While adding a trigger warning, promoting links to crisis information resources, and releasing supplemental materials to help parents and teens navigate difficult discussions, the actual plot of season 2 doubles down on the tricky material. This is important since 13 Reasons Why is big on messages. Using Hannah as a spirit guide for Clay, essentially stretching out one of the more powerful scenes from season 1 across season 2, makes for a fine plot device but a lousy message. That’s how death works.Īnd now she’s back, which is not how death works. Here was a character we had grown to love, and then, she was just gone. Whether 13 Reasons Why glamorizes teen suicide or not is still up for debate, but Hannah’s final moments were shockingly real.
After viewers spent a season playing detective, coming up with fan theories, and analyzing the many eccentricities of this world (seriously, how do so many of these high school kids have tattoos?), it all came back to death. The decision to depict Hannah’s suicide in graphic detail in the first season, highly debated as it was, drove home the dead-serious stakes. While 13 Reasons Why needs all of these scenes to make sense of itself, they also chip away at the show’s foundation. Langford is given plenty of screen time between additional flashbacks, flashbacks we’ve seen before, and her ongoing dialogue with Clay.
Her control over the narrative subverted the typical beautiful dead girl trope, making her not only the focus of but the driving force in the story. Langford’s presence and performance on 13 Reasons Why is essential to its success. It’s like the show, desperate to keep the built-in story engine it had in season 1 churning, doubled down on the puzzle box element.Īnd then there’s the Hannah of it all. The use of the polaroids, conversely, makes for a compelling mystery while also feeling like a distraction. Based on a season 1 episode where characters are giving depositions to a camera, you might’ve even guessed this was where the show was going.
WHEN WILL 13 REASONS WHY SEASON 2 COME OUT TRIAL
Structurally, it makes sense for 13 Reasons Why to use Hannah’s trial as a focal point. Oh, and he also starts seeing Hannah as a ghost, imagining her everywhere he goes and talking to her when he’s unsure of himself. Meanwhile, Clay Jensen (Dylan Minnette), our erstwhile hero, stumbles into a conspiracy involving old photos which reveals an even deeper history of sexual misconduct at Liberty High. Many start receiving threats, warning what will happen to them if they don’t keep their mouth shut. Old wounds are opened again when Hannah’s parents decide not to settle their lawsuit against the school, instead taking it to court and forcing many of the students featured on the tapes to testify. In season 2, Liberty High and the surrounding community are still reeling from the death of Hannah Baker (Katherine Langford), as well as the attempted suicide of another student. Not that the writers didn’t leave plenty of threads open from season 1 for 1 3 Reasons Why to pick up with. So when Netflix announced that the show would be getting a second season, that was a tough ask for the thin story. It was an insatiably binge-ready if not extremely morbid premise. 13 Reasons Why was a one-way miniseries: A dead girl leaves behind a box of tapes explaining why she killed herself, each addressed to a different person who contributed to her decision.