Summary: In flashbacks, Clay and Hannah go to one of Jeff's parties and get high on ecstasy. Hannah reveals she thinks about suicide sometimes as she comes down. In the present, Clay testifies for Hannah but it doesn't go well. Alex has a birthday party but he gets angry and snaps at everyone. Andy wants a divorce.
The Good: Alex's outburst was somewhat successful. I get what they were going for and it does change up the story in an interesting way. I'm curious to see where his story is going to go. The Bad: The rest of this sucked. The opening animated sequence was pretty bad and felt needlessly "artsy". The dialogue was bad, it blatantly tried to shove the show's themes down our throat without even a hint of subtlety and it wasn't even pleasing to watch. It was pretty much a total failure. It ties into the drug scene, but even that scene was bad as it served no purpose. Honestly, the drug story was really bad. Why was it included? How does it affect the story or the characters of Clay and Hannah? The answer is it doesn't. It's there to fill out content in an episode which is aimless and accomplishes nothing. There is no significance to Hannah saying she is suicidal when coming down. It doesn't even feel important since it seems viable that people would just say that when coming down. Furthermore, it does nothing for Clay. His character arc is the same old crap. He feels guilty. That's it and there is nothing interesting about any of it. The show needs to stop retreading the same storylines over and over. Hannah was depressed. We get it. Clay loved Hannah and feels guilty. We get it. Jessica is upset because she was raped. We get it. Alex is angry because his life sucks. We get it. Nobody likes Tyler. We get it. The show is repetitive and refuses to deepen its characters at all. If you take away everything I mentioned in this paragraph about Hannah, Clay, Jessica, Tyler and Alex, we have no way to characterize them. Who are they aside from that? They are boring and character-less. It's disappointing that after one and a half seasons these characters haven't accomplished anything. Thankfully Kate Walsh is enjoyable to watch, but I am sick of watching her be sad for Hannah. We see it at least once per episode and it's so repetitive to the point that it pisses me off. Kate Walsh is talented. Give her something else to do. Aside from repetition, we have very little to actually discuss from this episode. Clay's story is bad. The court scenes aren't even structured around blaming the school, and it instead feels like the whole point of Clay's testimony is to prove that he is responsible for Hannah's suicide. It feels like he is on trial instead. Furthermore, it's implied that only the opposition questioned Clay. Why? What was the purpose of having him if they aren't going to ask him questions? Additionally, Clay says the court went terribly, but that's hard to understand since we hardly saw any of it. Too much focus was on Alex's birthday instead. Speaking of which, Alex's outburst doesn't feel earned at all. What changed to make him so angry when he was fine a few episodes ago? I have no clue and I couldn't tell you. The plot demands that Alex has to be angry so he's angry. His rage towards Bryce at particular is so out-of-nowhere that it threw me off and actually made me laugh. Miles Heizer isn't good enough of an actor to make the weak dialogue work, making the scenes even worse. The final twist of Clay sharing the tapes didn't resonate much with me. Furthermore, his conversation with Ghost Hannah was really bad. It felt like the show tried to address the complaints that Hannah sent the tapes out for revenge, but they did a piss-poor job of proving that wrong. They needed to give her another proper motivation and they didn't do that. Her "wanting her story to be heard" is pretty weak and feels like it was hamfisted into the story. Even the little things were bad in this episode. The show's usual good cinematography wasn't present here, the dialogue was worse than usual and the execution of many scenes was just bad. Take the mystery building. The stupid overdramatic sound effect was used when Clay found the polaroid, ruining that scene. When Tony was talking to his boyfriend, there was no subtlety at all to Tony asking about the one-eyed guy. Anybody would figure out he knows that guy somehow. The Unknown: Was Tony responsible for the man who lost his eye? What was that text that Sheri mentioned? It's clear that Clay knows something about it. Best Moment: Alex's anger probably because at least it felt like that story was going somewhere. Character of the Episode: Alex. Conclusion: Repetition. That's one word to describe this episode and most of this show as a whole. This episode accomplished very little and pissed me off every other minute. The execution was unbelievably poor and this is easily the worst episode the show has ever put out. This show has fallen off a cliff. Score: 35
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Aaron DhillonJust a university student who loves to watch TV. And analyze it way too much. Archives
March 2024
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