I was not going to write about 13 Reasons Why Season 2, as it’s not really in the wheelhouse of “genre” shows at all. However, opinionated as I am, I finished watching it and had some pretty specific thoughts about the ending, and would like to go into it. If you haven’t seen the show there’s not much point in me summarizing it, but needless to say MAJOR SPOILERS follow, so if you’re so inclined, read ahead…
Alright, last warning to avoid spoilers. With that said- what the fuck did I just watch?? Perhaps the most frustrating season of TV I have ever encountered. The season as whole, dealing with the aftermath of Hannah’s suicide (and her ghostly spirit that I mentioned in the Marvel Quiz piece) was not very good, and paled in comparison to the sterling and timely Season 1. They were telling a specific story with a specific theme, and while I may not agree with what that message was, I was at least willing to hear them out. The theme seemed to be, correct me if I’m wrong, that violent acts have consequences, if not always closure. And in their usual heavy-handed fashion, the writers took every opportunity to remind us that justice is rarely met out, going out of their way to show this even when it defied any semblance of realistic law. Okay, fine. And they clearly wanted to go with a big kumbaya ending, where everyone chooses peace and love instead of hatred and learns to let go, to an extent. I follow you.
But to have that stupid ending they went with, which not only goes completely against their own theme, but also deprives the audience of a satisfying conclusion- AND a realistic payoff to the very story they themselves set up- was a slap in the face that pissed me off. It was the worst kind of weak-willed, sappy melodrama that showed they had no courage in their convictions and just wanted to leave breadcrumbs for the next go-round; but oh yeah, they threw in another rape, because they’re so “cutting edge”! It devolved completely into soap opera, but with the now-standard upsetting violation scenes that have become their forte, and it reeked of the worst kind of shock value. They were doing all this just to set up their possible season 3, and that sucked. Having their cake and eating it too, in that they didn’t want to be blamed for showing the REAL consequences to brutal violence, which was set up the entire season to get the viewer invested, before the rug was pulled out from under us.
To re-cap: the Hannah trial is concluded, where Mrs. Baker loses her wrongful death lawsuit against the school, because that’s life. Jessica finally gets up her courage and goes to the police about Bryce, who is convicted of her rape, and is subsequently sentenced to three months probation, because hey, they gotta sync up with that unfair Brock Turner verdict, right? Whatever. I at least got what they were going for, in their typical on-the-nose fashion. The Bakers hold a funeral for Hannah at last, and Clay says goodbye to her and lets her go, so her force ghost can go to the other side and reunite with the other Jedi. So we had an okay ending, if not spectacular nor particularly realistic. Okay. But then they had to go and utterly ruin the whole thing; oh boy did they ruin it.
Sad-sack Tyler, the school outcast who purchased several firearms in the LAST season finale, has been getting foreshadowing every single episode that he’s going to shoot up the school. They laid the foreshadowing on so thick, the audience was no doubt just waiting for him to get on with it. The show made him as unlikable and awkward as they could. But then, in the final episode, he goes to his behavior camp, and changes. Tries to a better person. Accepts rejection, starts being kind. They actually made us like him! And it seemed like they were giving him a happy ending, having merely put forward a big red herring up to this point; the true power of peace and love beating hate. Yay! But then, out of nowhere, secondary villain Montgomery (Burns), enraged at Tyler for getting the baseball team put on probation (I guess), attacks him in the bathroom with his cronies, smashes his head into the mirror and breaks it on the sink, tries to drown him in the toilet, and then, in possibly the most graphic and upsetting scene I’ve ever seen on TV, brutally anally rapes him, with blood flying everywhere after he sodomizes him with a broom. Tyler then snaps and reverts, goes to get his guns, and comes to the spring formal to shoot up the school. And THEN- jeez, how it ends.
I may not like watching the horrific scene, but if they were going that route, I buy that Monty broke him, and now his deserved comeuppance will be the tragic result of violence begetting more violence; the realistic response that there are no happy endings, nor answers in real life. I was expecting Tyler to go nuclear and kill half the school for the ending. I would’ve even been okay with him just walking up to Monty and unloading his pistol up his evil anus, which no doubt everyone watching would have been okay with too. But no. Tyler comes with his 20 guns, and (after warning the major characters ahead of time with a text that totally incriminates him), somehow, Clay unbelievably convinces everyone to not call the police and just lock the doors. He then convinces Tyler not to go through with it through the power of love, and to just drive off with Tony. And then, as the cops arrive, inexplicably, Clay holds the gun and seems to be taking the blame himself, in a rip-off of the ending to The Dark Knight, just to set up their asinine season 3 cliffhanger.
To that I say: Bullshit. I could’ve accepted many variations, but this? No chance. They could’ve had Tyler not listen to Clay and gone through with it; they could’ve had him choose on his own not to kill Monty after making him shit his pants. They could’ve had him just kill Monty and not hurt anyone else; they could’ve had some balls and killed their main character, Clay, to show how stupid it is to try to reason with an active shooter. They could have even had Bryce the rapist redeem himself and jump in front of the line of fire, to show there’s goodness in everyone, but no, this show does not operate on subtlety or shades of gray. It was so unnecessary all around. Why even put the anal rape in, if you’re not going to show the violent result? Why set up the shooting subplot to the point where we’re expecting it, and not go through with it? Why make us like Tyler, put out all those stupid PSA trigger warnings in front of episodes where nothing happened, and then completely BLINDSIDE us in the most cruel fashion imaginable? “Well you know, these things happen, it was true to life, blah blah blah.” I’m pretty certain it doesn’t happen in real life much where the cops are not called and your friend convinces the shooter to just go home and takes the fall himself, outside of a Sam Raimi Spider-Man movie!
The other problem is that by virtue of inserting the rape scene, they condition the audience to need some kind of narrative release, that is never delivered. And it could’ve been done tastefully. School shootings happen in real life, and we seem to have a new tragedy every week. I get that the sensitive artistes behind the show didn’t want to “remind” us of this, and/or got cold feet. But they’re okay going hog wild with the graphic rapes? It’s such a double standard. They had a golden opportunity, in that up until the last episode, Tyler was not likeable nor glamorous. He was pretty much shown to be a complete loser, to the point of jizzing in his pants when holding a girl’s hand, and unironically wearing bow ties to school (I think the showrunners actually believe nerds today would wear this). And so, when pushed too far, it would not be glamorizing school shooting at all to see him go berserk, and do a really realistic portrayal of what would happen in such a situation; a la the graphic beginning of Saving Private Ryan. It’s a conversation worth having- that they themselves set up!
Conversely- and I’m grasping at straws here- if they didn’t want to do that, and wanted to go all in with their wishy-washy theme; they could’ve shown Tyler really did change, and chooses to just put the gun away and go to the police or his friends to report Monty’s savage buggery. To show that the characters really did learn from Hannah’s mistake, and were choosing to be better and affect different outcomes. I wouldn’t buy it, but fine, it would still be a positive release to see Tyler come out ahead; that Monty couldn’t break his spirit, and thus the rape culture at the school was finally brought down for good. But this ending? It was like bad fan fiction. Say Clay does take the fall for Tyler; he still has a car full of guns and the text he sent. It doesn’t change anything, he’s still going down. Say they avoid that and Tyler is caught; what’s the point, other than to pad out for another season a conclusion the characters all would’ve come to within minutes, that every act of violence has consequences (or whatever)? No, the only reason they did this was to set up another long, contrived, ridiculous plotline to sustain them for season 3. Which a shooting most definitely would’ve done. They want to have a “conversation” without actually doing something worth conversing over. It’s the worst kind of crass commercialism, and I hate the hypocrisy and disingenuousness on display.
As for what ending I would’ve gone with? (Not that you asked) Well, I obviously would’ve left the whole shooter/anal rape plotline out (this show is becoming as known for its signature rape scenes as Alan Moore’s work is) and focused on ending the story at hand. They seemed to imply there was no justice in the courtroom for Bryce; so that leads one to the conclusion, I would think, that the only other options are to get justice on the streets, or let it go and move on (which is exactly what Mr. Porter suggested to Hannah, and we summarily dismissed him as a dick). So if that was the way they wanted to go, I think it would have been really fitting to have a character take matters into their own hands and kill Bryce. And I actually think the character to do that, that made perfect sense, was Jessica’s father, Mr. Davis. He is shown to be a reasonable man and loving father, yet mad as hell over what happened to his daughter, and his inability to protect her. He is also a military man of principle. So I think it would have been highly fitting to have Bryce come home after the trial, Mr. Davis is waiting for him, and he just shoots him in the head. Point very much put across, that violence doesn’t really solve anything, and yet that was the only justice anyone could get if they were unwilling to let it go. The key word being unwilling. It would be fascinating to contrast the futility and wrongness of his actions with our own desire to see Bryce pay. Again, a moral gray area the show seems utterly disinterested in exploring, so we’re stuck with Bryce still attending the school dance by the end, with zero closure to be had.
It actually brings to my mind the ending of the Preacher comic, by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon. In the last issue, The Saint of Killers finally confronts his arch-nemesis, The Almighty (I’m not going to try to explain it, but readers know who I mean). He has already killed a dozen others, and his “foe” is the only one left. The Almighty asks him what he wants most, and without a word, The Saint of Killers just shoots him dead and replies quietly, “To rest,” before sitting down in his throne and doing just that. Short and sweet, but fitting, because that was his character goal. It’s kind of the same principle in other stories too, where you just know what feels like the “right” ending for certain arcs. For example, in Batman books, Bats is shown to never kill any criminal, and he’s locked in this weird relationship with The Joker where he seems unwilling to harm a hair on his head. So we get those annual meet-ups where he promises, this time, he’s finally going to do it and end Joker once and for all- he means it this time!- and we know he’s never going to.
So I actually think dramatically, it would be most fitting if Commissioner Gordon were the one who killed The Joker in a story; just shoots him in mid-sentence before he can get out a punchline, just to finally rest. And it would be totally in character because he doesn’t need to abide by Batman’s weird-ass rules, he’s an officer of the law, and I would think this would be very much warranted as a clean kill. It’s also the right payoff to where they’ve taken the traumatic relationship between Gordon and Joker over the years. But due to the nature of comics, they’re never killing The Joker, so instead we always have Gordon as the one talking Batman off the ledge, imploring him not to kill Joker in every other story, for law and order or some such nonsense, when he has more reason to hate him than anyone. My point is, 13 Reasons Why is not Batman. They can tell finite stories, like Preacher, that bring characters to their logical and inevitable conclusions based on realistic goals. They can take them off the table to fulfill the narrative theme that makes the most sense. But God forbid they risk depreciating the show’s stars before the inevitable season 3, I guess.
I think I can put my finger exactly on why I found the whole thing so repugnant and upsetting: why show the rape, if you weren’t going to show the shooting? For a show that prides itself on being “true to life,” to subject us to the first, and then take away the thematic release of the built-up result, was upsetting. And just to dig the knife in, before Monty violates Tyler in the most humiliating way possible with his goons present- poor Tyler tries to use his little skills he learned at the camp to try to reason with Monty, and it does no good; it was never going to. We watch him maimed and debased and his dignity taken away, as if to crap all over his attempt to be a better person. As if it was pointless to try. Then thirty minutes later, Clay is somehow able to reason Tyler out of shooting up the school. So the audience is already traumatized for kicks, but to no end as nobody learned anything. If the lesson is, people don’t care about reason as human nature is savage, I would’ve carried that to its natural endpoint with a savage shooting. Not gone in the opposite direction and decided, yay, we can talk it out, when it was past the point of talking. In one fell swoop they destroyed a compelling natural endpoint for all the arcs, as well as a sobering moral. Anyway, that was my problem with the show’s finale in a long nutshell. I also didn’t like how they handled many other things, such as not getting Clay the help he clearly needed when he’s having out-loud conversations with Hannah’s ghost. The boy’s nuts!
(Hannah agrees with me)
Other little things that bugged: I liked the idea that Clay’s family “adopted” Justin and they became brothers, but right as his arc came to a satisfying conclusion, we see him shoot up heroin again, and then have sex with Jessica while handicapped Alex is cuckholded in the other room, proving they’ve learned nothing. What the fuck! To top it off, Chloe is pregnant with Bryce’s baby, just to manufacture “drama” for season 3? Do they realize how obvious it is that they’re just creating hooks to drag us back next year, and degrading the show to the point of nonsense? They did not set out to tell a story with a theme, they’re spewing melodrama, and it feels very insulting to an audience member who invested in the show and believed in it. People were so excited about this show dropping that they stayed up all night and marathoned it, and they deserved a better outcome than the writers essentially chickening out of their convictions.
Most ridiculous character award for the season goes to Zach’s mother, Cindy Dempsey. It was nice that instead of a stereotypical fresh-off-the-boat grouchy Asian mother, they instead went for a stereotypical high expectations Asian-American mother with her blinders on. Cindy was perhaps the most 2-dimensional character on TV this side of Ward Cleaver. There was also the beyond irritating defense attorney representing the school, who not only character assassinated Hannah and every one of the witnesses on her behalf, but also spoke in the most inauthentic, made-up legal jargon this side of Harvey Birdman. Did nobody writing this show even TRY to figure out what lawyers would really say? Even I know you don’t ask any question you don’t know the answer to, yet Lady continually asks them things five times in the same way until she gets some wild revelation out of them. “Isn’t it true, then, that you were really doing this? Huh huh? Weren’t you?” What trial lawyer would talk like that? It was only topped by the silly judge who allowed every last thing she said, because “drama”!
I’d like to mention anything positive about the season, but boy howdy, this ending takes the cake and overshadows any other good they might’ve done. It makes me think the show really would’ve been better off as just a done-in-one or a limited series. But the serialized nature really damned them, and made them feel they had to contrive inauthentic cliffhangers in the event a third season comes to pass, which utterly ruined what came before. It’s just a complete shame. What was before a really compelling drama, about the complicated and tenuous link between the intimacy of suicide and young love, has now become glorified fan-fic, more outlandish and unbelievable than anything going on in any given Marvel comic this week. God help us all.