’13 Reasons Why’: Here’s Why Dylan Minnette’s Clay Jensen Won’t Be Axed From Season 3

Spoiler alert: This article contains spoilers for 13 Reasons Why Seasons 1 and 2.

13 Reasons Why will have a casting shakeup for its upcoming season, but one popular character is pretty much a shoe-in to return for the third round of the Netflix teen drama. While 13 Reasons Why star Katherine Langford is definitely out for Season 3, the series’ other main protagonist, Clay Jensen (played by Dylan Minnette), has an unfinished storyline that will need to be addressed.

The second season of 13 Reasons Why ended with Clay holding a gun after he managed to get it from Tyler Down (Devin Druid) as he stopped from going through with a planned school shooting at Liberty High. In the final 13 Reasons Why 2 episode, Tyler fled the scene and left Clay with the gun in his hand, leaving viewers with a cliffhanger ending. When Season 3 of the Netflix series picks up, Clay Jensen could possibly be accused of bringing a gun to school. Some 13 Reasons Why fans fear the Clay character will be shot by police who think he is planning to go through with a school shooting.

Either way, unless 13 Reasons Why goes into a major flash forward format a la This Is Us, the Clay gun storyline will have to be a pick-up point when the show returns to Netflix with new episodes next year.

Last month, both Netflix and 13 Reasons Why star Katherine Langford confirmed that the story for her character, Hannah Baker, is done. But Langford teased that Dylan Minnette’s Clay Jensen also experienced some closure, which got some fans thinking that Minnette’s job could be in jeopardy.

“For me, we told Hannah’s story so fully in Season 1,” Langford told Entertainment Weekly in May. “Then being able to officially say goodbye to her—it definitely felt like time. For me, letting Hannah go was in Season 1; Season 2 was for Clay to let her go.”

Of course, Netflix would have probably announced the departure of a major star like Dylan Minnette, just as they did for Langford when the new season was announced. Still, 13 Reasons Why fans may have also been a bit confused over the weekend when Minnette was missing from cast photos taken on the red carpet for the 2018 MTV TV & Movie Awards. According to Seventeen, the supersized cast of the Netflix hit posed for pics on the red carpet ahead of the annual awards show, but Dylan Minnette was nowhere in sight. Dylan later turned up on the red carpet wearing jeans and a T-shirt, then posted to Twitter to apologize for being late for the cast photos.

13 Reasons Why 3 will premiere on Netflix in 2019.