Don’t Worry, ’13 Reasons Why’ Fans, Hannah Baker Will Be Back For Season 2
Hannah Baker is coming back, but she's going to have a slightly different role this time around.
So, we know 13 Reasons Why is getting a second season, but most of us don’t really know what that means. How do you create a TV sequel to a show that followed the events of a book almost perfectly? What else could the writers have in store for us?
Well, we’re still not completely sure, but we finally do have some answers, thanks to showrunner Brian Yorkey’s interview with EW.
Perhaps the biggest question I had on my mind was whether or not Hannah Baker would be back for season 2. We finished the tapes in season 1, so is her story officially over?
According to Yorkey, we haven’t seen the last of Hannah Baker.
We’re going to get some new context for events we already know about and we’re going to see a lot of things we hadn’t even heard about yet that fill in some really interesting gaps in our understanding of who Hannah Baker was and what her life was.
It sounds like we still have a lot to learn about Hannah, but she’s hardly the only one. Yorkey said that season 1 was only the beginning of each character’s stories, and that there’s still a lot left to explore.
All the cliffhangers that we saw at the end of season 1 go back to the initial set of traumas that we’re talking about — go back to bullying, go back to Jessica’s rape, to Hannah’s rape. They’re all related, so I would very much like to explore where they all go and to see if there is, as I think there will be, some light for these kids.
Like the first season, the second will weave the past and the present together using a voiceover, though Hannah will no longer narrate the show. Instead, there will be a new voice taking over, though we’ll have to wait to see who’s going to take the limelight.
As for the tapes? Those won’t take center stage this time around, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be something to replace them.
The tapes are still obviously on people’s minds, but there is a different sort of analog technology that plays a hugely important role in season 2. So the cassette tapes aren’t at the center of it — those two boxes of tapes are still hanging around and matter to people — but there will be a new piece of technology for 13-year-olds to Google and try to understand what it was.
What does it mean? I have no clue, but I can’t wait to hear the fan theories that’ll come out of this interview. Otherwise, we’ll have to wait till 2018 to know the truth about Hannah Baker and the rest of the gang. 
