the biggest problem with 13 Reasons Why season 4

after four seasons 13 reasons why has finally come to an end the story that started with hannah baker making 13 cassette tapes about what everyone at her school did to her it's all come to an end with a final season that was almost barely recognizable as being part of the same show taking the point of view mostly away from the other kids and having it solely be focused on clay we see him dealing with all the stress and anxiety of everything that's happened over the last three seasons with hannah bryce monty etc now to be fair every other character is also dealing with their own issues but everything else in the season is secondary or tertiary to clay and his impending mental breakdown we see clay finally realizing that he is in way over his head there are far too many things that have happened to him and he just wants a simple normal life his quest to be the hero help his friends turn himself into a martyr so to speak is finally catching up with him the first half or maybe two thirds of the season is a strange psychological thriller almost like they tried to turn it into fight club or something as clay has a full-on mental breakdown due to the football team and this new transfer student trying to get to the bottom of what really happened to bryce because they know that monty was actually busy at the time he supposedly killed him and just when it looks like the truth is finally about to come out near the end of the season suddenly it all just goes away i have enough to prove it and you can't stop me i can't why'd you do it why'd you cover for them you weren't even a part of it i was though i came to this town and i got to know all of them and i love them right away and we get these kinds of half-hearted snapple cap life lessons about how our main characters deserve to live their lives even though what they did was terrible because they're still young and still have a future i guess which is very strange considering how what bryce and monty did was horrible which it definitely was and so i guess we're supposed to see that killing bryce and framing monty is not that bad because they were bad people now clay is dealing with this throughout the whole fight club reenactment part but the way it wraps up is very strange considering one of the constant messages of the entire show up to now was about how the truth is important and it's not good to cover things up just to save your friends and yet we're given multiple speeches about how ruining bryce and monty's lives was maybe not the best choice but our main characters can't let the truth get out because that would ruin their own lives which is apparently where they draw the line after watching four seasons of the show i still have no idea what the overall theme or message was really supposed to be i suppose if i had to boil it down to one sentence it would be life sucks things are complicated and you just have to deal with it we're presented with this idea that life is complicated and difficult because it just is which is not inherently untrue but from the perspective of the show most of the problems are caused by the choices of the characters but it's also supposed to be out of their hands in one way or another clay is seeing a therapist about his anxiety and depression about everything that's happened and the major breakthrough for his character comes when he learns about how to deal with his trauma but that doesn't change the fact that he framed another kid for murder who also ends up getting killed himself but yes clearly clay is the one having a rough time one of the other main themes of the show at least how i understood it is that your past mistakes and poor choices do not define you you can start over at any time it's never too late with that said at the very end of season 4 we learned that justin has aids which he got when he ran away at the end of season 1 ended up homeless and addicted to certain things and of course to pay for his addiction he had to do certain things with certain people which leads him ultimately to getting pneumonia due to his compromised immune system and in the final episode he passes away so the show tells us that our past mistakes are always fixable and it's never too late and then they kill off a main character very suddenly due to his past choices so what is the show trying to say life sucks but you gotta keep pushing through unless it sucks too much and then just kinda really though are we just supposed to walk away from the show patting ourselves on the back because hey at least my life isn't that messed up right in the first season 13 reasons why it was supposed to be a realistic look at how someone can go from a sweet happy new kid at school to where hannah baker ultimately ends up and while it definitely had its share of issues in that department it was at least coherent and made sense somewhat but as the show went on for the next three seasons it feels like it lost all direction and they were just trying to cram as many possible social issues into each season as they could without really giving any of them their proper screen time especially in this last season where a lot of important scenes are happening off-screen so we just get like little snippets and ideas of what's going on but like we don't actually get to appreciate any of it the football team and new transfer student end up finding out the truth about who really killed bryce walker and how monty was set up but they decide to drop it because they become friends with the main characters and being a team player is apparently more important than the truth or justice or whatever which is literally what the entire bryce walker saga was supposed to be fighting against this idea that if someone you know does something bad it's not that bad compared to when someone you don't like does something similar standing up to your friends when they do something wrong is important unless you're the main characters in which case suddenly now protecting your friends and family is the most important thing i always say that this job is everything to me and i say this job is everything but it's not true family comes first when you agree but like that's what got us into this whole mess in the first place one message they really hammer home this season is how there are more people out there that want to help you than you might think and only by asking for help can you truly start to heal and they have to keep reminding us of this message because it gets lost so quickly in the muddy nonsense of the rest of the show and no matter what happens it's all good in the end as long as the pretty girl has a crush on you right clay uh but i go to east county and i'm going to brown next year and i heard you are too so i was wondering if maybe you wanted to get like a coffee or some other beverage to like go over the course catalog and first year handbook or is that too dorky at least to me 13 reasons why is a very bizarre show that never could settle on a message or consistent through line for what was happening and why like i said season one was okay mainly due to the tape format so it was pretty easy to follow and we got like in-depth looks at every reason why hannah baker did what she did but by season four it just kind of feels like a voyeuristic who's who of teenage social mental issues and there's no real conclusion or hope for anything to me it all just felt like the show was about how things happen and life sucks the end going into season four very different genre very different like style like all of a sudden it was about clay having this psychotic break and i thought it was an interesting choice and i wanted to see where it went the fact that it ends up just being this weird fight club thing where it's like oh clay's actually been his own enemy the whole time and i was just kind of like it just seems like just a random way to do it i mean of course the whole point of the show is to talk about like mental issues social issues emotional issues teen issues if you will but it's just such a hollywood hyped-up version where like he's talking the ghosts and he's turning into tyler durden and it's just so the way they did it i thought was so weird in the show they introduced monty's little sister who starts going to the same high school the whole show clay is battling with himself about the fact that he framed monty and then monty was killed he feels so bad about it but like he almost never speaks to monty's sister really like monty's sister would have been like this perfect vessel for like clay to sort of forgive himself and for her to like i don't know forgive clay or at least come to some kind of mutual understanding about why he did what he did or something like that monty's sister and tyler do have like kind of a scene together and like they kind of sort of buried the hatchet type of thing which is good i thought that was perfectly fine but the fact that the whole show clay is like battling with himself about the whole monty thing and then he he never really interacts with monty's little sister which could have been a whole that could have been a whole emotional scene where he confesses to her and then he explains why and then she sort of understands why and she's like i don't know if i can ever forgive you but you know i'm not gonna like i don't know there could have been something with it but like they never took it anywhere it wasn't like it's not like an unwatchable mess because like there are definitely worse shows out there but it's just it tried to say so many things and ended up saying nothing really anyway thanks for watching don't forget to subscribe don't forget to ring that bell follow me on twitter and above all let's have a great day and i'll see you all next time you

Channel: Alex Meyers

Views: 915,506

Keywords: alex meyers, alex myers, alex mayers, 13 reasons why, 13 reasons why season 4, 13 reasons why netflix

Id: BImRseysjCw

Length: 8min 3sec (483 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 16 2020