Final season of 13 Reasons Why circles the drain

(Spoilers, but really, who cares anymore?)

I still had hope. Despite watching this series go from that incredible first season high to that messy but still solid 2nd season and then a total mess of a 3rd season, I still hoped the showrunners could reverse this steep collapse and right the ship for at least a satisfying conclusion.

Sadly, no. Not even close.

Season 4 is almost a complete disaster, so incoherent in tone and character from what this show once was that I can hardly believe it's the same series at all.

Season 3 was all about the mystery of who killed Bryce, aka Jocky McRaperboy. Tbh it held so little real interest that I had forgotten who done it until seeing the little recap package that they showed at the start of the  new season. It was Alex, although the whole group helped pin it on Monty, another Jocky Rapist, who then was conveniently killed in prison almost immediately. Why did I hold out hope again?

So anyway, season 4 is a total mess, but if it has one main plotline it is the group trying to not be found out about their coverup. 

A couple things make this hard. One is that a few people not in the group are suspicious: Winston, Estella, and Diego. Winston (aka evil Timothee Chalamet) was hooking up with Monty at the time of the murder (half the male characters this season are gay, you get used to it). Estella is Monty's sister. And Diego is yet another douchebag jock, who refuses to believe Monty could have done this (never mind that it was established a couple seasons ago that the whole jock squad had their own raping shack basically). 

The other complicating factor is that our lead, our onetime hero, Clay Jensen, is losing his damn mind. 

I honestly should have kept a running tab of all the insane, stupid things that Clay does in this 4th season. It's unbelievable. For one thing, remember how he talked to ghost Hannah before? Well now he is constantly having whole conversations with deceased characters, primarily Bryce and Monty (Katherine Langford wisely did not come back to play a ghost Hannah again).

Clay does not go a single scene, especially in early episodes, without doing something absolutely batshit crazy. I mean, he is clearly mentally ill and dangerous. His paranoid twitchiness is unbearable to watch. 

He gets in multiple fights. He crashes a car that nearly kills one of his friends and.leaves the scene. He walks in on a passed out girl and leers at her, while hard. He screams at faculty. He grabs a security officer's gun. He walks into a police station and claims to have a gun when he doesn't. He sets the principal's car on fire. 

He finally gets committed to the hospital after the police station incident, only to almost immediately escape after shitting the bed as a distraction. No I am not kidding. That happens! What even IS this show? (Shitting the bed does make for a hell of a metaphor though)

Clay's a raving lunatic, and not the least bit sympathetic while being so. And not only does he get away with everything, he is still chosen to speak at graduation and gets into Brown. WHAT? 

Much of the season involves Clay narrating the story, which we see he is telling to his therapist played by Gary Sinise. Sinise feels really out of place here.

This season feels like someone snorted a bucketful of coke, then wrote a.bunch of fanfic and that became the season. It's just bonkers.

Would you believe there is an episode that culminates in a full scale riot between the student body and local police?

Would you believe a major character suddenly gets AIDS and dies from it within a matter of weeks?

Would you believe that Clay loses his virginity to the sheriff's daughter, a character who is never once mentioned or seen again? 

Would you believe that every parent in town uses a secret surveillance app to track their kids?

Would you believe that at one point Clay has a prank played on him that results in him being covered in blood and holding a knife, and then he walks into gym mid-dance like that's a sane act?

Would you believe that several characters get mixed up in a black market gun sale, which is actually a police sting operation, which we know because the cops were seen and heard planning this in full public view?

These things happen! And there are so many bizarre things I can't even recall as I do this blog. 

Good characters like Jessica and Zach are just wrecked this season. Jessica spends half the season dating Diego just to keep tabs on his snooping. Zach is mostly just an angry drunk. Ani, last season's lightning rod, gets the Rose Tico treatment and is simply written out of half the season for no reason.

We literally do not get a good episode until the last 2. Any high school series will have a prom episode and a graduation episode, and those are the last 2 here. They are okay. They are the only 2 episodes that feel at all like the show of old. There's at least a few moments of levity finally, and moments where we actually believe these friends are actually friends. It even manages a few effective tearjerker scenes. 

But we also have that aforementioned main plot end with the whimperest of whimpers. Winston and Diego each just give up, and Estella isn't even given a scene of giving up. She just vanishes. I mean, you can tell the showrunners didn't care at all about this storyline the way it ends.

So everybody who doesn't die gets a happy ending. Except for us viewers, who watch as this show goes out on seriously one of the worst final seasons ever. 

I'll never understand the fall this series took. Season 1 was one of the best seasons of TV I have ever seen. They expanded on the source material so well in that season that it is baffling they struggled so much to do the same in the other ones. It's almost like they got so much heat for some of that raw stuff in season 1 that they decided to make everything more soapy and less real after that. 

This season should never have taken place if this was the best they could do.

We'll always have Hannah.