13 Reasons Why opens with a death, as past seasons have been wont to do. However, while the kids of Liberty High have previously been put through successively elaborate whodunits to assign blame, Season 4 isn’t really about who did it. It’s a game of “Who Is It In The Coffin?”, though this pivot in narrative focus arguably has its impact cheapened by the circumstances of how and why this final loss of life has happened. Clearly meant to serve as a farewell to the students that we’ve come to know and sympathize with, Season 4 attempts a memorable finish but makes the same mistake that its predecessors did -- it tries to squeeze an ocean of teen issues into a kiddie pool -- and scrapes by, at best.
Much as Season 2 of the show dealt with the fallout from Season 1, Season 4 has the burdens and loose ends of Season 3 woven into its DNA. This means tweaks to the cast, who now more than ever feel designed to quite literally embody the ghosts of characters past.
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In this sense, we’re talking about Monty, who died offscreen in a very convenient jailhouse incident, being survived by his very own justice league in his sister, Estela de la Cruz (Inde Navarrette), and old fling, Winston (Deaken Bluman). There’s also the introduction of Clay’s therapist du jour (Gary Sinise) because someone needs to anchor our tormented protagonist.
And tormented, he is. As our lead character, Clay is the vehicle through which viewers will experience 13 Reasons Why’s latest cocktail of mental health troubles. He runs the gamut from hallucinations to dissociative states, topping it all off with violent paranoia to boot. Dylan Minnette deserves a commendation for the dizzying tilt-a-whirl that is portraying Clay this season; it can’t be an easy task to shoulder the bulk of the biggest emotional moments the show has had so far, let alone when they’re framed as pithy opportunities for social commentary.
On that front, Season 4 deals with attempted suicide by police, the aftermath of Tyler’s almost-school-shooting, undercover deals with police, protests, and more police interference. Most egregiously, law enforcement obfuscates the process of justice and essentially helps to cover up a murder. With the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd galvanizing public outcry across America, the timing of this season’s debut leaves something to be desired.
While it’s clear that the main characters' trajectories all involve regaining agency through acts of empowerment (or at the very least, trying to move on), intertwining said acts with milquetoast takes on protest violence and the accountability of authority figures feels like another misstep.
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The aspect of the season that feels like it had been initially set up well, if not a bit too on the nose, is the appearance of literal ghosts of characters past. We see the return of Hannah, Bryce, and Monty as spectral reminders of everyone’s murderous misdeeds -- It’s all very I Know What You Did Last Summer. These ghosts torment the students who were involved in their deaths, mostly in the form of ill-timed hallucinations, with Clay predictably suffering the brunt of them.
Season 4 could have been, in theory, about the students absolving themselves of their involvement in these past deaths by taking responsibility for their actions and getting rid of those specters before moving on to the next chapter in their lives: college. Unfortunately, things are perennially complicated by larger than life events like the aforementioned protests, an unending cycle of violence visited upon those who previously perpetrated it, and the constant meddling of the adults. The environment of distrust that the writing fosters between the main characters is masterfully tense; it’s a shame that it also seems to undermine the ability for any of those kids to reckon with their choices in truly meaningful ways.
This constant interplay between the past and how it affects the present-day lives of these kids means that the focus on the far-off future that the parents of Season 4 are so concerned with is just that -- something on the horizon that never becomes the focal point that it should.
13 Reasons Why prioritizes an excavation of the deeds of previous seasons rather than looking forward, and this feels strange given that the motivations for a lot of these teens’ questionable decisions are hand-waved away with every guidance counselor’s favorite phrase, “think about college admissions.”
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The writers' reliance on using shocking circumstances of the past to evoke emotional resonance ultimately peaks in a scene mirroring Bryce and Hannah’s doomed dance with two characters of vastly differing circumstances, with one common thread -- interpersonal violence.
This moment has a lot of potential to be poignant despite its messiness; however, like a lot of other moments in Season 4, it is undercut by something designed to be provocative. Here, AIDS and sex work are played for shock value for the grand total of one episode. This will likely leave viewers scratching their heads and wishing that the showrunners had given at least one exploration of a complex issue the thorough attention that it deserved.
Therein lies the problem with Season 4: it never gives its plot points any time to build up steam. The previous installments of 13 Reasons Why set up a towering house of cards of emotional stakes, and burned them down in spectacular fashion by each finale. By contrast, the last dance of this season is one long, meandering whimper rather than a bang.
The inaction of those in power to stop what’s happening to the main characters really shines through thanks to the at-times excoriating writing, and that topic could have been explored more meaningfully as a wider comment on social responsibility or growing pains, if the writers had dug a little deeper. It’s the hapless parents not knowing how to have frank conversations with their children about mental health. It’s also the police appearing to look the other way when it comes to the actual perpetrator of a murder because they’re a “promising young man.”
The flawed justice system has hung like a pall over the show since Season 1, and it’s a shame that it only continues to drag Clay and his friends down. Like every fraught plot point in Season 4, this shallow attempt at social commentary briefly crests the hill of Emotionally Affecting but slips and tumbles down the other side before you can enjoy the view.
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