By becoming a hallucination, a manifestation of Clay’s guilt and lingering feelings for her, the series can utilize Langford outside of the occasional flashback, and also put her in scenes with Minnette to once again capitalize on their on-screen chemistry and solid performances. The most glaring evidence of this is in how the series works Hannah back into the story. In doing so, 13 Reasons Why inadvertently invalidates the intended emotional impact of what came before.
Many of those potential examinations wind up being tabled for the purpose of pushing Clay down the path of uncovering a new mystery, one seemingly in connection to Hannah’s suicide, and in convincing the audience there’s more to her story than was seen in the previous season. It’s meant to be perfunctory, but it’s also unintentionally representative of how the show itself often makes due with a superficial investigation of its own content. There’s a scene early on in the new season where the school’s baseball coach listlessly reads his players a memorandum about consent. Though it makes a concerted effort to cover important issues, the series often does so in a facile manner platitudes are delivered in place of more meaningful examinations of the subject matter. More: New Girl Series Finale Review: A Sweet Farewell That Distills The Show’s Best Parts The photos and the mystery surrounding them are little more than a lateral move for the series, a secondary device intended to further mimic the structure of season 1, that only affords 13 Reasons Why a chance to rehash a story that’s already been told. With Hannah now gone the focus shifts to the lawsuit filed by her parents against the school for failing to protect her, as well as a second thread involving Polaroids as evidence of just how rampant bullying and sexual assault really are at this school. The narrative device of Hannah’s recordings, mixed with the investigation into them made by Clay Jensen (Dylan Minnette), along with a multitude of flashbacks featuring the show’s expansive ensemble cast, gave the series enough structure to partially mitigate the more ponderous parts of the season’s storyline. That’s a problem for season 2 as the series struggles to justify the unnecessary continuation of what was a self-contained story.įor there to be 13 episodes in the first season was, if not totally necessary, at least ambitious in its design. Nevertheless, it still told its story from beginning to end. Though it covered sensitive, important topics like bullying, self-harm, rape, and suicide - sometimes in not the most sensitive of ways - the questions of why Hanna Baker (Katherine Langford) killed herself and chose to explain why on a series of cassette tapes, didn’t have enough story to adequately fill 13 hours of television. Based on the novel by Jay Asher, the series was initially intended to be a feature film, but soon took on a new form as one of the streaming giant’s overlong, sometimes ponderous, supposedly bingeable originals. Season 1 of Netflix’s 13 Reasons Why was about as self-contained a story as you can get.