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I watched the series of 13 Reasons Why and I could not figure out why Alex committed suicide. Any idea on this?

In the series, a few things I did notice:

  1. Justin Foley carried a gun with him before he met Bryce.
  2. Tyler was hiding guns and all in his case.
  3. Tyler removes the picture of Alex in a mixture of all other students.

Did Tyler kill Alex and made it seem like suicide or did Justin kill Alex because he was Jessica's ex or did Alex actually commit suicide?

But suicide seems so unreal for Alex because he was from a military family.

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    Plus, for all we know, he may be still alive. The show ends with him going to the hospital, and they only said he shot himself. It never said he died.
    – LeonX
    Jun 28, 2017 at 17:03

3 Answers 3

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This was kept the mystery in season 1 on purpose but got answered in season 2.

Spoilers ahead..!!!

What happened to Alex?

He committed suicide.

Alex was there when Bryce raped Hannah but he was busy playing video-game and asked Monty to check what's going on and Monty did notice and lied that Bryce is having sex when in reality he was raping Hannah and Alex did nothing. That's why he even had a fight with Monty because this two could have saved Hannah from getting raped. But Monty didn't care.

So he committed suicide out of this guilt only. And to commit suicide,

he used his father's gun.

Now you might wonder why Tyler was hiding guns, then the answer is also hidden in the second season and it had nothing to do with Alex:

Tyler does target practice in the wild to overcome his anger and even in the last episode, he plans to go on a mass shooting in school dance due to what Monty did to him.

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    Exactly correct on all counts.
    – Charles
    May 23, 2018 at 11:05
  • @Charles existing answer were right but now we know the real reason so answered
    – Ankit Sharma
    May 23, 2018 at 11:08
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You're on the right track by noticing that it could have been Tyler, or it could have been a suicide attempt by Alex himself. Or, for all we know, someone else tried to kill Alex.

This is intentionally left vague. Because the show's writers want people to be interested in what happens in the second season. That's pretty much why cliffhangers exist in the first place.


Tangential:

But suicide seems so unreal for Alex because he was from a military family.

Two comments on my part:

  • Alex deciding to kill himself has nothing to do with his family being military. His dad's strictness may add to it, but that's not the same as "being military". Correlation, not causation.

  • Alex' family being military does make it considerably easier for Alex to obtain a gun to kill himself with.

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Even though you already have an answer, I'll just through this piece of information. It is never clear if he actually did die since it stated that he shot himself and was seen being taken to the hospital. However, he was seen teasing that he might actually kill himself on several occasions as shown in this article:

When one person warns, “Whatever happens to us, happens to you,” he darkly responds, “So if I kill myself, you die too?”

On other occasions:

The episode dedicated to his tape, Alex also quits jazz band despite his passion for playing the guitar and is later seen jumping into Bryce’s pool, letting himself sink to the bottom before reality sets in.

Also, the common sense is that he DID shot himself and it was not killed by Tyler. Take into consideration that Tyler was remembering the moment that Alex helped him and then took his picture out because he would spare him.

Some might argue that this moment was to show he killed Alex and removed him from the list, although that would be really bad storytelling taking into consideration the order of events. I might be wrong since I watched it quite some time ago, but I recall this order of events:

Alex is shot -> Tyler's Memory -> He removes the picture

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