Stars: 1/5
It would be ideal for a TV show to listen to their audience, but “13 Reasons Why” ignored our grievances for the third time. 
I’ll just start with the fact that this season was dull and boring. For a show that started as suicide awareness, it turned quickly into this poorly made murder mystery. 
Last season we discovered that Bryce (Justin Prentince) raped Hannah (Katherine Langford), Jessica (Alisha Boe) and ex-girlfriend Chloe (Anne Winters). Bryce was only given a short sentence of three months in probation causing the characters’ need for justice. 
It’s a sensitive topic to focus on how some rape victims don’t see the justice that they deserve. This is an opportunity for the show to highlight on this topic but instead, they made the whole season about humanizing Bryce because he was murdered. 
Now, I understand the message that we are all humans and make mistakes, but Bryce raped multiple women and took polaroids of intoxicated female students in “The Clubhouse.” He is far from being redeemed. 
But, the show misses the mark in multiple ways. Here are my four reasons why this season is even more awful than the previous ones.
1. The new girl
The season opens with Ani (Grace Saif). She came to Liberty High after the trial, and all of a sudden she’s friends with everyone. She even becomes friends with Bryce. Ani narrates the whole season, and in some scenes, she is in an interrogation room.
Putting Ani in this season just causes even more confusion because she basically knows everything about everyone, but she was never mentioned in the last season. 
Ani is one of the show’s ways to try to humanize Bryce. She would tell Clay that he has changed, yet throughout the season it seems like Bryce has no idea what he has done. But, Ani comes to his rescue and sees him as a misunderstood boy. 
Overall, her appearance on this season didn’t make sense. She knew everyone’s secrets, but she never knew about Hannah and the tapes which is basically the whole point of the show. 
2. Present and past transitions
The show’s signature move is using different colors to differentiate the past and present. But they do this so many times in each episode, it gets confusing. I think I spent half of the time trying to figure out the timeline.
3. Teen issues
The show mainly drives on different teen issues. It’s important to bring awareness to these issues, but they presented these issues in a tone-deaf way. It seems like they never consulted with anyone who actually dealt with these issues. That would’ve made their writing so much better.
It’s also insensitive on how everyone with a problem was consulting their issues with Bryce. Bryce would be the last person for someone to discuss their problems with. Tyler (Devin Druid), who was raped by Monty (Timothy Granaderos), told Bryce about what happened to him.
It was unnecessary to come up with the decision to make Bryce console a rape victim. This is one of the many times this show has displayed that it’s socially tone-deaf. 
There were so many ways for the show to save itself, but I think they don’t realize that these are real issues that real people face. I rolled my eyes a couple of times at the superficial, lazy writing. 
4. Tyler
Finally, I like to mention Tyler again. He faced through so much trauma and bullying that he made the decision to cause harm to his peers. But, that was stopped by Clay before Tyler could harm anyone. You would think that Tyler would seek professional help but that didn’t happen.
The main characters decided that Tyler basically needed to be watched, so they took turns hanging out with him and walking with him to class. This is such a terrible way to handle this issue. It also shows that no one in the production of this show paid attention to what they were doing.
Before the show started the cast made comments on how if you have problems with the issues being discussed, you must tell a trusted adult. But, that never happened in the show. A group of teens cannot do what a therapist might do for Tyler. They just assumed that his thoughts of harming innocent people are gone. 
With issues like drug abuse, teen pregnancy, deportation, rape and many more, “13 Reasons Why” does a terrible job at portraying them with no ounce of sensitivity. I couldn’t take the show seriously because they made the characters go to Bryce for help.
These are serious issues that should not be taken lightly, and “13 Reasons Why” is a show that doesn’t portray these issues with any compassion.