The Exhausting End of 13 REASONS WHY (Season 4)

you're about to watch a video about a show that brings up a lot of issues and does nothing to solve them so in light of recent events in the US and their dwindling media attention in the description of this video I've linked to a page with petitions that still have yet to meet their goals and some funds that would benefit from your contribution I can wait these causes can't it only takes a few minutes for you to help thank you well guys the time has come how would why more in a show like 13 reasons why on one hand it's a dangerous irresponsible piece of media that caters to an audience its content serves to damage but on the other hand I've gotten a lot of YouTube views because of it it's sort of like he'll Bryce Walker raped several women but you know he gave his friends some money and he liked his mom it's a very complex relationship never again will I hear the sweet sound of you're an actual nerd or FML forever no longer will I be reminded that someone's keeping secrets and my days of uncomfortably not knowing how to react to a supposedly comedic or sexual beat among all the trauma I'm witnessing are over but fret not because we have one last ride my only regret is that this season didn't come out three months later oh [ __ ] [ __ ] my only regret is that this season didn't come out three months later I'll have to pour this out between cuts looking back at the series there are things I would have done differently my first video is actually kind of painful for me to watch because they say stuff like the fundamental flaw with this show is that the creator's prioritized politics over art when the real fundamental flaws that the show's message and story priorities are at odds with each other as you well know by now but it goes further than that as the show's progressed it's tried to take on world issue after world issue trying to be a comprehensive guide for everything wrong in the world and by the end of it one gets the sense that they've eaten at a fusion restaurant that can't really cook any of the cuisines it fuses properly or worse like it's advertising an alternative to a certain food and then just serving that food like a beyond burger whose secret ingredient is beef I don't know how well this food metaphor is holding up snake oil is what this show is an advertised cure-all that does nothing to help and the only time it does anything it hurts the consumer that's not a perfect metaphor either because snake oil had the possibility of placebo benefits I'm not really sure how that applies here but media and the power of suggestion are quite influential and that's precisely why this show has got to go you do have to respect the sheer grind of it though clawing its way through the trenches carrying every specific issue it can on its back so what if it dropped a couple along the way it's a lot to carry and by the end of it I think the only word that can describe where we're all at is exhausted I'm exhausted the show's exhausted everyone involved in the production is exhausted and it feels like house of cards a shorter final season whose main purpose is to just give the show and ending so everyone involved can wash their hands of it and move on props to Dylan Manette for sticking through it when he's got a commercially successful band on the side he could have pulled the Dan Stevens but he didn't too bad his devotion was to such an awful show you're probably exhausted too but pick yourself up and grab some coffee because we've got business to attend to I promise these flavors don't clash at all I've been informed by many reliable sources that I may have overindulged in my aspect-ratio discussion last time but you know what they listened this whole season is 2.2 to 1 and that is fine by me I think Netflix is trying to make 2 to the Nu two to one the new symbol of prestige television and the age of streaming now that 2 to 1 has become so popular it's still not 2 3 5 but it's inching ever closer and I gotta say I did half expect this season to get even narrower as that was the trajectory of each season before it but there's a lot about season 4 that's inconsistent with previous seasons for instance each season up to the contrast to the point of occasional unwatchable 'ti in season 3 and I'm actually glad they toned it back down this season it still often looks like a soap opera and there's some stuff that's pretty unwatchable but in general they made the right move calming themselves down this is partly due to another welcomed inconsistency there are no dual timelines this season which was another thing that became more incomprehensible as the seasons progressed there is a flash-forward at the start of the first few episodes but that's dropped pretty quickly for some reason the only other thing that's a little unclear is the analogy of the narration or really whether or not it's diegetic of course we had to have narration this wouldn't be thirteen reasons why without narration and finally it's clay narrating taking his rightful place as the main character of the series not that he wasn't already but there's a case to be made for each individual season that he's not but no such case exists for season four now in this season clays in therapy which he really should have been in since season two but whatever therapy's definitely a trope definitely an easy way to explicitly discuss a character's psychology and thus their arc but most of the time I'm fine with it especially in a show that purports to be about mental health sometimes though an episode is framed as those clays narration is what he's saying to his therapist like Ani to the police and of course this makes it incredibly unnatural for the narration to take on artful syntax and that's one thing that's more consistent than ever this season framing the narration around a college application in one episode for instance can't be something he's explaining to his therapist is it a mix then and if so why I was honestly actively listening for the word secrets and I was actually surprised I didn't hear it that often at first I was even impressed with the show's restraint and then in one episode referencing secrets becomes the structure of the narration it's like they relapsed secret [ __ ] can stay secret of course I keep secrets the trick is keeping track of which secrets are which and then there's the secrets you know nothing about and then what do you do about the person who shares your secrets I've got enough secrets already I have a hard enough time with the secrets I already have it might be for some of the secrets you keep yeah I mean I have secrets sometimes I wish I had more of the good kinds of secrets like a secret friend a cool secret Talent a secret hook of secret heartbreak sometimes all we have is our secrets the more secrets you have you start to lose track of what [ __ ] these secrets another 13 reasons why staple is clay getting beaten up which happens more than ever here in fact there are more fights in general and it reaches the point where you start to think that that's the only way anything can be settled and of course these characters are pretty much invincible and we get other high stakes moments trying to match how high-stakes previous seasons got but they're pretty ridiculous and it's obvious what the show is doing nothing speaks more to this exhaustion though than the opening title sequence after switching from tapes to Polaroids to clues in the bryce investigation they finally said [ __ ] it and switch to this stripped-down sequence I think this is probably for the best considering how disingenuous and tone-deaf it's been in the past the most glaring inconsistency of this season is the fact that it's only 10 episodes unlike the previous seasons 13 I certainly won't complain about having less to get through and the 13 episode count in the past is called for some really awful pacing but isn't it interesting that every inconsistency have described as to the show's improvement and every consistency only hurts the show the only good consistency I can think of is that after the tapes and the testimonies season 3 kind of felt like one long run off season and season four make successful efforts to return to a distinguishable episodic feel and there are smaller inconsistencies that hurt the show like how it seemed to forget that Tyler was in H oh the biggest thing this episode count says to me though is that the show was finally asserting itself as a different show than the one that started out as it already was but now it's making that clear in the meta saying this is not 13 reasons why and I guess I can't fault the show for trying to be better despite its problematic past that's what the whole show is about now right but if we're looking at the show itself as Bryce Walker now it only makes sense then that despite these efforts to distance itself from its past at the end of the day it still reverts to its worst tendencies and on that note right off the bat we get this flash-forward to a funeral we have a pastor giving a eulogy for the first few episodes speaking vaguely enough so that we know it's one of the kids but don't know who it is specifically then we get Charlie speaking in the next episode and you think the framing device is gonna be that each episode someone's gonna speak at the funeral but after Charlie this has just dropped completely for the rest of the season I guess they realized that if we see each character speaking at the funeral we'll know they're not the one who died so after the one we'd were not really worried about they stopped it but why commit to a few episodes and then stop it why not just the first one it's not like either of them are actually saying anything anyway it's the same abstract nothingness this show was perfected writing maybe the real reason they couldn't keep up with it is because they ran out of steam they've exhausted all vapid ramblings imaginable but even if they had kept it to just the first episode like I said this whole season is one timeline so it only serves to hook the audience in pulling the old by the end of the story someone you care about will die this says a few things one it says that the writers are so used to upping the ante they can't fathom a season of this high school drama without killing someone anymore and it also says that they don't trust their audience to get invested in the story without this hook look thirteen reasons why you're on season four now anyone who's made it this far is probably in for the ride you don't need to resort to a gimmick like this to keep people invested then because we have the context that eventually someone's gonna die the show keeps ending on these cliff hangers to try and trick us into thinking a certain characters about to die clay and Zak get in this car accident which looks awful by the way and they try to trick us into thinking Zak died but he's fine and you'd think the show would try to connect this to Jeff Atkins as clay was drunk driving but there's no mention of him at all and the fact that this much more cartoonish crash ends with mild injury and nothing else really demonstrates how little this show gives a [ __ ] about its own content there's this episode where they're fighting an arms dealer that ends with him shooting we get this shot in the next episode of Tyler jumping in front of the gun and he's out of the beginning of the next episode but when he comes back he's fine and it turns out none of them were even shot what's the point of all this not only do we know that because it's not the end of the season no one's gonna die but even if we did buy into it what does the show gain from this a brief moment of empty suspense that's all the show has it's [ __ ] junk food now I was gonna say if who dies for the end of the video to add some suspense for the people who haven't seen the season but it's Justin Justin dies and the reason I'm fine mentioning it now is because it has nothing to do with the events of the season he goes through an arc relapsing on heroin and breaking up and getting back together with Jessica wait are these my season from you notes no no no it's it's season four it's just the exact same arc so once he and Jessica finally get back together for the last time he collapses and it turns out he's contracted HIV from his time in season two and it's now developed into AIDS and he dies so if the funeral hook wasn't manipulative enough already the fact that it's not really the result of the plot were watching makes it even more manipulative not to mention how much of the 90-minute finale consists of people just sitting around crying about Justin not much else really happens in this finale and at first I thought maybe it's just wrapping things up after the climax but then I tried to figure out what the climax was and there really isn't one not much really happens the whole season actually even though it's shorter than previous seasons there's just as much filler and empty threats so was to perpetually keep us in a state of thinking shits going down when it never really is that's the show's currency the ability to falsely make us think everything's falling apart in every episode maybe now would be a good time to get into that Tony's involved in most of the filler this season which is fitting because he never seemed fully integrated into the main plot anyway he and clay are watching Tyler again except something's going down with Tyler and deputy stand all he's keeping secrets they keep meeting up and talking about something but Tyler keeps lying about it and Tony won't have it this goes on for a while eventually after an interaction that ends with this cliffhanger turns out Tyler was working with the cops going undercover to crack down on arms dealers in the city I don't know how undercover works or liaison or whatever this is but I don't see why Tyler can't just be like look guys I can't tell you what we're doing but it's not about what you think it is it's fine and we'll be fine just trust me the whole idea is that he's upset with them for not trusting him but I don't see why he had to lie about being with Stan doll which is the reason they don't trust him it's not like they're above lying to the police if he's really not allowed to say anything anyway he just lie I mean we all know how to do that and then he forgives them and nothing becomes of this whole plotline it's not like evergreen arms dealers wear a loose thread the show had to resolve it just toys with the idea that Tyler might relapse which is what's the word manipulative so tony has to deal with that but when he's not dealing with that he's in a boxing movie this thread isn't as inconsequential as it leads to him getting a boxing scholarship and dictates where he ends up at the end but the whole show we've seen that Tony has anger issues and that using them to fight is destructive suddenly he's fighting because of his anger issues and he wins every fight there's no threat or conflict or anything we're introduced to the idea of tony and caleb having to keep their relationship a secret so as to avoid homophobic violence in these venues but that's never brought up again and then a few episodes later they kiss and no one minds but it's not even framed as a conclusion to that thread then there's the threat that the cops hate Tony but they're cool with him once he fights and before each fight there's the threat of his opponent looking scary but then he still wins he's not even particularly hurt by the end of these fights he recovers fine from all of them it's just a bunch of fake tension that amounts to nothing except for this scene now there are a few directions I can take this from Tony so we'll circle back to the scene but for now I want to talk about as I mentioned Tony's thread feels like a boxing movie except without all the plot beats of a boxing movie but that's beside the point this is not the only time when the show dips its toes into another genre as we well know season 3 went from what was a regular teen drama with mystery elements to a full-blown murder mystery and it seems season 4 has taken a lot of inspiration from horror films I think the reason for this is to convey that clays anxiety is horrifying because instead of manipulating the camera mountain color grade to illustrate past and present it serves to illustrate reality versus clays mania basically there are all these scenes where the saturation drops we go handheld and switch to a wide distorting ones and some vision of Monte or Brice terrorizes clay now I will give this show credit for sometimes trying to be funny most of the time it's a humorless drag but sometimes it does try to be funny even if the humor doesn't land with these scenes though which are supposed to be the embodiment of Clay's mental illness which is really the backbone of the whole season there's no way to take this seriously the smiling is awful it's edited like a Joker fan cam this is supposed to be the big bad threat terrorizing clay every dream sequence in this show is just the worst but it goes past that we get a bloody shower sequence that leaves clay covered in blood like Carrie we get a scene where Jessica's covered in maggots and once she realizes the music amps up and we get some zooms like Suspiria which is part of a whole camping episode filled with dumb horror antics like Friday the 13th how does any of this stuff contribute to the story we get some sci-fi elements - with an intro to one episode that's just a quick fanfiction Bryce plays a cyborg for no reason other than they realized they could have Bryce as a cyborg why are we suddenly trying to make Bryce a fun character sure it can be int agonizing for the character to have fun but stuff like this doesn't contribute to his antagonism it just waters down how horrible of a person he was and does nothing to flesh out the complexities that season 3 tried to establish granted unsuccessfully it feels pornographic and really the whole season is pornographic all this extreme stuff doesn't raise the stakes of the show it's just the show doing stuff think would be cool or boundary-pushing to do because again the show is insecure about being able to raise the stakes from previous seasons like cover and clay and blood it's his imagination and sure he's freaking out in real life but it comes across more like they wanted to cover clay in blood because it's a crazy image we also get graphic descriptions of school shooting in the midst of what seems to the characters to be a school shooting and I'm reminded of the suicide scene from season one it's bold and graphic but if the show is trying to help its audience all this does is force them to relive traumatic scenarios which isn't helpful at all but what else is new from the start this show has always had a sense of being out of touch conveying a high school experience that very much feels like an older writer trying to imagine what modern high school is like but there are so many things this season in particular that suggests a lack of understanding in the world outside of high school there are more high school things that don't make much sense like the senior camping trip or really how few seniors there are you'd think after watching this season that Liberty is a private school and I don't think college is portrayed much more realistically as Zach and clay go to a frat party that's just a bunch of the frat bros drinking by themselves and the one girlfriend as though that's how fraternities operate the show's understanding of Technology is also questionable Clay's filling out what I can only assume is the show's non-copyright common app but it's got this big college application title at the top it looks like a stock image clay and Justin get iPhones for Christmas that come and this is from a parent who could be out of touch in world but the further lack of understanding suggests otherwise look how generic Clay's Facebook is they act like a VPN is some super nerd knowledge we of course get excessive phone clicks except this is during what the characters think is a school shooting so you'd think they'd silence their phone but nope and there's a whole chunk of an episode devoted to them freaking out about the possibility of their parents tracking them they probably trashed Georgie yes - this is crazy right it's treated like such an extreme and unheard-of violation but parents tracking their kids is kind of a common practice at this point and well-off suburban parents are the exact demographic most prone to doing it and honestly with everything that's gone down can you blame them for tracking their kids there's this one line from clays dad talking about eggs a new technique with the eggs touch a queen this one's actually kind of funny it almost feels like an ad lib I just hope it wasn't meant to be taken at face value the bigger offenses though what the show really doesn't understand isn't just the day-to-day offenses it gets wrong it's a little bigger than that and it's why the whole story falls apart I mentioned some things earlier that we're filler but the thing is it's kind of hard to call anything filler when there seems to be no real plot at all let me flush it out as efficiently as I can Winston shows up to Liberty forming relationships with all the main characters to try and crack the case about Monte being framed the football team particularly this new character Diego also thinks something's up and join in on the investigation he gets hot and heavy with Jessica as she and Justin have broken up again and they also take Monty's sister Estella under their wing clays anxiety alienates him from his friends and makes him paranoid about covering up the murder severing his relationship with Ani a bunch of things keep happening vandalism and destruction and pranks and this symbol that follows him that further exacerbate this anxiety alex is discovering his sexuality and forming a relationship with Charlie after things go south between him and Winston while dealing with the guilt about Bryce and for some reason they keep up this water motif with him and finally the school is cracking down having police at all times a metal detector and security cameras as well as this brutally realistic school shooting drill there are the Tyler and boxing threads I mentioned earlier and Zack is just [ __ ] around because he's given up he's still the best character in the show because he's the only one who seems to have any emotion anymore him and Charlie whereas everyone else is stone-cold all the time for the whole season the problem with these plots is that they go nowhere it all sort of leads up to prom and then they just go to prom and they're all fine and then Justin dies and it's over that's the show I think the real reason they fall apart though was due to a lack of logic in terms of motivation and a lack of consequence Winston is on a [ __ ] mission it doesn't make much sense at first that he'd be so adamant to clear Monty's name especially because Monty being a rapist is uncontestable but because of how quickly he claims to fall in love with Alex it's clear he's got some sort of hyper fixation so that's one of the few things that is justified in terms of motivation Diego was friends with Monty so it makes sense that he also wants to clear his name but as the season progresses things make less sense they seemed to think that whoever framed Monty for killing Brice is the reason Monty was killed and they seemed to think clay is responsible but Monty was killed because he was a rapist he was dead before Bryce's death was even pinned on him what do they hope to accomplish one of the big pseudo tensions at the start of the season is the series of phone calls clay gets from Monty's phone and a censored voice keeps giving him empty threats and because of how poorly they handled the hallucinations and dream sequences I thought this scene was just a really ham-fisted metaphor at first and it wasn't until the next episode that I realized that it's real there are many frustrations trying to figure out who's making these calls and classic 13 reasons why fashion and this escalates to that shower scene and then a CPR dummy that's dressed up to resemble a murdered monty with a shiv and everything clay freaks out seeing Monty and Bryce as he does and it turns out it was the football team pranking him because what else would the show do with a mystery like that but not only is this a pretty sadistic setup for people who were friends with Monty you'd think it'd still be a touchy subject considering this season picks up only a month after season 3 but everyone acts like it's been ages anyway so whatever the real problem with this scene is that they interpret clays reaction as a sure sign he's guilty of something even though clay has been traumatized numerous times and everyone understands this and this is clearly portraying the real-life death that happened like three months ago so there are a few reasons he could have reacted the way he did rather than being guilty from here we get a series of beats in the investigation that seemed to be gotcha moments but really aren't for one Winston corners clay at the end of camping episode and says every one of your friends wants to say something they don't say so which one of them killed rice and the next episode picks up with no mention of how the conversation went but more importantly than that Zac eventually confides in Winston about beating Bryce up but knowing that that's not what killed him so Winston asks Zach if he know for a fact you didn't kill Bryce then you must know who did and Zach is like backed into a corner even though it was the police who assured him that he didn't kill Bryce well before he knew who actually did it why couldn't he tell Winston that it's literally the truth and that could have even been justification for why all of Zach's friends have been acting sketchy about Bryce's death I guess I can't call it a lack of logic that the characters didn't come up with a smart plan but my point here is that Zach had a true refutation that he seems to have just forgotten about even clay has some questionable logic that can't really be attributed to his anxiety how about when he approaches Diego about the email with so much assurance but a few minutes later goes Bonnie thinks English might have sent the email I'm pretty sure he was told this before he went up to Diego they establish at the beginning that Estelle is uncomfortable joining the Monti tribute because of his actions and there's one scene later where she mentions her complicated feelings about it but after this first scene she's just in with Diego and Winston and wants retribution for the rest of the season that's not so much a lack of logic as it is just an underwritten character maybe if they didn't have so much filler in this season's short runtime they could have fleshed her out but instead she's just an afterthought and while we're talking about under written characters Ani has nothing to do this season so she's just written out of several episodes and when she comes back she has more nothing to do there's a subplot with Bryce's mom wanting to give her money for college but that's mentioned like two more times after that and also feels like an afterthought I think I'm digressing right now though I think maybe we should move on to cull the plot doesn't so much wrap itself up as it does kind of just drop everything the only person that suffers any sort of consequence is Justin but his death is the consequence of season two nothing that happens this season everyone gets into these great colleges Zack spends the whole season [ __ ] around and maybe it doesn't get back on track entirely on the same pace but he still pulls it to get gets into music school at the end Winston decides not to expose the group out of love for Monty or Alex or something so that neatly wraps itself up the school doesn't face any consequence for its traumatic school shooting drill or the violence the police caused in fact they even joke about it Tony as I mentioned gets a scholarship and everyone's approval for his fighting and there are smaller things like Zack almost [ __ ] his barely conscious prom date and all they say is be better no one faces any consequence for busting Tyler's operation other than the fact that they could have then there's clay every season clay seems to incriminate himself before eventually falling back into public favor this is usually one sort of big thing that happens toward the end of the season but in this season it's like every episode he has some sort of meltdown and he always looks like either will from the inbetweeners or this kid we even get a we live in the society but this [ __ ] guy clay Jensen gets off the hook with everything first of all the season has some sort of constant desire to put clay in these situations that make him look worse than they are and it's like Seinfeld levels of worst case scenario he sees this frat guy put his drunk girlfriend to bed and runs in to stop what he expects to be an assault but it turns out it's just his imagination which makes him look like he's about to assault her which he later mentions how he was turned on but that goes nowhere the other big one is he walks into the school dance all bloody and with a [ __ ] shiv in his hand he gets a 2-week suspension from this but what was the point later on though he breaks out of a mental hospital with no trouble and gets away with it he drunkenly crashes Zak's car and everything's fine he feels bad about crashing the car but that's about it which is especially underwhelming when you consider that this is supposed to be like the peak of clays downward spiral he gets really drunk he gets really high he beats a guy up he has sex with sheriff Diaz his daughter Valerie except nothing becomes of it for the rest of the season not the fact that she's his daughter not the fact that he loses his virginity which you'd think would have some importance since they made the extra effort to establish it I had assumed he and ani had had sex but I guess for some reason it was important that they show him losing his virginity though honestly it's hard to call anything peak of clays downward spiral because his episodes in each episode feel like he's stuck in a loop every time we think he hits rock bottom he hits rock bottom again in the next episode but it's not like it linearly gets worse for him it's just the same [ __ ] over and over you could say his episode in the finale is the real peak but because we've seen this routine so many times before it just feels tired and out of left field here not to mention it feels catered more to the school shooting narrative than anything else which doesn't fit anything that's been developed here maybe the reason most of these characters don't deal with any real-world consequence is because they're dealing with internal problems as these ham-fisted images so subtly represent they are their own worst enemies Tony by accepting the scholarship gives up the auto shop which is important to him ani by taking a handout from Bryce's mom might feel guilty and Winstone by accepting the cover-up loses retribution for Monty however the auto shop is only important to Tony because he thinks it's his dad's life work but we get this hallmark moment so Tony's resolution is that everyone wins any subplot isn't even given any focus and she seems to be fine at the end which makes you wonder why it was introduced at all and Winston giving up doesn't have much weight when he's already come to terms with Monty being a not great person and Alex being with Charlie though he's the closest any of them actually get to dealing with internal consequences and clay goes through that broken record routine but his mental problems have real consequences in the world in a bombastic twist it turns out that clay is responsible for the vandalism the horror stick on the camping trip and a series of other things he has no recollection of this season was already reminding me a Fight Club Zack putting on his Tyler Durden act and whatnot but I didn't think they'd go this far with it and it kind of sensationalizes Clay's condition and Clay's therapist tells some of the people concerned for these damages that it's a result of Clay's condition but before that reveal everyone seems to have just forgotten about the stuff that happened to them like being psychologically tortured so when they find out it was clay the whole time they really don't seem to care this symbol is also the doing of on conscious clay and it ends up meaning nothing so because no one suffers any actual consequences the show just kills off Justin to try and make us think that they have but when it happens out of the blue it doesn't mean anything to any of the characters he and clay had sort of a Cain and Abel thing going on for a little bit but they're pretty much cool with each other at this point and it doesn't reach any conclusion for his death to mean anything and this is where the lack of consequences doesn't just affect the plot but it affects what the shows trying to say as always this season is trying to tackle a lot too much in fact it's still handling gun violence and sexual assault but really only in passing and at times that don't make any sense in the narrative like why don't they go back to this scene and why have it in the first place the show continues its exploration of having complex feelings about seemingly bad people except after all the groundwork laid in season 3 and having clay apologize to Bryce's mom Bryce has just reverted and antagonize his clay again the whole season even introducing the idea of clay feeling like Bryce which as I mentioned is never expanded upon then in clays graduation speech he mentions how he's grown to have these complex feelings for Bryce and Monte when he never has a moment with them that actually canonize is this his revelation happens totally off screen and as a result you begin to lose track of what the show even makes of this situation in the school shooting episode we get to romantic moments which considering that for all intents and purposes psychologically the kids might as well have been in an actual school shooting feels incredibly disingenuous like a nun ironic version of that 911 musical from Skinz and what does it say that the frat bros are all ready to take clay down after the misunderstanding in the bedroom it's certainly the reasonable thing to do on their end of the misunderstanding and maybe it's supposed to be ironic that the frat bros are on the unproblematic side here but considering how much the show wants the events of the story to reflect real world politics this seems to ignore certain problematic aspects of Greek life that would be on brand with some of the issues earlier seasons of the show try to address with a bigger sample pool I guess it could flush out more complexity among Greek life and I get that that's not exactly the priority here but the fact that this is the only portrayal we see feels like it kind of passes under the radar and doesn't get the indictment that many other things in this show get now if we're talking about things this show doesn't indict enough I think it's time we finally talk about the police presence in this season as I mentioned there's a metal detector and cops posted up but this season seems way more interested in the surveillance aspect of this occupancy like it's an Oliver Stone movie that sort of fits the paranoid thriller aspect with clays anxiety but between freaking out about parents tracking them and being more concerned about security cameras than cops patrolling the hallway the police are portrayed surprisingly positively here what's crazy is that this season came out June 5th 2020 pretty much at the height of the black lives matter protests following the murders of George Floyd and Brianna Taylor and a lot of media that was supposed to come out at this time was postponed filmmakers and musicians and youtubers all stopped their regular output basically everyone realized that releasing something that would draw attention away from the movement would be harmful at that time but that didn't stop thirteen reasons why so I figured there had to be something about this season that Netflix felt would be helpful to the movement and sure enough we get a police protest that escalates to cops and riot gear attacking protesters [Applause] and this is where a lack of consequence really sends the wrong message a couple people get knocked around but that's the extent of the damage no one is so much as bruised and when a cop is about to attack Tony we get this good cop moment properties damaged by protesters but the cops don't do much about it and are shown as kind of incompetent there's obviously no way they could have predicted what would happen in the real world when they wrote this but considering how much violence and escalation the police cause in the real protests releasing this sugar-coated version of protesting feels like I'm watching the kendall Jenner Pepsi commercial watching Cyrus cheer while getting pinned down by the police feels like I'm watching that a boy who asked cops to cuff him so he could get his anarchist aesthetic tick tock because that's essentially what the show's doing here it takes these anarchist anti-cop affectations and applies them to this generally safe situation which completely covers up the reality of these protests effectively rendering the show pro cop this guy saves Tony but what does he do about the fact that his partners are beating up kids with batons you go I guess he's not as much a dilemma because the brutality shown doesn't reflect the brutality in real life what about deputy stand all what would he make of this and Sheriff Diaz who's a sort of menacing presence throughout the season but whose resolution is that the whole time he really just cared about Clay's well-being what kind of message does that send but the police aren't as much a threat as we thought that cops are good when you stand to gain from abuse of power I think it comes from the fact that most of the issues in this show occur in a controlled and privileged setting anything that happens to clay is written off because he's rich and white but the show doesn't use that to make any sort of statement about the structural inequalities that allow clay to get off scot-free with everything in the bubble this show takes place in those inequalities almost don't even exist everything wrong in these people's lives is but one Monet's latte away from being solved the extent of police brutality shown is that this cop profiles Diego and mixes up his nationality but it comes from a very few bad apples mindset on the show's part Tony's family is the only one that faces some sort of systemic injustice but the resolution is them convincing Tony that they're comfortable and for him not to worry erasing any sort of antagonist from their situation it's not like there's any suggestion that they're lying about how comfortable they are to help his conscience this show really has no antagonist it redeemed the only ones it had it's not against anyone so it's not for anything every chance it gets it conveys that the enemy is some faceless source mental illness is bad security cameras are bad brutality is bad sexual assaults is bad but not the people implementing the cameras not the violent cops not the rapists it wants us to understand that these people are complicated and that it's better to shake our fists at the sky and curse the ether for these bad things existing not inciting any action that could actually contribute to some sort of structural change it's a solidarity Instagram post with a multi-million dollar budget the only thing this season seems to consistently address is clays anxiety and how the events of the previous seasons have given him a warped sense of heroism as I mentioned clay usually looks ridiculous when he blows up and to the show's credit a lot of the time that's actually the point we get the usual excess of dialogue explicitly stating how much clay and on you do for their friends and how heroic they are but Ani learns to take care of herself this season and clay does all these things attempting to be heroic that usually blow up in his face so you get the sense that it's trying to debunk the hero complex this is attributed to masculinity and actually a lot of the conclusions this season come from the John Green school of adolescent thought I think you have this ideal of what a girl should be and you push me away when I turned out to be something different I fall in love with girls too fast too hard which feels like a bit of a cop-out but this last admission comes at the very end of the season and it could actually serve as a decent through-line for the show clays heroic actions the first few seasons come more from his fixation over Hana and public gratitude than his own morals and realizing that he should stop putting his life on the line for the approval of women he likes and the public could wrap everything up in a way that almost lets you forget about all the problematic points in between as it's ultimately a criticism of the character but right after this admission this scene happened are you quit Johnson oh my gosh sorry I'm a little nervous you're just like a rockstar after that speech 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 and you know that comment nice alien killer robots in fact it's so immediate there's no way it wasn't meant to be tongue-in-cheek to some degree maybe it's saying that admitting this to himself doesn't mean that clays out of the cycle but it's progress which could be fine but that doesn't change the fact that his heroism is still affirmed in the same unhealthy way that's motivated him the entire series and like getting away with everything else and getting into an Ivy League school at the end of it all the show doesn't make a point out of it it's just an archetypical hero's end that rewards him with a non-person to satisfy all his desires just because he's been through a lot I've already discussed most of the closure this season we get a funeral so we can mourn the loss of the show we get a graduation so he can celebrate the show's accomplishments these are genre conventions but I have to mention this bit from the funeral let us remember his smile that I am told melted a hundred hearts is this really a callback to smile that damn smile and then we have to mention this bit from graduation all we have truly wished for is to see that you are all happy and healthy and safe this class in particular has made that hellishly hard isn't that just classic when five children die under your leadership and honestly poor Justin Monti got several tributes with de la Cruz jerseys but at Justin's funeral they just wear their own jerseys they're probably tired of ordering all these custom jerseys it's [ __ ] expensive as I also mentioned everyone gets into a good school dispelling the notion that it's possible to have a valid future without higher education but as always not making a point about the issue that stems from then they bury the tapes which were apparently still in miss Baker's possession even though we've already had the characters except Hanna's death multiple times in the past I get that it's the end of the show and they have to tie it back to the beginning but they kind of shot themselves in the foot wrapping that up and taking the show somewhere else completely we have several conversations with hallucinations for the sake of closure and we even get this explanation that claim might as well be looking into the camera for I just want to be clear I don't actually see ghosts I just like imagine people and what I would say to them you wrote my paper on magical realism except it's not just magical realism because clay interacts with these imaginations in ways that other people witness and it puts him in harm's way on numerous occasions and clays that even alludes to the hallucinations in season 3 sometimes when I'm imagining a conversation I'll accidentally whisper a couple sentences out loud but on this level the show still tries to ignore the fact that it's a problem for clay when it's put his life in danger numerous times and this is to hide the fact that the real reason for the hallucinations is to just give these actors the Harry Morgan treatment like they gave Hana in season two but it opened up these problems the show just buries its head about now what about our closure as an audience as you've seen in the past this show has riled me up quite a bit and I've had tantrums and there's a lot about this and worth getting worked up about but I just don't have it in me anymore I'm tired guys this show is drained everything from me and at this point I'm just glad it's over in context of the other seasons it's a little hard to discuss the first and last episode really are hard to get through but I'd say in general this season isn't as boring a season three may be the shorter runtime helps with that however it's more outrageous than any of the other seasons and more than ever it's clear that there's nothing beneath all this absurdity it's a show about nothing not a show about nothing a show not about anything to give it a rating at this point would be to give it too much credit the only thing this show is good at is tricking an audience into thinking they've watched something when it's just smoke and mirrors 13 reasons why is the perfect example of how less is more how telling a simpler story even if problematic for many reasons had more expansive implications and held them more tried to flesh out the less it ironically had to say contradicting itself and proving that its priorities don't actually lie at the root of the problems it presents I find myself in a similar quandary with this show there's so much more I'd like to say little things I'd like to point out like play staring at this wolf or a ham-fisted lion like what clues are they hunting but if there's one thing I've learned from 13 reasons why it's that you got a no-one to call it a day so for your sake for my sake and for the sake of this god-awful series I'm gonna call it a day thank you for your love and support throughout the years I will continue to channel that into videos about better shows and movies and 13 reasons why links to my social media and patreon are in the description but please sign the petitions and help the mutual aid organizations I've linked to in any way you have the means to don't be like 13 reasons why make an actual contribution to help solve the problems going on in the world now until my next video I'm going to fall into a deep deep slumber I'll see you when I wake up thanks again and goodbye [Music] [Music]

Channel: Taylor J. Williams

Views: 502,585

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

Id: aOnMMb2O1Mc

Length: 44min 23sec (2663 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 23 2020