The Betrayal of 13 REASONS WHY S3

the original plan was to frame this review as a PSA to not watch the show in an attempt to get it cancelled thinking I had the influence to do that but a fourth season was announced even before so much as promotional material for season 3 it was released so I'm thinking in the wake of Netflix pulling the plug on a lot of its great shows 13 reasons why is here to stay I'm actually pretty optimistic that they'll end the show at season 4 the characters will probably graduate at the rate the show's been going at and a solidified final season would make sense for them to renew so far in advance but if Netflix is gonna exploit this dumpster fire so am i I've definitely questioned the ethics of continuing these reviews because I know a lot of people watch the show specifically for the purpose of watching youtubers like myself tear it apart but my rationale is that by going in depth and going into spoilers which this video contains it serves as an alternative to watching the show for a lot of people and if that audience can eclipse the audience that watches the show because of me I can sort of justify it to myself I'm still aware of the fact that I'm performing mental gymnastics to justify these videos but the bottom line is don't watch the show that's the point here I've made the videos I've made and will continue to make videos for as long as the show runs as a means of convincing you guys that it is not worth your time and attention so we're back time to celebrate another season of a show that continues to perplex me a show whose original premise was holding a tight circle of people responsible for the suicide of a teenage girl which has inexplicably turned into a murder mystery so full of death and rape and other crimes it's impossible to operate as the after-school PSA it's somehow still convinced it is this is they've updated the look of the show yet again last season they deepened the color contrast and switched to a two-to-one aspect ratio which was one of the few things I felt was a tasteful improvement but this season they took it way too far they've gone even more widescreen with a two point two to one aspect ratio and the color grading looks like 2011 film riot the colors are D saturated the blacks are blues and the contrast is so intense that every scene looks overexposed this isn't without purpose as it serves to illustrate the difference between past and present but when you look at how season one did that with nothing more than a slightly warmer color grade for the past and compare it to this season it feels like the only way to illustrate how it feels is with this visual while the present is high contrast and low saturation the past is low contrast and high saturation to the point of looking like a YouTube rewind segment they still have the flashback shot handheld and present-day shot with smooth often complex camera setups but switching between the two which was one of the inoffensive aspects of the previous seasons doesn't work as well here when we switched from present-day to flashback the 16 by 9 aspect ratio and natural color palette looked kind of drab which makes the climactic scenes look remarkably uninteresting and amateurish and then switching back to the 2.2 to 1 aspect ratio and action-thriller color palette it looks like a heightened reality that itself would visually make more sense as a flashback and because of the aspect ratio we get these preposterous transitions of course some of them are pretty good but because there's so many in general we get a good amount that are just hokey beyond measure the thing is I say past and present because the majority of the season like every other season follows two general timelines that eventually meet up at the end but this time it's so unnecessarily convoluted technically these present-day scenes are really flashbacks because the real present is this new character Anees police interview which we only see a few seconds of per episode and start out black and white slowly catching up in saturation to this footage as the season progresses now I know what you're thinking Taylor you just said that this footage looks so heightened that it would work better as a flashback but now you're saying it is a flashback the is that this footage slowly morphs to match this footage so in a way this is more of a flash forward than the present flash forward is certainly an interesting concept and makes me think about why we generally consider the farthest chronological narrative thread in a story to be the present but there's no reason for the chronology in this particular story to be like this season one made sense because of the tapes and then season two tried to recapture that feeling with its testimonies but needlessly complicated things even though it was coherent and the framing of this story feels remarkably similar to season two but only further convolute things there's only one narrator overall rather than changing from episode to episode but we have testimonies within testimonies flashbacks within flashbacks and there's so much going on that it visually tries to convey but just feels again convoluted there's one flashback to season two that still has the 2 to 1 aspect ratio but all the other flashbacks are in sixteen by nine and it becomes so strange visually conveying season one material and recent new flashback material in the same aspect ratio but the small period of season two is presented in still a different aspect ratio than those I get what they were going for but because the first two seasons are consistent aspect ratios within themselves and different from each other and they wanted season three to have that wider to point two to one aspect ratio they should have just committed to two point two to one for the whole season and like before relied on camera setup and color grading which are already more over the top this season to convey flashbacks all of this shifting aspect ratio and color scheme and everything else suggests a lack of confidence in the narrative cohesion and when you have to go to these lengths to make the narrative easy to follow I think there may be a problem in the writing every movie known for being narrative ly hard to follow once you break it down is pretty simple that's because it needs to be simple to make something complicated comprehensible this show feels like it's making something simple complicated just for the sake of doing it it's not like the chronology is the way it is to make any sort of point season one was very clearly from Clay's limited perspective we only know what clay knows even when they cut away from clay for dramatic irony it never gave us the information we were interested in it was more vague suggestions about what might happen and the bigger question this eventually posed was the reliability of Hana it was annoying and manipulative but it was at least simple it could be argued that season two is trying to make a point about unreliable testimony and jury perception but we know more than the jury knows and aside from that the season was more an ensemble piece than anything here the information seems limited to what Ani knows even though she conveniently knows just about everything but we do see some stuff that there's no reason for her to know and some unreliable narration on her part potentially suggests a similar point about the justice system especially considering how the season ends but because there's no actual restriction the writers can arbitrarily decide what to tell us and what not to tell us I guess this was the case before but more than ever it feels like they're only withholding information so they can have more oshit moments there reveals particularly regarding who really killed Bryce that recontextualize so many things but not in a way that enhances the story instead it muddles up motivations and because so many lies are at the mercy of writers with the freedom to do whatever they want I find it impossible to become invested in anything it feels like the boy who cried wolf and when something is finally confirmed to be true it's just whatever because we stopped caring if we ever cared at all I think for something like this the writing needs some sort of restriction to adhere to in order to justify misdirects and red herrings obviously by that I don't mean the writers shouldn't have full creative freedom but I think they should set up narrative restrictions for themselves in order to establish the rules of the story's world once again the show finds itself unable to exist without a narrator so in Hannah's place we get Ani who I mentioned earlier conveniently knows everything about everyone her role is so bizarre in the grand scheme of things but she's clearly a Hanna Bakker surrogate for so much of the show who else would be so verbose with narration in a setting where verbosity wouldn't make much sense why does she give her police interview like it's an AP Lang si it frames the show in such a comically epic way that it seems like we're watching clay Jensen become a mythological hero or a tall tale character if I could count the amount of times she says secrets in fact I'm gonna try there are things I'm sure no one has told you secrets that have been well kept and yes the keeper of those secrets is often k johnson one secret goes back to last spring their secrets tony padilla also a secret keeper with the secrets i know all the secrets these AK had a secret buzz AK had another secret everybody at liberty had secrets Chloe had a secret secrets bring more secrets how he kept a secret from Brice their secrets we all have secrets the master secret keeper secrets are family secrets had secrets secretly secrets a secrets miss Lee Christmas secrets the secrets once he had a secret not only does she use verbage that doesn't fit the police interview setting but she gives exposition that shouldn't make sense for what the police know she's been an evergreen for like six months now she's become familiar with everyone why does she tell the police we get clay inany running around playing there Blue's Clues mystery Incorporated act the exact way we had clay and Hannah's hallucination back in season two we get the same reveal we got about Hannah in season two that she's friends with Bryce we even get the same sense of unreliable narration from Ani that we got from Hannah they really convinced us they were getting rid of Hannah and then they just replaced her with a completely recycled archetype maybe on ease a little nerdier than Hannah I guess is one of the the few differences but there are way too many similarities her relationship with clay isn't terrible they do have some chemistry but the writing is always so on the nose Anees written as a highly perceptive character which is fine but when all her interactions with clay setting up their relationship just consist of explicitly stated direct characterization I feel like I'm reading the outline of a story rather than the actual story our hero was back and more than ever the show wants us to know he's a hero it wants him to go down in the history books so we get an unreasonable amount of time spent with other characters explicitly talking about how deep and sad but kind and upstanding he is we finally have a season of the show where clay isn't constantly beaten up but we still have some action for him and also he goes to [ __ ] jail aside from making him a hero the show is on a quest of making this dorky kid as edgy as possible I'm honestly surprised they didn't have imagine dragons playing in any of these scenes I haven't seen enough shows to confirm this but I feel like it's a pretty tired trope at this point for shows specifically soap operas to have a main character go to jail or turn evil or something along those lines just to give them a more dramatically varied journey and that's clearly what they're doing here which makes me wonder how much of this story they're just pulling out of a hat now that they have all the archetypes in place to recycle other stories and yes pretty much every story is recycled but you got to do a better job disguising it than this because of the writing for clay Dillon Manette gives another OneNote performance even though we know he's capable of more the season tried to address to some extent the Hannah hallucinations from last season but in a strangely half-assed way Justin mentions to Clay's parents that clay mentioned that he couldn't get her out of his head which in any normal context would be interpreted as he can't stop thinking about her but Clay's dad asks like he couldn't stop thinking about her or like he was hearing her in his head why would he ask if clay was literally hearing things unless there was some context of clays mania that he knew about and if he knows about clays manic episode why doesn't he do anything and then in that very episode clay has a hallucination of Bryce and I was suddenly terrified they would have Bryce follow him the whole rest of the season fortunately this never happens again but it's strange that these hallucinations are mentioned and actually happen again but they're never brought up as a problem once again the show proves that it does not care about mental illness it cares about what's dramatic and exciting and uses affectation of mental illness to convince us we've seen something eye-opening Jessica's storyline wasn't too bad this season at least until the reveal at the end which I'll get into later this character who's tangentially part of Jessica's arc was pretty annoying and then had a resolution to a conflict that felt underdeveloped but everything else about Jessica's leadership worked for me it's perfectly realistic that a protest with good intentions pointing out a prevalent issue won't be taken seriously by the people being protested - and you can feel the frustration I thought her speech at the end along with the subsequent Spartacus moment was a little hokey and sentimental but it's far from the greatest offense this season her tension with Ani considering that ani slept with Jessica's rapist is also rushed and underplayed but this is also one of the lesser offenses I can't tell if alex is the worst character in the show or just the worst actor he didn't have the most important role in season one but ever since they tried to give him his own thread the past two seasons it's been impossible for me to care about anything that happens to him it's partially due to the constant apathy in his voice but I also feel like no one knows who this character is supposed to be this season he's just kind of roid raging for a lot of the runtime and we see later the bigger cause of some of this emotional outburst but aside from steroid use the friending Bryce again was a complete betrayal this is like when Drake collabed with Chris Brown after things fell through between him and Rihanna how does he redeem himself by saying sorry even before the pivotal scene of this season which certainly doesn't get Jessica to forgive him anymore because it kind of ruins her life how did they make amends did she just not know he was friends with Bryce and we're supposed to be cool with that he's overcompensating with his body because Jessica left him for Justin but what resolution does that bring it's not that every story needs resolution but resolution helps reveal what a certain storyline is about and there's no indicator of what Alex's storyline could possibly be about obviously the show isn't condoning moments like this but he's framed as one of the good guys and when he doesn't redeem himself from his overcompensating entitled personality what are we supposed to like about him Zach remains the most reasonable character in the show even thinking he killed Bryce he tells everyone to stop the shenanigans and let the police figure it out sure there's a whole thing about the police having an agenda and pinning clay but had they just got an honest testimony from everyone there wouldn't be an issue at the very end reasons are revealed for why honest testimony wouldn't be ideal for two specific characters but I'll get into that later because no one else knows those reasons for all intents and purposes as far as he knows clay leads everyone to a vow of secrecy because he and Tony helped Tyler flee the scene of the school dance he was about to shoot up and he doesn't want the police to find out this makes sense to an extent but Ani tells the police what happened and they don't care so Zack was right and that there was no reason to take matters into their own hands it only complicated everything he certainly goes a little overboard beating Bryce up but I think this is one of the more justifiable acts of violence in the show the extent of the violence is too far but also it's Bryce Walker that said the one scene that doesn't make sense is Zac saying that only a large person could beat up Bryce implying it was Montgomery if you were really trying to cover up his tracks I imagine he just wouldn't say anything at all unless he suspects that people would suspect that because he didn't say anything he might be guilty but something tells me that that's not the case Tyler's the cause of most of the seasons legal complications as I mentioned and as I also mentioned he ended up having no legal consequence at least for the shooting attempt I was surprised with the direction they took his character in and he's actually one of the few compelling things about this season in a vacuum but the context of this season knowing he was seconds away from killing all these people makes me a little unsure of how to feel that's perhaps by design but that redemption in the audience's eye is maybe a little more difficult than I suspect the writers expected I think they may have been trying to draw a parallel between Bryce and Tyler the only difference being that Tyler was stopped before committing a terrible act and serves as proof that Redemption is possible but it's not like Bryce could have just been stopped from one rape he was a repeat offender more on that later though I don't know what more to say about Tony Padilla I keep forgetting he's in high school and not just Clay's older friend he looks even less like he's in high school than before he's basically not even going to school anymore and he still has so much [ __ ] on his plate he has the storied life of a 60 year old man and he's only 18 this time ice is out to get him I don't know why this show thought on top of everything else it could squeeze immigration into its themes but it really is trying to tackle every single world issue this thread is so disconnected from everything else all it really does is give him more reason to not want to get busted which is something which I can understand why might seem justified but it makes the narrative feel loose and scattered which is typically a result of lazy writing justin has somehow become one of the more likeable characters in the show mostly as clays comic relief sidekick which is really funny considering his arc I'm no expert in drug addiction but there's seemingly no symptoms in Justin he looks fine and healthy he hasn't adopted any mannerisms or tics we never get a sense that he's just maintaining on heroin and the only issues he has playing football have to do with him being impatient and how long it's been since he played so he's out of shape which I'm sure the heroin doesn't help with but he gets back on the horse pretty quickly because the show had to up the ante on the street danger as well from last season they visit Seth Justin's abusive stepdad or mom's boyfriend or whatever their relation is I should mention after breezing through this montage of Justin dealing via the coffee shop and we get this hilarious action scene where they just knocked the gun out of his hand and he struggles so hard to pick it back up that they managed to get away in addition to upping the ante on that the show had to match or excel past season two with more guns and knives pulled murder threats all that good [ __ ] last year that stuff was insane to watch because we were coming straight out of what was mostly a grounded high school drama but after season two and all that and the fact that the whole premise for this season is a [ __ ] murder mystery I've become desensitized all of this violence in crime and the fact that I've become desensitized to all this stuff in a high school drama is instead what's shocking to me in lighter criticism Justin and Jessica also feel like a broken record breaking up and getting back together but there's so much else wrong with the show Justin was actually usually a relief to see on-screen in infinity war fashion the big bad guy has become the main character not the hero I suppose it could be argued that clay was never the main character and that Bryce is just taking Hannah's prior position but that doesn't change the fact that the season is about giving Bryce Walker emotional depth the very concept of this season a murder mystery about the villain of the previous two seasons can only be described as preposterous given the context I'll accept no other word for it in season two the show made sure almost overly so to make Bryce irredeemable every instance of potential Redemption he gets he just further proves to be a piece of [ __ ] he reminisces about raping women to his mother he gets hard just thinking about it he even burns bridges with people who used to be his friend and maybe after the trial you'd think he'd count his blessings and change his ways to play it safe but even after the trial he remains a piece of [ __ ] it's only when he goes to a new school and people bully him for being a [ __ ] rapist that he has a change of heart and suddenly it's good guy Bryce there are a few moments where he lashes out or does something bad but for the most part he's just an upstanding guy the whole season every scene he's in he's defending his mother being emotionally open with on'y doing favors for his friends and not only does this big change happen within him everyone else changes their attitude towards him as well independent of his own changes people keep giving him second chances and of course now he's an upstanding guy so those second chances turn into longer friendships but the fact that they even went back to him in the first place feels out of character Jessica even plagiarizes Bryce's words after listening to the tapes and her speech about sexual assault to sexual assault victims which I understand the poetic intention behind but it really sends the wrong message his rationale is I went too far yet Jeffrey Dahmer went too far as well I went too far as what you say when you add too much whacky stuff to your Star Wars movie say sorry sure I went too far as what you say when you beat someone up in a fit of anger even if it were a one-time occurrence he could say I went too far and that wouldn't excuse anything obviously but he was literally running a syndicate of serial rapists to take women into a shed and rape them it was an organized operation that lasted months they had dozens of victims it's one of the worst things humanly imaginable I get that they're trying to ask what he should do next if he seriously has had a change of heart but saying I went too far shouldn't blow over all the horrible stuff he's done when ani talks to him about clay she says clay doesn't really like him and he goes that's an understatement yeah that's ironic because I raped the love of his life along with dozens of other women typical I can't tell if Ani is supposed to be in the wrong in the scene but she sort of qualifies that even though Bryce did terrible things he at least wasn't a liar I'm pretty sure Ani knows Bryce convinced the whole jury that he didn't rape dozens of women so I don't know where she's coming from say what you will about season one I sure have but at the very least it was simple and in its simplicity the characters were able to represent things Hannah was a martyr and Bryce was the embodiment of evil behaviors closely tied with toxic masculinity by trying to give Bryce this complexity he no longer holds up to his previous symbolism and he means nothing I would posit that even though the complexity is necessary for someone to be emotionally invested in what happens this season they don't even succeed in portraying that complexity how are we supposed to suddenly retro actively care about this character just because you cherry-pick all these moments of him being a good person that were completely absent from his character in the past if they had planted seeds of his complexity before then maybe we would have complex feelings about him now but they changed their objective with the character and it's obvious and pulling a complete 180 just doesn't work but they still tried to give Bryce complexity they still tried to make this season an elegy for Bryce Walker which I feel like I shouldn't have to say is completely disingenuous to everything the show tried to stand for I'm not gonna act like the show was ever successful in getting its message across but we knew what the attempted message was and this feels like a complete betrayal of that not only is the concept of a murder mystery disingenuous be is it such a silly heightened reality versus what the show was going for in the past even though season to abandon whatever grounding season one might have accomplished but season 3 is disingenuous because it serves to ask what if the rapists weren't a completely bad guy it really makes me feel like this whole season is an allegory for xxx 10th ASEAN what the [ __ ] is the show even about anymore what are they trying to say and the show still feels like it's trying to be an after-school special a PSA and we have moments where characters get in situations only so someone can speak to the audience surrogate and it's always felt somewhat like a soap opera but putting more emphasis on Bryce's household makes it feel more like a soap opera than ever before well dressed people standing around a giant house talking about how sad they are whenever Bryce goes off in his new school uniform I feel like I'm watching an episode of Mackenzie Falls one of the many twists this season is that Ani had a sexual and emotional relationship with Bryce despite knowing everything he did and she sort of leads the charge and everyone sort of being like well Bryce is a person too the same way season 2 had people give testimony and we found out they had some closer relationship to Hanna than we thought and thus were even more personally responsible for what happened season 3 takes the exact same structure but uses it for Bryce there's a piece of evidence per episode instead of a tape or a Polaroid and while it's not always directly linked to the person's relationship with Bryce it still loosely makes each episode about a certain character an example of Bryce not being a bad person there's very little tension in these flashback scenes they only have tension because of the present-day scenes and the present-day scenes are all empty tension in classic 13 reasons why fashion it mostly consists of people vaguely hinting at some big thing we won't know about until the end of the season it's scene after scene where we learned virtually nothing how is Jessica getting a text from Jessica when there's only one Jessica someone gets incriminated we know that because it's not the last episode that this person didn't kill Bryce and then it flashes back and it's back to the good guy Bryce show season 2 was a mess but the actual scene to scene interactions and reveals were so outrageous it was often entertaining in a so bad it's good way but season three is just a drag we do have outrageous moments but for the most part each episode just feels like it lasts forever while nothing interesting happens it pretends to be exciting because people get arrested left and right but they're just doing police interviews further pushing the ooh what if it's this person narrative and the big crazy thing that keep in ting at is just another brawl I'm sure after season two the writers had the question how are we gonna escalate things past this just like all those other moments a murder could potentially do that but that's not epic enough so we have to have a higher stakes fight the trouble is because they hint at it so much throughout the whole season it's actually pretty underwhelming when it does happen if we maybe saw the whole thing go down from one characters perspective at the beginning the hints at other perspectives might be a little more interesting and suspenseful but people keep hinting about perspectives of an event we as an audience haven't even seen yet and when it does happen it tries to show all the perspectives at once and it's a total mess Montgomery certainly served an interesting role this season and season one he was just Bryce's hype man and in season two it surprised me that a character with such a small role became the key villain in such a pivotal scene with Tyler which I of course won't show right now Tyler's Ark deals with the fallout of that event so Monty is sort of a lingering presence but for as important as he is to the plot this season he still gets relatively little screen time which is bizarre because they tried to do something very similar to what they do with Bryce they give us all these scenes trying to make us sympathize with him the counselor tells him how smart he is and how successful he'd be if he applied himself he has a shitty home life he's a repressed homosexual and even his rationale about what happened was wasn't sexual assaults messing with him I don't know if this is a suggestion of nuance that many sexual predators are just misunderstood in the context of Bryce it certainly seems that way I don't know what this guy's deal is so quick to forgive Monty after a beating that most certainly should have hospitalized him also how does Ani know that this stuff happened does she or is the show just showing us this independent of her police interview see what I mean when I say they need to adhere to restrictions regarding the Brice comparison I will say that at least Monty still displays a lot of the same behavior as before and wasn't a complete 180 so in that sense it's executed maybe a little better than Bryce but it still feels underdeveloped due to the lack of screen time and after putting Monty through it feels like a mini storyline the sea Tyler finally completes his arc by filing a report getting Monty arrested and then Monty is [ __ ] murdered in prison but they had gotten Monty nowhere near the point of his arc really saying anything for them to kill him off it still felt like they were just starting the fleshies character out not to mention the fact that another character dies and everyone just treats it like they hear about this [ __ ] every day I guess I can't blame them the death toll in this show is up to four now in retrospect I should have given season two props for not killing anyone but it's a bit too late for that and Monty being murdered in prison isn't even where the absurdity ends after all these shenanigans I expected some cop-out explanation for who killed Bryce so I was surprised when it actually was one of the main characters who did it I was then immediately disappointed to realize it was Alex he's been such an on character this season there's no emotional climax when he tosses Bryce in the river they go for a fake-out like he's gonna help Bryce after Zach crippled him and then there's a moment of clarity where he realizes that this person has hurt everyone he's loved I can't tell if it's the way it's written or the way it was shot but this whole sequence feels the most slap together with no effort or anything out of the whole season in theory it could be argued that it was meant to portray raw emotion in this spontaneous moment and by putting careful planning into the scene they would be diminishing that but look at the raw emotion in the scene where Zach beats up Bryce which is one of the most gripping and successful scenes of the whole season and compare it to this cartoonish sequence maybe the aspect ratio and color grading have something to do with how pedestrian this supposedly emotional scene looks but this scene takes place like 30 minutes earlier and works so much better I think it's just a combination of those filmmaking techniques the on-the-nose dialogue and alex is less than compelling character but this scene was a total dud they also have Bryce revert to his evil caricature in his dying moments nullifying all of the upstanding stuff they've shown him do I'm not really sure how to feel about that because all the upstanding stuff was unconvincing and manipulative anyway and this is more consistent with the character he was in previous seasons but it also makes most of what we saw this season obsolete further convincing me that the seeming redemption of Walker was a terrible idea so after killing Bryce Alex and Jessica his accomplice are off the hook thanks to a bunch of Hollywood absurdity the whole season Jessica's been using this horribly fishy alibi she pretends she was with Justin which is a cover-up Fred herring and then she reveals that she was really in bed the whole time her alibi being that her dad tucked her in she uses this line to convince her dad which is fine and then Ani uses it with the police and there's no question about it Oh her dad tucked her in there's no way she could have gone to the scene of the crime then obviously that shouldn't have single-handedly incriminated her but it's such a shaky alibi I think the police would look for some more substantial evidence before ruling her out completely and keep in mind this is after they've eliminated clay as their prime suspect so their agenda can't even be used to justify it on'y eventually walks deputy stand all through the whole story and pins the murder on Monte it turns out in this scene that Monte was conveniently murdered like two hours earlier which means on II was totally willing to frame a living person for murder it's not like Monte is a good person he was in prison for sexual assault but that seems ideologically opposed to everything this season was trying to say about Bryce how would these characters feel if say Monte were murdered and Bryce were framed for it Bryce and Monte are more or less interchangeable in terms of morality so it really muddles what they're trying to say about these people if everyone's content framing someone else for murder and stand all pretty much knows through coded language that his son killed Bryce as evidenced by him burning the evidence so no one has a problem with this there's this conversation where they're not necessarily happy with what happened but Donny's like this is the best thing we could have done given the circumstances maybe the best thing for you maybe it worked itself out nicely so none of you have to go to prison maybe it's convenient that a sexual predator was murdered making it easy for you to pin the murder of another sexual predator on him but that doesn't mean it's not morally reprehensible to frame someone else for murder and keep that secret with you your entire life and then we have this guy seeking justice for Monty as a loose end cliffhanger for next season it's hard to tell if it's just because he was with Monte and knows they framed him and he's just seeking justice in that sense or if he's trying to clear Monty's name because he had a bond with him once again their bond was incredibly rushed and doesn't make sense from his perspective and Monte isn't exactly a name worth clearing but it does feel like an abuse of the system to frame another person that said what's the public gonna say if Monty's name is cleared oh thank god he's not a murderer just a rapist and in terms of this being a murder mystery knowing who it was obviously recontextualizes things but I'm once again reminded of the jumbled up perspectives and narrative restrictions how the writers can choose to omit anything they want while pushing the illusion of narrative restriction when I put it like that it sounds like one of the many magic tricks of filmmaking but as a writer I can't help but feel like it's a bit of a cop-out what do Alex and Jessica do about the fact that they know Zach was there and beat Bryce up why do the police update the public that Bryce was beaten up rather than shot but not update the public that the cause of death was drowning rather than battery why is Ana's relationship with Bryce not mentioned until it's revealed to the audience after which point it becomes pivotal to her motivations as a character trust me guys I wish I had the answers just to recap this season tackles drug addiction mental illness immigration abortion murder corrupt police repression of sexual orientation trauma from being sexually assaulted the difficulties of living a normal life after almost committing mass murder and the difficulties of living a normal life after sexually assaulting people there's so much going on that it can hardly say anything cogent about most of these things and there's one more message I'd like to bring up in the midst of everyone having a change of heart about Bryce and deciding that he's a person - the main source of tension was that Clay had no sympathy for Bryce at the very end he goes to Bryce's house and he tells Bryce's mom that he's sorry Bryce died she accepts this and tells him he said it before but she only believes it now so in this sense it's as though the big message of the season is that it's bad to not be sorry that a rapist died now this could actually be a decently nuanced thing to comment on but because the season spreads itself so thin trying to tackle everything else it comes off as a pretty simplistic message it's definitely saying that you shouldn't condone these people's actions because they've in arguably committed atrocities but it's also saying that to think the world is a better place without them is bad this isn't something that's not worth inquiring into and it fits within the grander context of the show being about sexual assault but due to the nature of a TV show being released season by season it feels like rather than this being an issue discussed to enrich the main commentary this has taken over as the main commentary maybe season 4 will recontextualize season 3 and make it feel more like a detour in the commentary but considering the fact that the only narrative thread they've set up for season 4 is the threat of being exposed for framing Monty for murder and between that and the fact that this season was so obsessed with its own murder mystery I feel like this show does not have its priorities right once again 13 reasons why proves that taking serious subject matter with the integrity of a PSA and trying to fit it into a silly entertaining narrative is maybe not impossible but certainly harder than one might think and the show still has yet to produce a season that accomplishes that successfully how it holds up to the previous seasons is perhaps a little hard to gauge on one hand the season seems to be more ridiculous in concept but more grounded in practice which seems like an improvement but season 2 doubles down on the fact that the show longs to be Riverdale filled with ridiculous moments and lines and because season 3 still doesn't succeed in its thematic endeavors it actually ironically feels like more of a slog than season 2 season 3 maybe doesn't have a chain of events that starts with premature ejaculation and ends with school shooting but it also doesn't have anything is fun to criticize the absurdity of as a self-serious chain of events that starts with premature ejaculation and ends with school shooting there wasn't even a callback to wow you're an actual nerd aren't you all we got was astronaut forever instead of Hannah walking into the heavens we get this scene ripped straight out of the first Harry Potter film the politics of this season are bizarre in the context of the previous seasons and again the mere fact that the show is devolved into a murder mystery is preposterous but seemed a scene the season is just boring with no bearing on the truth of the situation because the restriction of information is all over the place season 3 goes for more accomplishes just as little and is somehow even more different to watch so I'm gonna give it a three out of ten there we go another season down the hatch thank you once again for sticking with me through these tough times all my links are in the description if you want to see what I have to say elsewhere on the Internet so I'm gonna go now maybe get some sleep you should do the same good night [Music]

Channel: Taylor J. Williams

Views: 730,178

Keywords: 13 reasons why, bryce walker, clay jensen, dylan minette, hannah baker

Id: SxNc_WhhhkQ

Length: 37min 36sec (2256 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 07 2019