OK! I’m at the end and beyond. My So Called Rashômon! is a fairly accurate description of this show.
I didn’t appreciate the way they threw in a weird offhand reference to Columbine near the end. That felt extremely unnecessary to the point of being actively distracting. Probably my only substantive complaint.
I don’t know that this glamorizes suicide. Although OK fine, on a surface viewing it is technically an extended gotcha! revenge suicide note that makes these characters “regret” doing the things they did …
As I watched, I found the aftermath of her suicide troubling. In real life, when someone commits suicide, their story ends there. 13 Reasons Why failed to end Baker’s story, since she lives on through the tapes. We become captivated by the drama of the suicide rather than the actual suicide itself.
Furthermore, seeing how people are affected by this suicide is pretty … unappealing. That scene of the actual suicide and her parents discovering her, yeah not fun. If you go this route, know you will be actively damaging a lot of people for a long time as your goodbye present to them.
I don’t feel fantasy suicide revenge is truly the point here. No real teenage girl could possibly put together such a complex posthumous plan plus 13 hours of tapes (some recorded on location!) documenting everything in excruciating detail. So clearly, at least to me, it’s actually about the multiple views of reality, the Rashômon effect on a teenager’s life, which is intense. Can very bad things happen to teens without anyone really meaning to do anything wrong? Yes. Can very bad things happen to teens without anyone noticing? Yes. Furthermore, could any of those very bad things realistically have been avoided at the time, even with perfect foresight? I dunno, can you control how a bunch of emotional teenagers, all with their own individual family baggage, feels and thinks? How much of this is random chance and fate, playing out against multiple people at multiple times, eventually weaving itself into this particular story? What is to be done? It’s complicated, indeed.
I particularly liked the one part where she clearly recalled something incorrectly on the tapes – the confessional note she wrote to the asian jock, where she “saw” him ball it up and throw it away on the ground, but he later produced a copy on demand and said the note profoundly affected him, but he didn’t know what to do about it.
Whose story is true? Wrong question! It doesn’t actually matter whose story is true! Maybe nobody can tell you the whole truth, really, even with the impressive (but also biased in its own way) God’s eye view on offer here, which must be filtered through 13 different perspectives / episodes on the same set of events. What does matter is how people treat each other day to day. And boy howdy does this show do a good job of showing teens being cruel to each other, both intentionally and unintentionally, every day.
Looks like this got a Season Two, which surprises me, so I guess we’ll see.
