She calls him an asshole for wanting to leave her behind, which is something many suicide loss survivors feel. The show does not mention this specifically, but birthdays can be tough for suicide attempt survivors for a host of reasons - usually because they are a reminder that they lived when they wanted to die.Īt Alex’s birthday party, Jessica unleashes hurt feelings she’s never expressed to Alex about his suicide attempt. It’s also Alex’s birthday, and it seems to be a rough one. “13 Reasons Why,” you need to do better, this is dangerous messaging. We cannot continue to glorify narratives that suggest suicide is a reasonable or altruistic way to get people to change. This is such a dangerous myth to perpetuate because it can encourage people who are struggling to view their death as a “noble” way to effect change for the greater good. Hallucination Hannah asserts she released the tapes because, “I wanted people to know what happened to me, so that maybe it wouldn’t happen again.” The tapes last season were bad enough - perpetuating the idea that someone who dies by suicide can continue to have a conversation with the living even after their death. When someone dies by suicide, their life is over, period. When someone dies by suicide in real life, they don’t get to “come back” and help their loved ones get through the confusion, pain and trauma of their loss. Instead of moving the plot forward in a way that acknowledged the past season’s problematic nature while looking to undo past damage, the show writers brought Hannah back via hallucination to defend themselves and the decisions they made last season. I was angry because this wasn’t really Hannah talking to Clay, this was the show writers attempting to address a common concern from last season - that Hannah’s actions were a revenge fantasy enacted via dramatic suicide. He suggests that she left them to teach people a lesson, to which hallucination Hannah replies, “It wasn’t revenge, I had to tell my own story.” When she said this, I was genuinely just angry. Clay walks away feeling like he failed Hannah again, which as we have seen over and over again, is usually the driving force behind Clay’s “vigilante” side.Īt the end of the episode, we see him argue with hallucination Hannah about why she left the tapes in the first place.
Liberty High’s litigator is ruthless in her questioning of him, and Clay, who was meant to be a slam dunk witness for the Baker defense, ends up making Hannah look worse to the jury. The story about the drugs, of course, comes out in Clay’s deposition in court. There’s no way the meaningful look that passed between her and Clay would have gone unmentioned in the tapes, based on the way we know Hannah told her story in the tapes. From last season, we know Hannah is sensitive to both the “big” and “small” moments when people let her down or didn’t care enough to listen to her cry for help. According to CNN, after the high from Molly has worn off, sometimes a user shows signs of depression and may not be able to get out of bed for an extended period of time. Hannah could have been more vulnerable to the “low” coming off the drug as she was already struggling with depression. Hannah has tears in her eyes and looks meaningfully at Clay, who understands it is a cry for help but doesn’t do anything.
Alex takes the question as a joke and says he thinks about it every day. Hannah, on the other hand, is visibly depressed and asks the others if they have ever thought about dying. Jeff, who has done the drug before, shrugs it off and says you can’t feel the highs without the lows. Sheri remarks that she knows she feels bad, but doesn’t really care. The next day when the Molly crew “comes down” off the drug, they sit at Monet’s coffee shop and talk about the “bad moods” they are in. We can perhaps draw the conclusion that Hannah felt like “infinity” or “love” wasn’t really possible for her, so she took her own life.
I believe the writers of the show want us to see this conversation as particularly tragic because, as we know from episode five, Hannah struggled with extreme loneliness and looked to boys to fill that void. While high, Clay and Hannah talk a lot about “infinity,” and Hannah decides maybe we should define “infinity” by “love,” proposing that those things are essentially one in the same.