Season 4 of YOU pressed reset—and based on the first episode of the season, I haven’t quite figured out whether that’s a good thing.
It’s impressive that a series manages to reinvent itself with every season while still keeping the main character intact, the only thing stringing together the seasons into one cohesive thought.
Joe attempts to reinvent himself too, but underneath it all, he’s still the same guy running the New York bookstore who romanticized his creepy obsessions with women in an attempt to normalize his behavior.
On YOU Season 4 Episode 1, things pick up with Joe’s new life in London. The events before this over-the-seas move are addressed—he killed Love, faked his death, dropped his baby off (the hardest thing he’s ever had to do, he claims) with a family he trusted, and hopped on a plane to Paris to find Marianne, the woman he deems his one true love.
But we’ve been down this path before… with you. We know how this goes and that Marianne is just the latest of Joe’s obsessions. We also know how it always ends, so for Marianne’s sake, I hope she’s found a way to get off the grid for good.
Somewhere along the way, while hunting for Marianne, Joe ended up teaching English at a university under the guise of Professor Jonathan Moore.
You. Penn Badgley as Joe Goldberg in episode 401 of You. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2022
Jonathan Moore kind of suits Joe—and I dare say it almost grounds him. He’s lived through some really wild situations, most of his own making and stemming from his obsessive nature, so it’s refreshing to see Joe fight those demons. Whenever he feels his obsessiveness pulling him under, he stops himself, diverts his attention, and tries to do better. Trying is half the battle, they say, but unfortunately, Joe’s life becomes entangled in yet another shady scenario when he gets pulled in with an elite group of “douchebags” through his colleague Malcolm.
While we spend much of the first episode exploring Joe’s new life under his pseudonym, the series tackles the remaining loose thread connecting him back to Joe head-on by giving audiences a play-by-play of what brought him to this very rebirth.
We see how he made his way from Paris to London—it’s where Marianne ended up for an art show—and after a tense confrontation with her during which she looked at him as though he’s a killer (I mean, she’s right, he is) and he vowed to prove her wrong, he was confronted by a hitman hired by Love’s father. Turns out, they knew Joe’s death was “too good to be true.”
The theme of being hunted is heavily explored this season, but we’ll get to that in a minute.
In a rather unpredictable turn of events, the hitman admits that he’s “tired” of killing—and Joe says he can relate—so he offers him a deal: a new identity in exchange for his disappearance. The one caveat is that he must kill the only person out there who still knows he’s alive—Marianne.
Joe has never had a problem killing before when his life depended on it, and yet, when he’s ordered to kill, he struggles to follow through, mainly because the target is a woman he loves. Instead, Joe pickpockets her necklace and sends it as proof that the “job was done,” which for now, seems like lazy writing as I don’t think an expert hitman would just take Joe’s word for it. Why wouldn’t he follow Joe to make sure? Why wouldn’t he ensure that the last thread was taken care of?
Regardless, Joe took the risk because he thought that by not killing Marianne, he was proving to her that he was a genuinely good guy. It’s twisted, but Joe’s twisted, so I’m sure it makes sense to him. You have to give it to him for continued positivity through any situation.
Truthfully, nothing gets Joe down, including waking up from a wild night out with the elitist bunch with a wicked absinthe hangover only to find Malcolm dead on his dining room table. Joe has zero memory of what happened, and yet he doesn’t even hesitate when considering that he may have been the one responsible for the murder. His response is basically, “whoop, not again! Oh, darn.” Given his track record, it’s not entirely surprising that he’d just accept that he killed again.
Without wasting a minute, he rolls Malcolm’s body up in a rug and throws him in the trunk of his car, before taking the corpse and dismembering it. I know that YOU loves to push boundaries to see how far they can take it, but I thought (hoped?) we were done with dismembering bodies after the nauseating meat grinder scene. Did things have to get this graphic? Though I guess in a way, you can sense the anxiety and heaviness that Joe feels having to get this done in a foreign country once again. He’s resourceful, I’ll give him that, but he’d really rather not. And it was slightly reassuring that after everything he has done, he was still disgusted and disturbed by the task at hand.
You. Penn Badgley as Joe Goldberg in episode 401 of You. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2022
The fact that Malcolm had his fingers cut off didn’t even phase Joe since he did something similar to himself when trying to stage his suicide in Madre Linda. The murder was textbook Joe, so rather than looking at it as a whodunit, he simply accepted it as an “I slipped up.”
That is until he gets a mysterious text from a random number and the person reveals that they killed Malcolm and tried framing him for it. The anonymous texter admits to being impressed by how Joe disposed of the body, and suddenly, the series embraces a whole new vibe as the tables have turned— Joe is the one being hunted and stalked, and he’s getting a dose of his own medicine.
And since we don’t know who the person on the other end of the secret messaging system is, YOU has become a classic whodunnit murder mystery, with the suspects all sitting at the table of the exclusive Sundry House. Any one of them could’ve done it as they have a motive. It was hard keeping up with the who’s who of it all, but I feel like we’ll get to know these characters on a deeper level, including what makes them tick, as the series continues.
If I had to wager a guess based on what we witnessed in the first episode, my money is on Rhys, the author plotting a run for governor who comes from a broken home and has endured a traumatic childhood. He’s the only one that Joe connected with and saw eye-to-eye with. In fact, in my notes, I wrote that Joe found his equal, so it makes sense if he was to be revealed as the killer. Two broken men finding common ground in murder—it’s the making of a promising murder mystery.
Joe even felt comfortable enough confiding in him about his past, including what torments him, the darkness and the hiccups he’s faced—without giving away too much, of course—and Rhys’ advice about just accepting and facing it all, no matter how difficult, was odd.
It’s almost as if Rhys knew what Joe was talking about without him having to say it. However, Rhys as the prime suspect seems almost too easy, so my backup guess would be Kate, Malcolm’s girlfriend who was definitely not happy in the relationship. She’s made it clear that she doesn’t trust newcomers and wants to keep Joe at arm’s length, even after he risked his life to save him from the muggers.
Regardless of who the killer turns out to be, Joe’s perfect “European holiday” has already been tainted, and now we’ll have to see how/if he finds his way out of it without crashing and burning. If he didn’t get rid of the body, he would’ve been framed for a murder he didn’t commit, but in taking care of it, he’s made the killer question who Joe really is. And nothing threatens a new identity like someone sniffing around your old one.
Joe is a chameleon, sure, but can he play this game and win? How many lives does he have left before his past and his sins catch up with him? And can he push off his obsession with Marianne or will it be what destroys him and forces him to slip up? After all, his love for her is kind of what got him into this mess in the first place as he allowed himself to get completely annihilated to numb the pain of “losing her.”
What did you think of the YOU Season 4 premiere episode? Do you like the show’s new vibe and that Joe is really the only constant?