The ‘13 Reasons Why’ Season 2 Bathroom Scene Has Fans Divided

This article contains SPOILERS for 13 Reasons Why season 2 and in particular the final episode of the season. 

The second season of Netflix’s hugely popular teen drama 13 Reasons Why dropped on Friday, and fans had all weekend to plow through its courtroom storyline, all the new things we learned about Hannah’s life at Liberty High, and all the ways that her classmates/friends/enemies continued to cope with not only her death but with her putting the whole toxic culture at Liberty on blast in her tapes. It’s a season full of intense emotions and increasingly complex character relationships.

But by far the most intense and frankly disturbing scene comes in the season finale. In the episode, titled “Bye,” we jump ahead to one month after the jury’s verdict in the courtroom storyline that framed the bulk of the season. Hannah’s parents and friends hold a memorial service where they all come together and where Clay (Dylan Minnette) seems to finally be able to let her go. Elsewhere, we see Tyler Down (Devin Druid) — who we last saw being sent away to a disciplinary program after his and Cyrus’s anarchist pranks against the school and the jocks — return to Liberty as a seemingly changed person. He’s more confident, less tortured by the bullying he’s endured, and less angry. It’s a heartening turnaround. It doesn’t last.

At mid-episode, Tyler cornered in the boys’ bathroom by Montgomery, one of the jocks who faced legal repercussions for intimidating anyone who knew the truth about Bryce raping Hannah. Helped by a pair of anonymous jock goons, Montgomery viciously beats on Tyler, slamming his had into the sink, and shoving him into the bathroom stall. From there — and here’s where the scene becomes seriously hard to watch, to the point where many people (critics included, from anecdotal evidence I’ve heard) turned away from their screens — Montogomery anally rapes Tyler with a mop-handle, as the goons muffle his screams. It is, simply put, AWFUL to comprehend. That it comes in the season finale brings up comparisons to Hannah’s suicide scene in season 1, another scene that was incredibly hard to watch and which remains a source of controversy for the show.

Unsurprisingly, the bathroom scene is proving to be similarly divisive. The rationale for showing the scene is pretty much the same as the rationale for showing Hannah’s suicide: these terrible things happen, and by shielding ourselves from the horror of it, it’s too easy to brush it off and forget about it. And that’s true. Sexual assault as a result of bullying is a real thing that happens, and tidying that up might allow people to brush those realities aside. By that same token, watching a scene like that bathroom scene could easily be traumatizing.

13 Reasons Why fans have been expressing both sides of this debate all weekend.

From a critical perspective, the question comes down to whether the scene is gratuitous and sensationalistic beyond what the show needs to convey in its themes about bullying and toxic masculinity (two themes which 13 Reasons Why handles really well, actually). Decider’s Meghan O’Keefe called the scene “so traumatizing, upsetting, and deeply disturbing that I still honestly can’t believe it actually happens in 13 Reasons Why and not Game of Thrones.”

It doesn’t help that this scene exists to get the Tyler character to a point where he tips over the edge and taps into that cache of weapons he’s been keeping for two seasons. The specter of Tyler and his guns has been hanging over the show since season 1, and so the attempted school shooting that happens at the end of season 2 feels both grimly realistic and somewhat salaciously foreshadowed. It’s a sequence of events that rides the line between unsettlingly brutal (in the way that the real world can be) and cheaply over-the-top, and while this critic may feel like the show stays on the side of its good intentions, many will not.

Stream 13 Reasons Why on Netflix