**spoilers for season 3 of You**
You is a show that I’ve wanted to watch for a while now, since I find Penn Badgley so charming. And what better way to counteract the ill will I have for season 6 era Dan Humphrey than watching Penn Badgley play someone who is ten times worse? Joe Goldberg is an absolutely horrible human being. This isn’t something that’s up for debate, he stalks and murders people. The thing I’ve found most interesting about You as a whole is that Joe is hellbent on finding what he hopes is the perfect love, and each time we’ve seen him convinced he’s found it, it becomes clearer to me that he has no idea what he’s talking about. Joe Goldberg doesn’t know a thing about love, no matter how much he convinces himself that this time he really has found the one.
Of the three women that Joe has set his sights on throughout the series, I think it’s safe to say that Love Quinn (yes, her name is Love) was the most interesting. And if I had to make a case that Joe loved any of these women, I would make that case for her, though I don’t think he really loved her either. It turns out that Joe’s being drawn to Love is due to the fact that they’re more alike than he originally realized, which in the end terrifies him so much that he doesn’t like her anymore. The only reason he doesn’t kill her like he did Beck is because she’s pregnant with his child, which sets the scene for a chaotic season three in the suburbs of Madre Linda.
If you thought Joe and Love were going to live happily ever after, I don’t know what show you thought this was, especially after the first episode ends with Love killing a woman that Joe started to have another obsession with. The season shows they are fractured, and though they work as a team to cover up Natalie’s death and attempt to act normal around their kooky neighbors, it becomes clearer and clearer that Joe doesn’t love his wife in the slightest and so his affections shift to Marienne, the director of Madre Linda’s library, who is working on gaining back custody of her daughter.
In season one, I was a bit hesitant to continue the show because I found Beck, the first woman Joe stalked, to be a bit bland. I realize now this might have been a purposeful choice, since when it is revealed that Love is a killer herself at the end of season two, she uses this same adjective as well as “unremarkable” to describe Beck. What Beck had, and what Marienne has that Joe seems to connect with are problems that he believes he can help them solve. Beck was struggling to get her writing career off the ground, and she had friends who didn’t truly care about her. Marienne has a terrible ex who does everything in his power to keep their child away from her. Love has baggage of her own, what with her co-dependent relationship with her twin brother Forty (RIP, gone too soon!), and a strained relationship with her mother, but as we learn more about Love, we realize that she is perfectly capable of dealing with her problems in a way that Joe is not used to. Sure, killing people is probably not the way to go about solving her problems, but for Love, it gets the job done. And in that sense she doesn’t need Joe in the way he wants to be needed by the women he feels drawn to. So season three leaves Joe and Love at an impasse, no matter how much they try to fight this. I knew this marriage could only end one of two ways: either Love kills Joe, or Joe kills Love. It was a close call, but Joe made it out unscathed and is now free of Love and in Paris, hoping to one day run into Marienne.
I would actually love for this show to end with Joe dying. In my mind, it’s the only way for his terrible behavior to finally catch up with him. I’d like to state again for the record, HE IS A MURDERER. If you think this show is ending with Joe finally finding the love of his life, I have to say, you’re watching the wrong type of show. We are presented with some real examples of love, however. In season one when Beck’s friend Blythe and Joe’s coworker Ethan strike up a relationship, they seem like an odd match at first, but it’s clear they truly care about each other. In season two we’re given a solid familial relationship between sisters Delilah and Ellie, who would do anything for each other. And of course in season three we see a true partnership between mommy blogger Sherry and her viking-like husband Cary, a partnership that Love wants so badly to replicate. These characters give us a solid picture of what Joe wants but cannot have, and I’m intrigued to see what mess Joe gets himself into next season.
Premieres This Week
The first two episodes of The Sex Lives of College Girls are now streaming on HBO Max:
Season 2 of The Great premieres today on Hulu:
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