Logan Echolls (Jason Dohring) began Veronica Mars as the school’s “obligatory psychotic jackass,” a super-spoiled bully whose antics bordered on the extreme. (Setting up a bum fight? Not Logan’s finest moment.) He was so extreme, in fact, that he was a prime suspect in Veronica’s (Kristen Bell) investigation into the murder of his girlfriend, Lilly Kane (Amanda Seyfried). Yet even in the first season of the show, Logan showed signs of redemption. He came from an impossibly broken home and suffered his fair share of tragedy, but he always rushed to protect Veronica even when they were on the outs. Throughout the first two seasons he teetered on the line between villain and hero, and his tendency to lash out with cruelty came between him and Veronica time and again. But by the third season, he started to learn to make healthy decisions for himself, and when we revisited him in the 2014 movie and the 2019 Hulu revival he’d gone straight, becoming a Naval Intelligence Officer and regularly attending therapy. Though Veronica, maladjusted as she could be, might have missed the bad boy “Old Logan,” the new, redeemed Logan still maintained the snarky, sharp demeanor that made us fall in love with him. And that edge of violence never fully went away—it was just put to good use, as when he saved the life of Congressman Daniel Maloof (see above). [Mary Kate Carr]
