



You know, I’ve been wanting to write this review for a while now but quite honestly, after I saw it, I genuinely couldn't care less about wasting another minute trying to think and analyze this show. However, I didn’t want to waste the time I spent binge-watching this 13 episode long season (each episode being an hour-long btw) going to nothing, so let’s talk about this.So 13 reasons why is this teen, somewhat adult drama about the suicide of a young girl and the people surrounding it. The ironic part is that this show kind of branded itself as this after school like special, saying that it wanted to start conversations about the dangers of bullying and teen mental health. The funny part is, right after the first season, people actually pushed back, saying that the show glamorized suicide and people began to notice how actually problematic this show was. It was even reported that the youth teen suicide had increased like 28% following the show airing, it was just a whole mess.So my personal thoughts on the show before season 3 were very meh. Season 1 was somewhat decent, I did find a lot of it over the top, but what else do you expect from a Netflix drama. Season 2, however, was bad. It basically became this bad courtroom drama, a lot of the plot didn’t even add up with the things that we saw in season 1, and lastly, who could forget that broomstick scene. For those who don’t know, there’s a scene with a main character named Tyler, being brutally beaten and raped by a broomstick, mind you, all of this is happening in a high school bathroom I-. That scene was clearly put into the show for shock value because not only was that scene both graphic and disgusting, but it didn’t even drive the plot either. I guess they wanted to give Tyler this “school shooter” narrative, but there were so many better and less graphic ways you could’ve done that.So season 3 starts off with the introduction of a new character, this black British girl named Anita who we find out is actually the new narrator of the show and one of the new main characters, and my first thought was “why is she British?”. Now I’m not going to lie, I don’t understand why they had to pick a British actress for this role, I mean we later find out her mom is from Kenya, but I still don’t understand why she’s British, it’s actually something that’s never really brought up in the show either.Now I’m not going to run down every episode of the season because that’ll just take too long, but there were some... “interesting” key points that I did want to talk about. Warning, there will be spoilers given.So as shown in the trailer, the main plot about this season is about the death of Bryce Walker. If you don’t know, Bryce is basically the villain of this show, he’s an asshole joke, serial rapist, and overall just a bad guy. He raped Hannah, the original main character and he also raped Jessica, and possibly more? I don’t really member.*Spoiler*So Alex ends up being the killer, and that scene was quite frankly the most boring death I’ve ever seen on Netflix cinema. So in the events previous to his death, the character Zach beats up Bryce at a pier and leaves him to die basically thinking that he was, Bryce has previous plans to meet up his with one of his rape victims Jessica, and Jessica brings Alex for like protection or something? So anyways, while Bryce is bloodied and beaten up, he asks for help and Alex basically throws him in the ocean and that’s that.A really interesting thing I will say about this season is Bryce trying to make up for all the things he’s done wrong. In the show, he basically gets off scratch-free as a privileged rich white guy, and in this season we see that he actually has guilt for the things that he’s done, but that’s not till after everyone turns on him. In the show, we see that he goes to a new school after the events of the second season, and how reputation as a rapist follows him. Everyone absolutely hates him right, he’s the guy that everyone knows as a rapists, they trip him in the halls, they exclude him, they bully him and he’s basically socially exiled from everyone else in the school, and it brought up an interesting question to me at least, how does a rapist become reaccepted back into a society?And that’s an important topic for me to think about because statically, most rapists normally don’t spend more than 5 years in prison, and in fact, I was just reading a piece from Slate about how not only is the law is so easy on those that commit sexual crimes, but they had a statistic saying that 75% of all rape cases are never even prosecuted for criminal charges? That’s a scary thing to think about, and that’s actually something that’s presented in this show. In the first season, Hannah tries to report her rape but even adults that they say we’re supposed to reach out to didn’t really do anything about the situation.With saying that I do find it interesting how the show presented the ways that Bryce was trying to get help. I think it’s so important that criminals do seek the mental health services they need, for those I don’t know I’m a strong advocate against prisons, I don’t believe they do their jobs on preventing crime, I think it’s important that we work with criminals in giving them the help they need so that they don’t repeat violent crimes that are too often committed, and I'm happy that the series showed Bryce recognizing that something was very wrong with him and that he had to seek help because he didn’t want to commit another crime knowing that he could possibly get away with it again.Another interesting thing about the season was the club that Jessica starts for the victims of sexual assaults at the school, and the reason why I liked that was because of the way how they showed that feminism can be presented by different people. So Tyler, the victim of the broomstick scene joins the group and he’s met with hostility from one of the girls that joins the group. She’s like this typical white, SJW feminist. She’s loud, she’s rude, she has a short haircut, I think you get the picture. So Tyler, being to ashamed to admit about what he went through, joins the group as an “ally” and throughout the season, she makes really rude and snarky remarks to him, thinking he doesn’t know what it’s like to be a victim of sexual violence, and I just thought that was a really interesting dynamic shown in the series.The last thing I also wanted to talk about was the character Monty, he was the ex-best friend of Bryce and he was also the one that raped Tyler. So later in this season we actually find out that he's gay and honestly, I'm not here for it. I am so tired of seeing the cliche of the closeted, masculine straight guy and he's always angry because he's fighting this battle inside, and honestly, I no longer care for it. I'm a person who strongly believes that we need more diverse, and quite frankly, better written gay characters in mainstream television and cinema. I'm also annoyed at the fact that show led it on that the next season would be about him. Once again, spoiler alert, he dies in the last episode and it foreshadowed that the next season would be about his secret lover trying to "avenge" his death? I don't know, and honestly, I don't think I care either.So honestly after saying that, this season was still pretty whack, most of it was very boring like I genuinely found myself falling asleep to this show, I’m surprised that it’s still popular as it is. Quite honestly, I don’t even know if I’ll be checking out the next season, I think I’ve seen enough of this show but I do love-hate watching shows so we never know. If I had to rate it out of 10, it’d be a solid 4, maybe 5 at its strongest points.Hopefully, you like this review and I don’t know if I’ll be writing more in the future. I also was thinking about maybe starting a podcast? I don’t know, we’ll see.