13 Reasons Why Boss Offers Up First Season 2 Details: Will There Be More Tapes?

Showrunner Brian Yorkey spills on his plans for the follow-up to Netflix's controversial high-school drama

By Billy Nilles May 09, 2017 4:41 PMTags

13 Reasons Why fans desperate for information about the just-announced second season, this is your tape.

It's only been 48 hours since executive producer Selena Gomez announced that the controversial and highly addicting Netflix series would return for another season of gut-wrenching high school drama, and details are already trickling in about what exactly those new episodes might look like. And if you thought Hannah Baker's story was over, think again.

"I think one of the things that is still hanging out there is this question of is someone responsible for Hannah's death? Is the school responsible? Who is responsible, if anyone is," showrunner Brian Yorkey told EW. "One way we'll explore that question is through the trial and also through all of these kids reflecting on where they are a few months down the road and what other secrets are being uncovered." 

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It's through those newly uncovered secrets that we'll get the opportunity to know Hannah a little bit better. "That's going to take us into the past, into Hannah's story," he continued. 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."

That said, don't expect to be hearing Katherine Langford's lovely voice as narrator moving forward. "There's voiceover in every episode, but the voiceover is no longer Hannah," Yorkey admitted. "The voiceover and the stories that are being told bring us into the past and back to the present much in the way that Hannah's voiceover did in season 1. So there will still be that weaving of time frames and seeing them unfold and how they impact each other as they go."

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Yorkey knows season one left a lot of questions unanswered, and he plans to address them all, while offering something new from the experience of the first season: Hope. "We're going to answer all of the burning questions that people have about [the show]," he explained. "Is Tyler going to do something? What's going to happen to Alex? Will Bryce be brought to justice? We're going to answer those questions but I think, even more, we're going to continue to look very truthfully and very honestly at what they go through, even when it's painful at times. But I think what we're going to discover is, as they begin to emerge from this very dark time, there's hope and there is some light to be found. That's my hope anyway, and I think that that's also truthful."

While it would be foolish to expect the discovery of another set of cassette tapes in season two, Yorkey did admit that another type of outdated technology will play a role in the new season. "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 two," he revealed. "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."

13 Reasons Why season two will debut on Netflix in 2018.