Superfans readers, please note: I am about to drop ALL of the spoilers so please stop reading if you haven’t watched You Season 3 on Netflix.
Hello You. You could have read any blog post today but you chose to read mine. Could you be as intrigued by me as I am by you? Are we about to indulge in a bloody, spoiler-filled, sexy and dangerous few minutes read that is going to completely engross you? Yes,yes, we are. Let’s dive into You.
When we last saw Penn Badgley’s Joe Quinn-Goldberg (yes, he is modern that way), he was settling into married life with equally batshit crazy Love (Victoria Pedretti) with a baby on the way in the picket fence, picture-perfect sleepy suburb of fictional Madre Linda. At the end of Season 2, we saw Joe’s stalker instincts piqued by his lovely neighbour Natalie (Michaela McManus of One Tree Hill fame) and wondering how Love would react to this.
Well, after delivering a bonny boy named Henry ( much to Joe’s dismay), Love did exactly what we the audience expected but which her suddenly morally-disgusted husband did not – she straight up butchered the unsuspecting Natalie with an axe, in the basement of her new bakery.Blood, after all, is so much better than champagne to help you christen a new business, right? And that was just episode 1, man!
Over the course of the next 9 episodes, we see Joe try to keep Love’s killing impulses in check (he naturally fails); cover up those murders ( which really isn’t easy with Natalie’s tech guru husband Matthew,played by the still swoon worthy Scott Speedman with dazzling effect – my inner teenaged Felicity fan was LIVING for his DILF look! -using the town’s cameras and the digital rings all residents wear to track down his wife’s murderer.Uhm, Hi violation of privacy rights!); fall in love (and back into his evil stalker ways) with his feisty librarian boss Marienne ( Chilling Adventures of Sabrina ‘s superb Tati Gabrielle ) AND try and fit in with their fellow residents which include the best onscreen representation I have seen of that annoying mommy blogger/influencer we all love to hate (NCIS : New Orleans‘s Shalita GrantΒ as Sherry Conrad is the ABSOLUTE worst!).
I’ll admit that Season 3 was a very slow burn for me – after the truly creepy, shocking and eye-opening facts on just how much we give away about ourselves on social media and how that can be used against us in the first two seasons, I wanted my thrills hard and fast this season and I was mad about not getting instant gratification.
The last three episodes of the third season deliver on that and then some. As Love spirals into a stab-happy, unhinged suburban wife and mother, Joe retreats back into prime killer mode with plans upon plans than ensure his and his son’s survival. I’ve always said that my attraction to the Joe character is because of my murderous lust for Dexter and this season really played up their killer with a father’s love similarities (re-watch Dexter seasons four and five for a reminder).
The finale ends on a triumphant high for the former Mr Quinn-Goldberg as it builds towards a crescendo of murder (Joe outsmarts Love with her own poison in a double crossing you don’t see coming), gore (the man cuts off TWO of his toes and BAKES them into a pie to fake his own death and make it look like Love killed in him in a murder-suicide!), a happy ending for Henry at least (Joe leaves him on the porch of a loving couple desperate for kids) and travel (yep, our dangerous romantic heads to the City of Love to find his latest stalkee Marienne).
As utterly bonkers as Love was, her final moments cut me deep:
With Netflix having greenlit a fourth season (unheard of because we know how this streaming services loves to cut their shows off at the third season knees), I absolutely CANNOT wait to see what Joe gets up to next. Until then, goodbye, You π
