With You Season 3, we find Joe Goldberg exactly where we left. With a tiny addition – his baby Henry. We are treated to Joe navigating the worlds of marriage and fatherhood and taken further into his mind than the seasons prior.
Also Read – ‘You’ Season 1 & Season 2: Recap & Ending, Explained
‘You’ Season 3: Plot Summary – The Wife
As we discover from the very first episode of You Season 3, Love- now Love Quinn-Goldberg is no ordinary wife. Neither does she seem to be on the same path of self-redemption that Joe is determined to stay on.
Love is as impulsive, fierce, and intuitive as she revealed herself to be at the end of You Season 2. It is one thing for Joe Goldberg to be married, it is another game entirely to be married to his perfect match. This is a woman with the same instinct of violence, the misguided protective instinct that knows no limits, and the same skewed interpretations of love.
The very first episode ends with Love Quinn murdering a potential threat to her marriage, revealing to the audience that the stakes truly are upped this season. With each episode, we see Love Quinn’s violent instincts spiral. We get more insight into her mind and the nature of her impulses.
Love’s relationship with Joe goes through ups and downs, swings and misses. She enforces couples therapy on the both of them, thereby giving us an entertaining and insightful treat into the way their minds work. Attention from a young neighbor, Theo, shows us a different side of her, struggling between her wild impulses and the instincts of motherhood.
The Stalker Returns
Joe Goldberg may be a married man and a father trying to come to terms with his new life, but he is still the man he has always been. He has impulses, as he comes to recognize, and he cannot help but give in to it.
With the neighbor, Natalie, the obsession is nipped in the bud. While it is not by choice, it becomes an easy casualty to get over. But it is with Marianne, the woman he didn’t expect to find, that his instinct turns into his dream of love again. And as he falls into old ways and old patterns, even the flashes of enlightenment cannot stop him from crossing lines.
While Joe’s tally of murders this season may be few, it still goes on to show that Joe is still manipulating us. He can convince himself to murder still if it is for the right woman. To be clearer, the woman he deems is ‘right.’
And as the season progresses, we are forced to accept that Joe no longer deems Love as ‘right.’ Not even a child or the bond of marriage can curb his instinct to find the next ‘You.’
Madre Linda
As with the previous two seasons, the show’s geography plays a significant role in dictating Joe’s behavior and commentary.
If he was derisive of LA, it is nothing compared to the horror he feels about Madre Linda. This is a suburban nightmare, a world so removed from everything he considers exciting and worthwhile. And the people in Madre Linda are pale imitations of humans in Joe’s eyes.
While Love tries to fit in by opening a bakery and befriending local influencer queen bee Sherry, Joe finds his corner in a library. This is familiar territory for us and him, and perhaps it is foreshadowing. After all, he met both of his previous loves at his place of work.
There are entertaining encounters with the people of Madre Linda, including a boys’ hunting trip to the woods where men come undone, a group of sycophants who crowd the queen bee, a haunted neighbor with a personal mission, and anti-vaxxer families.
But as Love and Joe, with Henry in tow, interact with the people of Madre Linda, we see their destructive influence. The toxic well they seem to create sucks in a significant number of people, leading to murders, kidnapping, suicide, and assaults. While they try to convince themselves that it is for a good reason, the truth is that Madre Linda deserved better than the Goldbergs.
‘You’ Season 3: Ending Explained
In the end of the season, after a highly unpredictable set of episodes and a series of events that are both entertaining and shocking, we finally have our question answered. Will Love survive this You Season 3?
It is a credit to her force as a character that we almost seem to forget that she could be Joe’s victim. Joe himself seems to have unconsciously given her an equal place. This is not a child-like Beck, Love is a woman who knows him, who has done worse things than him. But when things hit rock bottom, Joe knows he can no longer stay with Love.
And as Joe asks for a divorce, he seals Love’s fate. Because she may have had plans to do away with him, backup measures in case she ever needed it, but Joe is always surprisingly one step ahead. Even this season, when he has been seemingly drained of his earlier prowess, his final stand with Love is cruel, clinical, and powerful. We may have gotten two seasons of her manic and magnetic energy, but Love is now dead. And we can’t help but wonder, will Joe Goldberg ever be satisfied with a woman?
We know Netflix has announced that You Season 4 is coming. We also know that Love is dead, baby Henry is in the care of Joe’s lovely coworkers, and Marianne is still on Joe’s map.
Joe Goldberg is now a ghost, having faked his own death. And Joe Goldberg has just gone international.
You is a 2018 Drama Thriller television series created by Sera Gamble and Greg Berlanti. Its three seasons are streaming on Netflix.
