All ‘You’ Needed Was Love… and These 4 Other Things
Season 4 was the worst. But Love (capital L) could have helped all of this make sense in the most twisted way.
The following article features heavy spoilers — please don’t read it if you haven’t seen the series finale. Seriously, keep reading at your own risk.
All Joe needed was love. Or at least that’s what he kept crying in his diazepam-induced nightmares, giving us a very Ebenezer-Scrooge experience — the ghosts of the victims’ past.
At last, Joe got his happy ending — a powerful woman to love and who loves him in return, so much so as to accept and help him hide his psychopathic murder history across the globe. Isn’t it lovely?
Oh, but wait… didn’t Joe already get exactly that a couple of seasons ago?
And is it even possible to have a split personality after the fourth murder spree and not before? (Psychiatrists of the world, this is a question for you guys.)
At last, Joe got his happy ending. But what about all of us who have been following this whole plot since 2018? We started out in our rocking twenties and now we are rushing to the dirty thirties, and yet, the destination was not as exciting as the journey. Especially for the last part.
Especially for a couple of things. Here they are.
What about Henry?
I think that this happens a lot with directors and producers when storylines, scripts, writers, and all there is about cast, crew, and locations are changed and time passes and they kind of want to come up with a story from scratch so that viewers are surprised because they didn’t expect to find a fresh story for a fourth season. But abandoning a son completely with no remorse nor consequences, yeah, that was not what we expected from the guy who stole Guinevere Beck’s cell phone (and dirty underwear).
The fact that even when he came clean at the end, you know, like, “My wife is rich and I’m a criminal, so what?” Yeah, he didn’t even look for him as his adoptive parent. Henry just became a big blank, you know.
I expected a lot more about this storyline since they gave us the whole thing with Pedro in the first season. Like, the guy who protected Pedro from his abusive father… screw it, the guy who protected Jenna Ortega (before she became the Jenna Ortega) just would not cut ties with his son like that!
Am I the only one who was rooting for the super ridiculous plothole that would bring Guinevere Beck back to life somehow?
OK, hear me out.
When Guinevere Beck came into my life, she immediately won top #2 in my Top 10 Main Characters That I Hate Even Though I Keep Watching the Series Because the Rest of the Characters Are Amazing. She is just behind Ted Mosby.
Guinevere Beck was this blonde (non-offense) American woman who thinks she is more than just a blonde American woman (again, non-offense). This type of girl who says she’s so emotionally deep when, in fact, she’s just trying too hard to be deep at all, to have something inside, to have some content, you know. I mean, she’s pretty and fun, and she was really good at school, but… meh.
I think I fell in love with Joe Goldberg (I fell in love with Joe Goldberg and definitely not with Jonathan Moore, whomever she is) because of the way he took an easy, average wallflower and made her such an incredible jungle fever inside his head. Like, the girl was dating this party guy and then she was all, like, “No, please don’t go down on me at the furniture store because I want to be diff’rent with ya.” But Joe Goddamned Goldberg saw that and he could only think of new ways to idealize her. Man. That was a passionate man right there.
So, naturally, when the whole “Love is as crazy as me and she helped me kill Candance and Delilah, too, and she’s pregnant!” thing happened, there was a part of me who was rooting for Guinevere Beck to survive. Somewhere, somehow. There was a part of me that was like, “Well, she wanted depth? She got that depth. ‘I scaped my crazy ex-boyfriend, yet I’m so terrified to see him again, I cannot tell this to the world into a viral TikTok, which is so what I would like to do right now’.”
Joe even killed her famous friend so she could have something to say. But she didn’t. She never did. Even in the reminiscence diazepam-induced scene, she barely got something to say. It’s as if season one was never really about Beck but only about Joe.
Oh, but now that we mentioned the infamously well-dressed Paige Salinger, I mean, do you remember how Love’s father paid this hitman to kill Joe? I mean, the Salingers aren’t like even richer than the Anavrin family? Like, why didn’t Joe get two hitmen from Paige’s family as well? She was the coolest victim and she never got the merit she deserved.
She didn’t even reappear for Joe’s diazepam nightmare.
All ‘You’ needed was Love (capital L).
Season 4’s finale depicts Joe’s happy ending — a powerful, rich, innocent-looking wife who can cover up for his murders and who loves him in return. But you see, he already had that.
Love Quinn is definitely my favorite character in this series. She’s amazingly well-written. She’s human, she’s relatable, and I think that she is really the only real relationship that Joe Goldberg ever had.
This makes me think a lot about those guys who always complain about how this one girl won’t match their energy, but when they finally meet a woman that does, they just don’t know what to do and end up behaving like the assholes they say they’re so different from. Take this theory and make them all psycho-murder-y.
Love Quinn loved Joe. Love Quinn accepted Joe’s issues. Love Quinn killed her own brother in the name of Joe Goldberg. She gave him a son.
And she was interesting to watch, you know. After season one with Beck and Paige’s stunning outfits, Love was a character that had as much depth as Joe. She had a complicated family. She was witty and came up with these quotes, like, “I wolf you.”
She was rich. She could have covered up for Joe.
Love Quinn walked so Kate Galvin-Lockwood could run.
Also, I feel like the writers could have made this whole encounter more interesting. I would have rooted for Love Quinn to survive and just followed Joe to London and be like, “Hi, baby. Did you miss me?” That’s the twisted love story I wanted.
I mean, if Marianne survived, why wouldn’t Love Quinn survived?
Oh, I almost forgot…
What is up with Marianne?
OK, Joe was moving on to his British/English/London socialite friends. But then, surprise! He’s been keeping Marianne captive in a cage because the writers were like, “OK, we definitely need at least one link to the past because this is just not engaging enough.”
But… what is up with the beta blockers? Everyone’s crazy about them suddenly. Guys, I was into the beta blockers once, but then I discovered that my resting heart rate is already <50 BPM, OK? I want to live.
And so did Marianne. She wanted to live, to escape, and to just forget about everything even when an 18-year-old was charged with first-degree (or second-degree?) murder. And that 18-year-old is the same 18-year-old who helped her with the whole beta-blocker plan.
(Doctors of the world, here’s another question for you guys — can you really fake your death with beta-blockers? Aren’t they more lethal on their own?)
She just moved on. Oh, that’s good, Marianne. You’re with your daughter? Nice. I don’t know why they exploit you out as a character resource, Marianne. To prove that not all of Joe’s cage victims end up dead? They already proved that in season two (the best season of all) with Will.
Or did they?
Because you know…
It seems like Joe Goldberg developed a dissociative personality disorder overnight. He woke up one day and said, “I think I’m into having a split personality now.”
This storyline bothered me because it’s very misinformative. You cannot develop a mental disorder just out of nowhere. Joe Goldberg already had a list of murders, victims, and trauma in his life, and he had never responded with a doppelgänger. He was himself. He was conscious of what he was doing, but he did it anyway.
Joe was so human — in a delusional way — that you got to empathize with him. That was it. That was his charm. “He doesn’t want to kill them… but he must. He has to.”
This just seems pretty off if we compare it with the wannabe Fight Club they tried to do this season. When Joe hated a guy, it was mostly because he was dangerously near the object of his obsession, or just because he was a douchebag. It seems very unnatural that he would lose all senses and blame his own murders on someone that embodies what he can’t stand.
I mean, dear former writers of You’s fourth season, we all loved Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but it’s not the only famous English literature book you could have chosen!
Will there be a season five? That’s my actual question.
I will watch it, of course — all of us You viewers are huge masochists because we had to wait over a year for this, to begin with. But, well, Joe is a character who at least is never boring.
He is good. He keeps the whole series good.
