The season starts with yet another funeral… I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be Monty or someone else.

We’re then taken 6 months earlier.

Obviously last season we thought everything was going to be ok, Monty was dead and they could blame Monty on Bryce’s murder… well, that might not be the case.

Someone knows that Monty was framed and they aren’t afraid to let the world know.

Clay is having a very tough time, he keeps seeing Monty and Bryce and I’m telling you his subconscious is going to be the one that unravels everything. Part of me thinks it was him that spray painted “Monty was framed” because his subconscious knows how guilty he is.

So now Clay is dating Ani and I’m like, alright, cool. I don’t know she rubs me the wrong way, she knows so much and yet she stays so quiet.

Justin went away to get clean and now that he’s home he wants to try and do better, he breaks it off with Jessica because he knows he can’t be in a relationship at that moment and I get it, but Jessica does not get it. She’s upset that he doesn’t want to be with her… interesting, I thought she’d be more understanding.

You can see the dynamic between Clay and Justin has changed a lot. Clay feels like his parents have found the favourite child they’ve always wanted in Justin, while Justin feels like he’s not enough for the family.

And we have a new(ish) character joining Liberty High… Winston… the guy who liked and slept with Monty and knows for a fact that Monty was framed, but I have this feeling it’s not him who’s taunting Clay.

But he has befriended both Tyler and Alex.

Alex is going down his own discovery path. He kisses Zach, which I feel is a long time coming, I have felt this energy for seasons, but Zach is like nah, but he’s really cool about it. Then when Winston tries to hold Alex’s hand Alex claims he’s not gay, but he’s now asking Tony how he knew when he was gay… so I think Alex has a journey to still go on. I’m here for that.

Ani and Clay finally decide to tell the group about who Winston really is, so now everyone is on high alert as to what Winston’s motives are… although I’m pretty sure we can all guess it’s to catch Monty’s killer.

We found out last season that the cops found the guns Tyler dumped… that plus the graffiti has the group all antsy again.

Tony is highly suspicious of Tyler because Tyler has seemed really dodgy; leaving places early, saying he’s going to be at one place, then not being there. We see him deal something to the guy who sold him the guns, plus it looks like he’s working with Alex’s dad, the sherif, so I don’t know what is up with Tyler.

We find out that it’s the football team that is taunting Clay and after he goes crazy over a dummy covered in blood and enters the school dance with a knife, Ani says she’s out and Clay spins harder than he ever has. He’s seeing things, doing things without thinking, a drug test comes back positive, and he blames Justin for switching them. Clay is a hot mess.

I’ve always understood that Clay has wanted to do good, but man, his actions this season have just been not good. His parents are so stupid and oblivious to the fact that he has any sort of problem, Justin is trying to help him, but the guy who’s a recovering addict can’t do it alone.

Like at the camping trip when Clay gets left and knocked unconscious… his own mother who is on the trip with them doesn’t think anything is wrong? Like they all act like everything is so ha-ha funny.

Then at a party Clay gets high and drunk, and goes out with Zach in his sports car and crashes the car…

Zach has also been dealing with shit, but he’s being very secretive about everything. Even his best friend Chloe notices but he’s still not about telling her. I like them as friends, but now I think Zach feels something more for her and the fact that she has a boyfriend you can see him backing away and not evening wanting to be friends with her, which is dumb.

So after Clay crashes the car, Clay is completely fine and Zach has a broken arm and messed up knee, otherwise it’s like nothing ever happened.

We then get an episode where they have a lockdown. There’s an active shooter in the school. Everyone thinks they’re going to die. Zach gets stuck in a room with Winston and he tells Winston that he beat the shit out of Bryce but that he didn’t kill him. Well, Winston knows that Zach knows who did kill Bryce, he just wants to know who.

Winston gets the whole football team on his side to get Zach to confess, to “cleanse” his soul. We’re sitting here going is Zach actually going to do it… nope. I knew he wouldn’t rat out Alex, he loves him too much.

Speaking of love, Alex and a new character on the football team, Charlie, start hanging out and I knew it was only a matter of time before they kissed, and after the lockdown they kiss… but Alex can’t understand why this person who is so much less “fucked up” than he is could like him. Alex deserves love, he just can’t seem to see it.

So we find out that the lockdown was just a drill. When Clay finds out, he freaks the fuck out. He has a total mental breakdown saying that having cops at school doesn’t make them feel safer; preparing for lockdowns doesn’t make them feel safer, in fact it makes them feel even more scared. He begs the principle to just let them live, it was definitely moving. Clay gets so angry he steals the cop’s gun and the cop attacks Clay, leaving Clay to be taken away and put in an asylum.

But of course, Clay escapes so that he can help his friends because there is still something happening with Tyler. Like he’s dealing guns to a guy. Tony overhears the police talking about a takedown… and Tony and Clay try to intercept it, but they get busted too.

We don’t get a lot of Ani this season. She’s surprisingly very, very quiet seeing as she was the narrator who knew everything last season. Her mum moves to Oakland and in order to stay and finish her school year, she moves in with Jessica. But when Ani’s mother takes a fall Ani heads out and we don’t see her. When she does return she has her college interview where she’s asked how her friends who see her and she comes to this realization that no one knows who she is because she hasn’t let anyone in; she only shows them what she wants them to know.

Also when she moves back she decides to move out of Jessica’s place. Jessica, I’m not really sure where she’s going, and I don’t think she knows either. She’s started seeing Diego, but only to get information because clearly she still loves Justin. People know that she’s working with the principle to make the school “safer” so they think the fake drill was her fault. She gets mad about it, but at the same time she recognizes that she has spoken up about it either to say she wasn’t behind it.

SEE I PREDICTED IT! IT WAS CLAY WHO WROTE THE MONTY MESSAGE.

It was also Clay who did a lot of of things. He broke the cameras at school, he started the fire at the protest, and on it goes. But Clay can’t remember any of it, and it only took 8 episodes for his therapist to realize that there is a problem.

So after the gun bust, no one is charged, Tyler doesn’t come to school for a week and Tony doesn’t think Tyler is the same guy anymore.

Then when an altercation happens between Diego and Justin the school cop gets involved and want to arrest Diego, obviously the cop is white and is targeting Diego. When students get involved, namely Jessica and Clay, they aren’t standing for it. When the principle doesn’t want to do anything about it, the students form a walk out. This escalates quickly and becomes a protest to get rid of the cops, to get rid of the cameras and all the apps that have been created to spy on them.

We learn through Clay, as he follows his parents to a school meeting that an app was created to spy on their kids. I was like what?! Are you fucking kidding me?! I’m glad that they’re standing up for this stuff because it’s so not right. I don’t know if they’re going to get the result they want but we’ll find out.

Their prom gets cancelled and so they all band together to get their parents to bring back prom. In order to do that they tell their parents a slice of the of the truth because their parents know they’re hiding something. Clay admits to his crimes, Justin admits to using again. My favourite was when Charlie comes out to his dad as bisexual; that was so touching.

So prom is back on and they all actually have a great time.

It’s interesting how close Tyler has gotten with Monty’s sister, of all people, but it’s also cute.

The whole prom king and queen bit was really cute. So Alex and Charlie win prom king and king and it’s just this lovely scene of two people who love each other having a moment.

Justin wasn’t going to go to the prom because he’s mad at himself for the relapse and he doesn’t think he deserves to go, but alas he goes and he meets Jessica and it’s all very beautiful… until it isn’t. They’re having a good time until Justin passes out… I really hope that funeral scene from the beginning isn’t Justin’s.

It feels like with the end of each episode they went with this cliffhanger approach which gets tiresome after a while. The first few times it really worked, now I’m just tired of being like ‘oh no, what happened?’ Because the next episode always acts like nothing just happened. Like they blew off the fact that Clay crashed a car or that they got busted selling guns. So I feel like if the start of the finale ends like nothing happened I wouldn’t be surprised.

So we do follow up with Justin’s story, and he’s in the hospital. This is where we find out that Justin has AIDS. I have to say, this plot kinda came out of left field, and I didn’t expect for them to kill of Justin. The show has sprinkled in here and there that he used to have sex for money to get by and that’s how he contracted it. We also learn that he probably had it a while because AIDS is silent and you may not know you have it. In Justin’s case, it’s too late for him and so we spend the first half of the episode watching him die. It was sad and heartbreaking and I honestly wish that Justin had gotten so much more because he was on his way to becoming so much more.

So that funeral we saw at the beginning of the season was in fact Justin’s.

The series ends on graduation, which I’m glad it did. Some shows go further than high school when they shouldn’t and the show loses what made it great.

Jessica obviously gives a speech, but so does Clay. It was voted by his class that he give one and he did a good job of just speaking from the heart about being present now, enjoying what you have.

I like that the show tied things up with the tapes. Apparently Hannah’s mom gave half to Clay and half to Tony and together they agree to bury them once and for all. I also like that they brought back both Ryan and Courtney as they both have a tape to really send them off. So the 9 people who are left that had a tape come together to say goodbye one last time.

And of course, it was a bit of a soft ending because the police close Bryce’s case for good. And Winston who was so deadset on putting away the guy who did it, doesn’t want to anymore. When Alex tells him it was him, Winston sits on it, then decides because he loves Alex that he’s not going to do it. Well alright then.

I’m kinda mad because I’m like did they make Alex gay this season just for this purpose? To make sure these kids get away with the murder? As much as I didn’t want to see them taken down since Bryce was a bad guy, they still shouldn’t have gotten away with it.

I’m only kinda mad because I actually liked watching Alex figure things out, it felt genuine and real.

This season was a whirlwind, like the ones before it, but it was just as entertaining and it did raise some good issues that are happening now.