On the CW, preempted regularly by "America's Top Model" and promoted with all the gusto NBC gave "Andy Richter, P.I.", the last season of Rob Thomas's teen-sleuth series seemed unnecessary. Difficult to follow during its first and second seasons, the decision to break the third year into three smaller running arcs while continuing to have a fresh mystery introduced and solved every week -- while expanding the presence of independent storylines for some but not all of the supporting characters -- made the series pretty close to impenetrable. It didn't help that storytelling logic forced Kristen Bell's lovable but brittle lead into some really unpleasant behavior, and "Mars" anchors like Keith (Enrico Colantoni) and Wallace (Percy Daggs III) were ill-served by counfusing and out-of-character subplots (Keith) or just completely falling off the map entirely (Wallace).

While seasons one and two of "Veronica" were good on broadcast TV and great on DVD, season three at least becomes watchable. The last handful of desultory stand-alone episodes with which the show passed unlamented into history still insults, but the first two-thirds of the season is still solidly entertaining, particularly now that close viewing can reveal the way that threads in the first arc fed right into second -- for all of his preseason pep about dancing to the new network's tune, Rob Thomas was cheating from day one. Newcomer Chris Lowell brought a lot of energy to the show with his fine performance as sad-sack nice guy Piz, whose doomed-before-it-even-began relationship with Veronica is a lot more fun to watch than the overkill of another go-round with Jason Dohring's monumentally self-pitying Logan Echolls. Although she tends to disappear for three or four episodes at a stretch due to the CW's penny-pinching, Tina Majorino's Mac is always a welcome presence when she shows up, as is Francis Capra's Weevil.

The guest performances are a mixed bag -- the trio of angry feminists who keep popping up are about as uninteresting as the parade of equally stereotyped college guys, from frat boys to legacies to football and basketball players, but Ed Begley Jr.'s loopy Dean O'Dell is a treat (when he catches Veronica breaking into his office to steal files, he simply tells her to go ahead while engaging her in a conversation about boxing) and as the less-hapless-than-he-looks graduate assistant Tim Foyle, the gifted Season Two scene-stealer (in a different role) James Jordan provides Veronica with an unlikely nemesis. There's less star power in the guest roles than in previous seasons. Sadly, Alyson Hannigan's deliciously against-type Tina character never makes it back, and Charisma Carpenter's dangerously sexy Kendall is dispatched in the season premiere (Whedonites should be on the lookout for a brief appearance from "Buffy" Season Five's Charlie Weber, however). Paul Rudd does show up for the one decent episode of the final run, and a subplot in the standout "My Big Fat Greek Rush Week" boasts the unlikely trio of Rider Strong, Samm Levine, and Dan Castellaneta.

As always, "Veronica Mars" is Kristen Bell's show, and she's a tiny powerhouse, confident, flawed, committed to -- or perhaps obsessed by -- justice. Critics have often contrasted "Veronica Mars" with "Buffy" by noting the lead's lack of superpowers, but I disagree -- Veronica's fearlessness is a superpower, the way Bell plays it. By no means should you begin with Season Three if you've never seen a "Veronica Mars" episode (among other reasons, dialogue right in the first episode will spoil the mysteries from the first and second years), but if you tuned out during the CW's harsh mistreatment in its original airing, it's worth giving it another go on DVD. Perhaps the best sell of all is that the DVD unusually allows for a new ending to be tacked on past the first run's rather unsatisfying finale; at no extra charge Thomas has included here his half-hour presentation for a not-to-be fourth season where Veronica is in her first year as an FBI agent. It's a little weird seeing Bell playing the same character with an entirely different cast around her (and the abandonment of the show's trademark anti-noir pink-and-purple lighting schemes), but it's nice that our last memory of the character will be of her blowing away the brass on her first day in the field. No one's freshman year of college is home to many of their proudest memories.