning. We have more mysteries, more things for Veronica to fix and just as many threats as existed before when Veronica was in high school. ---

Image & Sound:

The third season of “Veronica Mars” boasts a nice vibrant color scheme, sharp images and a surprisingly good looking transfer considering that the show is shot in 16mm. It stood up quite well to the intense scrutiny of DVD. We’ll see how the show fares once it is transferred to HD-DVD or Blu-Ray. ***

Audio sounds good although it doesn’t use the 5.1 format to as good effect as it could. The songs sound better however with a better bottom end, depth and separation than one might expect. ---

We get “Pitching Season 4” which has an interview with writer/producer/creator Rob Thomas shifting the focus of the series allowing Veronica to skip three years of college. Thomas pitched the idea of having the fourth season of the series take place during Veronica’s rookie year as an FBI agent. It’s a clever idea but it also might have lost fans. Take a listen to Thomas’ approach in selling the networks on this innovative approach (which reminds me a bit of “Lost” in that we’re jumping forward into the future…listen to the interview and you’ll see what I mean). ***

We also get “Going Undercover with Rob Thomas” basically a season three recap hosted by Thomas. ***

There is also a Webisode Gallery that features interviews with the key cast members and tours of the show’s sets. ***

Finally we get two things that rabid fans of this show want 1) deleted scenes with introductions by Thomas setting the tone as to why the scenes were cut and the infamous gag reel which is amusing.

Final Words: