Joe Goldberg seems to be living the dream at the start of You Season 4. Now that he’s murdered his wife, faked his own death, and left his son with a friend (Season 3 was intense!), Penn Badgley’s charming stalker character has made his way to London and goes by the name “Jonathan Moore.” Sadly for him and happily for viewers, however, Joe’s past soon comes back to haunt him in the form of a blackmailing stalker. As a control freak, this might just be Joe’s biggest nightmare–which is what makes it so fun to watch.
Joe spends You Season 4 determined to be a different person—a decent person. You know, someone who does not kill or stalk his neighbors. Viewers will be relieved to know that his success in this area remains spotty at best; for one thing, his priorities change just a little after he wakes from a drugged haze to find a dead body in his apartment. The killer soon begins sending Joe untraceable messages (through an encrypted app they’ve somehow installed on his phone) that make clear they know who “Jonathan Moore” really is. Let the “whodunit” begin.
As much as Joe would like to start over, You Season 4 delights in making the saying, “You can’t outrun your past” excruciatingly literal. At the same time, this also might just be our most romantic (well, “romantic”) season of You yet.
You leveled up when Victoria Pedretti entered in Season 2 as the aptly named heiress Love Quinn; that’s when the show shifted from an amusing and acidic tale of a narcissist into something more. Each time Joe spirals over a new person, we see another dimension of his relationship with himself; the narrative he weaves about them, and the decisions he makes in his pursuit of their affection, all reflect something about his own self image.
Season 1’s Guinevere Beck (Elizabeth Lail) only learned the truth about Joe after it was too late. Joe and Love, on the other hand, got married and had a kid together—and for most of that time, she knew exactly what he was. Their relationship created a safe space, at least for a time, in which Joe could explore his feelings a little more honestly.
You Season 4 will debut in two parts, each five episodes long. The first batch, Part 1, premiered Thursday, and Part 2 bows March 9. As much dimension as previous seasons have given Joe’s pathology, this season might just reveal another side to him—one that’s willing to flirt, at least, with the idea of honesty. Now that his marriage has gone up in literal flames, Joe is free to follow the librarian he obsessed over as his marriage languished, Marienne Bellamy (Tati Gabrielle), to Paris.
It seems safe to bet we don’t know the whole story by the time the season’s first half is finished, but another character also seems to supplant Marienne. More fascinating this season is Joe’s relationship with another woman, Kate Lockwood (Charlotte Ritchie)—his neighbor and, coincidentally, the romantic partner of the corpse who turned up dead on Joe’s kitchen table.
You might imagine that given everything that Joe’s going through—a reminder: faking his death, missing his child, maintaining his ongoing denial about the circumstances under which he murdered his wife, finding his neighbor’s dead body, and also learning to drive on the left side of the road—he might not have time to stalk another woman. In this case, you would actually be right. The resulting dynamic feels distinct from anything we’ve seen on You before.
At first, Joe mostly sees Kate as an obstacle in his way as he tries to find out who’s stalking him. Over time, however, it becomes clear that both Joe and Kate are beginning to recognize pieces of themselves in one another. It’s in that unexpected connection where some of the season’s most fascinating work lies. Joe and Kate both seem interested in a kind of intimacy neither of them has known before, although neither of them seems to know how to get there.
As usual, Joe keeps himself to half-truths, but for a brief moment, one can eventually almost imagine a scene in which he tells her the real truth. Neither Joe nor Kate seems particularly well practiced in the art of trust, but nevertheless, they establish an implicit kind of trust that almost seems anathema to both of them.
Alas, Joe’s past (and that stalker) remain an ever-pressing burden—and Joe finds no shortage of suspects in Kate’s orbit, including Kate herself. But which one of these pampered monsters really has the gall to hack a man to death and frame someone else for his murder? Do any of them? It won’t take Benoit Blanc to solve this mystery, but how Joe moves on from it will be the big question as the series moves into Part 2 next month.
After so many years living behind a wall of lies, can Joe really open himself up to true intimacy? Probably not—but as usual, I’m perversely fascinated to find out how his romantic bubble might burst this time.
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