Transitions and emotional identification in the fifth episode of 13 REASONS WHY

I'm going to try to start doing something I probably should have been doing more of. When I get off on a nice tweet-storm, I should post it here, reformatted as a blog post. It takes basically the same effort and I find I prefer having something archived here than having to search through thousands of tweets.

I'm in the middle of attempting to write a spec episode of 13 Reasons Why, so I'm revisiting a few episodes to study the style and technique again. (Also, I'm incredibly impatient for season 2, so going back to the better episodes is basically serving as my methadone.)

This discussion of the 5th episode of season 1 of 13 Reasons Why ("Tape 3, Side A") is from a tweetstorm I wrote on Saturday. You can find the original thread here. I've done some editing and expounded on a few thoughts here.

I was rewatching the 5th ep (school dance/Courtney's tape) of 13 Reasons Why last night and saw a few storytelling/transition/structure things worth discussing.  The episode was written by Julia Bicknell (only writing credit of hers I can find) and directed by Kyle Patrick Alvarez. Alvarez also directed the heartbreaking finale of Season 1, and the truly terrifying film THE STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT.

This is (I believe) the first ep where Clay has already heard the whole tape before the start of the ep. Usually Hannah's narration plays while we see him listening on headphones. Not this time. It means his actions the entire ep aren't of discovery, but of reaction. Not insignificantly, this is the first time that the severe actions on the tape strongly intersect with Clay's history. His past interactions with Hannah are usually asides. Here, they take center stage and it ups the emotional stakes.

This is ALSO the first time that it's implied the flashbacks we see are the memories of other characters too. The tapes aren't our only bridge there. Courtney flashes back to an earlier lunch with Hannah, and when Hannah's dad looks at her corsage, it triggers another memory. It helps spread the emotional identification around. It's not just Clay getting kicked in the gut by these memories, it's everyone around Hannah. It helps to make the ep an emotional pressure cooker so that we're ready for the release that comes at the end.

Also, after 4 eps where the flashbacks are about "This is what this means to Hannah" it's nice to see everyone else's stakes in those memories: what they knew, what they didn't know, and what they probably regret. It seems like a tiny detail, but it's huge. Quite rightly, the show has put most of its energy on getting us to identify with Clay and his grief, and only the pain of Hannah's parents has really been explored aside from that. Making this episode a flashback from at least four characters' interactions (Clay, Hannah, Courtney and Hannah's father) helps drive home one of the show's running themes about how connected everyone is and how much their actions affect others.

But ultimately, this is Clay's ep to shine. Because this flashback means something to him, it's knife-twisting to realize how devastating it must be to relive that moment at the school dance. It's a cute "I want to kiss her but I'm too scared to make a move" flashback on its own....




...but when you add it to everything else, he has regret of, "Why DIDN'T I do it? How could what I was scared of be worse than this?"

There's an end speech that Dylan Minnette acts the hell out of where he talks about never getting to dance with her again, and you feel his pain:

"When I listen to the tapes I want to see her in school tomorrow. I want to eat Mike and Ikes out of the box with her at the Crestmont. I want to dance with her again, and kiss her when I should have kissed her.

"But I can't."

When I posted this as a Twitter thread, the director of the episode responded with a few thoughts:

This is Clay’s episode to admit to himself what we’ve known for four episodes: she mattered to him. A lot. Anyway, thank you for this! Day making.

— Kyle Patrick Alvarez (@kylealvarez) April 7, 2018

I’m appreciating this commentary so much cause you’re touching on all the things that excited me so much when I first read it. The entire episode is about that speech Clay gives at Hannah’s grave. Everything before and after is in service of it.

— Kyle Patrick Alvarez (@kylealvarez) April 7, 2018

I mentioned to Kyle that on subsequent viewings, after we've actually watched Hannah die, it has the effect of putting us more in the emotional space where Clay is at this point. I did a lousy job of explaining this on Twitter, but at this point in the show, we still have eight episodes worth of Hannah's life to learn about. Even though she's dead to us in the present, she's still "alive" in the past in a way. Once we've reached her suicide, we've see it all. And we know what Clay knows.

So when we revisit these episodes, her loss somehow feels more real. There's nothing left of her and when Clay takes Courtney to her grave, we're HYPER-aware that the girl we watched die painfully is in a box below the ground. It feels very unsettling to be there, like it's almost wrong to intrude on that space.

If you've only watched this episode once, go back and revisit it after you've seen Hannah's suicide. I'm curious if you end up with the same reaction as me.

Also, this tangentially relates to a point I made last year in my 13-part series on the show. In the final segment I discussed the news that Hannah would continue to appear via flashbacks in season 2:

"I hope that when she turns up in Season 2, Hannah's used sparingly. There's real power in that character's reappearance. We shouldn't see Langford on-screen again unless the story demands that specific emotional sucker punch. It needs to mean something to revisit Hannah, and the worst thing the show could do would be to use her in a scene where she's merely a continuity checkpoint. Even though flashbacks are going to take us to other pivotal moments in the characters' lives, I feel Hannah can easily be kept an off-screen presence."

The way we experienced Hannah's life gives her future use an enormous amount of emotional power. Let's hope it's used properly.

Also, what happens to Hannah is this ep is a strong structural turning point because it pulls together the wrongs of the previous four ep and basically turns them into a snowball of pain that escalates everything that goes very bad. The picture out of context that led to the rumor she went to third base with Justin, the "hot list" that named her "Best Ass" and only further objectified her, the out-of-context picture of her kissing Courtney, which further fed rumors of her promiscuity - it all gets tided together here when Courtney uses them as a shield to deflect people who think there's something going on between her and Hannah. Basically she throws Hannah under the bus to save herself.

So the episode accomplishes two things: accelerates Hannah's descent, and more directly involves Clay in that downward spiral. The weight of that devastates present-Clay and sets him on the unstable path he continues for several episodes. Clay's not only dealing with the regret over his inaction towards Hannah on a romantic level, but he has to be thinking that he failed her in a more basic emotional support capacity as well. That guilt, and the desire to do something about, becomes what drives Clay for the rest of the season.

It's a lot of PLOT, but because of the way the show transitions between the past and present so effectively, and uses the emotions of the other characters to evoke our own, it makes us FEEL as its drawing all these threads together.

Lesson is: story works best when you don't divorce plot from emotion. Find every technique you can to get the audience to identify emotionally with the characters and you've got gold.

Transitions

Transitions are a subject that I don't often see discussed on screenwriting blogs, a fact that I didn't consider until a few weeks back when I read a spec script that made no effort at smooth transitions in its first 30 pages.

Guys like me harp a lot on the importance of the first ten pages of a spec script. We tell you to get the story rolling in those pages and if possible, get all of the major characters on the board in those first ten or twelve pages. And that's sound advice, don't get me wrong. The problem is when a writer tries to put 15 major characters in play in the first 12 pages. This only gets exacerbated when the characters are introduced three or four at a time in successive scenes with no connection to each other.

Let me set up a scenario so you can understand better what I'm getting at:

Scene one: 3 pages - three terrorists (let's call them LARRY, MOE, and CURLY) are putting together a bomb and going over their plans. No one in this scene is the clear leader, so it's hard to break it down to "This is our main bad guy and these are his thugs." Worse, they all sound identical.

Scene two: 4 pages - a high-school classroom where the TEACHER lectures about how they will be expected to behave on their class trip "downtown" today. In this sequence we meet BRIAN (the geek/brain), CINDY (cheerleader/hottie), AUSTIN (the asshole bully), TRACY (the popular overachiever) and PRINCIPAL CURTIS stops in to say hi. There's tension between the Principal and the Teacher, suggesting that the teacher might be the lead, but there's also emphasis on Cindy and Tracy's friendship (Tracy helped her with her homework) and Brian's crush on both of them. The thing is that the scene could be about either Brian trying to work up the guts to flat out ask one of them out, or it could be about Cindy's exasperation with ever guy in school coming onto her. The fact that Austin smacks her ass just after knocking Brian's books out of his hand could speak to that. Or it could be about Tracy's own quiet crush on Brian and her obliviousness to how guys are interested in her.

Scene three: 2 pages - College Student BRETT packs up for the weekend, preparing to leave his dorm. He mentions he's going home and then tells his girlfriend LILY that something came up suddenly. LILY isn't happy, but then calls her sorority friends....

Scene four: three pages - A drug deal in a back alley goes wrong. A kingpin's LIEUTENANT kills a couple corner boys who it turns out have been treading on their turf. It's the Lieutenant's bad luck that while he's making the hit, his car is stolen off the street by JACK. Worse, there are about 15 kilos of coke in the car.

So I ask you, what the hell is this movie about? Who is the lead? Who am i paying attention to? What's the thru-line?

Obviously, I changed all the names and fudged some of the scene details but this is pretty much the sort of spec I was greeted with recently. Strong transitions between the scenes wouldn't have fixed everything. After all, when a movie starts off like this, it's a good warning sign that the writer is trying to juggle too many characters at once.

But let's say that the terrorists are planning on bombing a downtown government office. Furthermore, let's also assume that said office is adjacent to a downtown science center and they specifically mention that the center will be a good place to lay low and escape immediately after setting the bomb. If that building was specifically name-dropped in this scene, it might be important later...

...like in the classroom when Brian maybe mentions to Tracy that it would be pretty easy to slip away from their field trip at the GOVERNMENT OFFICE BUILDING to the Science Center next door. Just a throwaway mention like that would have tied these scenes together and also immediately identified Tracy and Brian as the most important characters in this subplot.

And how about if that scene ended with texting his brother Brett, asking what time he'd be home? Now we know how Brett plays into this. Brian's probably the main lead and Brett will be important, but in a supporting capacity. This also suggests we don't need to worry too much about Brett's girlfriend Lily as a character. She's probably just there for color rather than being a developing subplot we'll need to pay attention to.

Now, there's not much that can be easily done to tie Scene 4 to the other three scenes, but the other three scenes do such a good job of putting a possible through-line in place that the audience can safely assume that these characters are destined to end up in the same downtown complication.

Strong transitions won't completely fix a screenplay that has other fundamental problems, and I admit, this example is an extreme one. Hopefully the point still comes across. Never underestimate how just a few lines tying one scene to the next can help guide your reader as the story is still taking shape.