Review: 13 Reasons Why Season 2 Offers Twice the Drama—and Half the Dignity

The first season of 13 Reasons Why, adapted for television by playwright Brian Yorkey, created exqui..

admin May 19, 2018 1:41 am

The first season of 13 Reasons Why, adapted for television by playwright Brian Yorkey, created exquisitely painful emotional landscapes that landed almost too well. Its sensitive suicide story line dropped into family Netflix queues without warning, prompting fears of triggering copycat behavior in vulnerable audiences. The show scrambled to address those concerns; in its second season, available now, resources and information are promised in the P.S.A.s that accompany the opening credits and close out each episode.

The problem is that 13 Reasons Why was initially appealing to young viewers precisely because Season 1 was so cynical about standard adult efforts to prevent teenagers from engaging in destructive or abusive behavior. In its first year, the show knew how unappealing an after-school-special tone sounded, and went out of its way to avoid using one. In its place was a radical exposure of the building trauma that can lead to suicide, which the show rendered graphically and without flinching. Teen suicide rates are on the rise, and high-school social dynamics now take place on phones and Facebook profiles, hidden from less tech-savvy adults. So the first seasons story of a girl (Hannah Baker, played by Katherine Langford) who is humiliated to the point of self-destruction did have value, even if some of the parental hand-wringing was also warranted.

Season 2—which exists largely because the Peak TV business model seemingly privileges quantity, not quality—begins five or six months after the events of the first season, in which the cassette tapes Hannah made before her suicide were distributed to the community around her. As her mother, Olivia (Kate Walsh, in a committed, heartbreaking performance), takes the high schools administration to court over their role in Hannahs death, everyone Hannah implicated before she died is called to the stand. Their testimony provides a narration, of sorts, for the second season, placing the audience in the role of de facto jury. In a way, it works.

But the whole process also forces the story to retread Hannahs path to suicide, a tale that was already told over the course of 13 hour-long episodes. As the series retraces its steps, it becomes apparent that 13 Reasons Whys Liberty High is the most dramatic high school in the universe: the second season introduces more beatings, more blackmail, several more secret relationships, and several more guns on top of last seasons double suicide attempts, fatal car accident, rampant cyberbullying, and serial rapists. Because much of this takes place in flashbacks to when Hannah was still alive, the audience is asked to believe that all of these goings-on were happening concurrently. On top of all that, in the present-day scenes, Hannahs ghost has begun to appear to Clay (Dylan Minnette)—and now, she talks, in a development that feels especially preposterous for a series that purports to be gritty and realistic.

To be sure, being young is a dizzying, overwhelming experience, and a week at the age of 17 might feel as long as a year for a middle-aged television critic. But peppering Hannahs already fraught story of suicide with even more codas and addendums, even more secret connections and mixed messages, does more to problematically glamorize her decision to end her life than the entire first season did.

As the second season careens toward a conclusion that was already heavily hinted at in the first season finale, it becomes increasingly clear that 13 Reasons Why isnt about uncovering trauma, but perpetuating provocation. We knew, in all likelihood, that this would happen; so many breakout shows struggle to land their second seasons. But most of those shows arent about teen suicide and sexual assault—and while the second season of 13 Reasons Why swears its even more aware of its sensitive material, its also even more exploitative than the first.

That said, 13 Reasons Why can also be wonderful. Though Hannahs suicide is cheapened in the retelling, the story of grief underlying the season is heartrending; Walsh and Brian dArcy James, as Hannahs parents, anchor everything while the younger performers get caught up in their own drama. The surviving teenagers are left with nothing but Hannahs memory, and even her ghost begins to reveal the limitations of death. In one chilling, Lynchian scene, her mouth opens, only to reveal the canned sound of her voice on a dinky cassette tape. The teenagers she used to know are frantic and desperate, but they live on; Hannah is nothing but the memories she left behind, stuck in a loop of frozen evolution.

As the trial moves forward, Clay becomes obsessed with doing what the lawsuit cant: bringing rapist jock Bryce (Justin Prentice) to justice. But Bryce has enablers spanning the community, from his well-connected father and his baseball coach to his loutish teammates on the field. The plot thickens when someone leaves Clay a mysterious polaroid that shows Bryce taking advantage of yet another unconscious girl. When it comes to social and gender dynamics, 13 Reasons Why is especially conscious; it pays close attention to the gradations of privilege between some white boys and others, while examining the multiple ways girls are victimized and re-victimized by rape culture. But its also didactic, and unevenly paced; Jessica (Alisha Boe) tests the viewers patience by spending eight to ten long hours declining to publicly name her rapist, even though everyone in the audience assumes that she eventually will.

And yet even here, the shows dedication to shining a light on uncomfortable detail comes through. Prentice, as Bryce, throws himself into the role of the recidivist rapist with remarkable self-assuredness; the shows other young, male performers, including Minnette, Miles Heizer, and Devin Druid, similarly hurl themselves into portraits of emasculated boys and abusive men with honest, earnest zeal. 13 Reasons Why shows these boys prematurely ejaculating, losing erections, getting hard at the wrong place and time, swelling with desire at the thought of violence, jerking off. Like the rest of the show, its uncomfortably and bracingly courageous, for better or for worse.

At other times, though, the shows tendency to find the most brutal entry point into a topic comes across as less than sincere. Just as Season 1 ended with Hannahs graphic suicide, Season 2s conclusion hinges on something horrible. And while the shows commitment to not shying away from pain might be admirable, its also hard to interpret the violence that ends episode 13 as anything more than setup for another wrenching season—one that will feature even more lived and relived trauma.

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