13 Reasons Why Seasons 1 to 3 recap
The first season of the show dealt with the suicide of Hannah Baker (Katherine Langford), who left 13 tapes, each of which featured another reason why she decided to end her own life.
These tapes dealt with the bullying and bad decisions Hannah had been a victim of. Particularly, she suffered bullying and sexual harassment from Justin Foley (Brandon Flynn), Tyler Down (Devin Druid) and Marcus Cole (Steven Silver).
However, perhaps the main inciting incident was being raped by Bryce Walker (Justin Prentice). Show lead Clay Jensen (Dylan Minette) managed to secretly record Bryce confessing to this, and gave all of Hannah’s tapes plus Bryce’s confession to guidance counsellor Mr Porter (Derek Luke).
In 13 Reasons Why Season 2, there is a new mystery, after Polaroids linking the school’s baseball team to a string of serial sexual assaults begin to come out. Eventually, Bryce is arrested and charged with the sexual assault on an unconscious Jessica Davis (Alisha Boe), while Justin is found guilty of being an accessory to sexual assault for not sharing what he knew about this crime.
However, Justin gets six months in jail for this, while Bryce only gets three months probation. Meanwhile, Hannah’s parents take the school to court for negligence, though the school is eventually judged not guilty.
Another of the baseball team’s sex crimes leads to the shocking closing of Season 2. After being sexually assaulted by Monty de la Cruz (Timothy Granaderos), Tyler plans on committing a school shooting, though he is talked out of it by Clay.
Season 3 saw Monty serve jail time for this crime, in a chain of events that directly leads to the big plot of Season 4. 13 Reason Why’s third season focused on the mystery of who killed Bryce, who was murdered after many thought he served insufficient time for his crimes.
After 13 episodes of suspects, it was revealed that Alex Standall (Miles Heizer) had killed Bryce, who was planning on giving Jessica a tape committing to all of his crimes. However, on the way, he was beaten by former Hannah love interest Zach Dempsey (Ross Butler), who left him with multiple broken limbs.
In a state of anger at Bryce’s many wrongdoings, Alex pushed him into a river, where the weakened Bryce drowned. However, in yet another of the show’s many cover-ups, the murder was pinned on Monty after he was beaten to death in prison.
This scapegoating takes us right to 13 Reasons Why Season 4. In the opening moments of the trailer for the final season, we see that someone has written in paint on the school door, “Monty was framed,” suggesting that someone is determined for justice to finally be dealt in the Netflix show.
13 Reasons Why Season 4 is released on Friday, June 5 on Netflix.
