This article discusses major plot points, including the ending, of You season 3.
Joe Goldberg may be the terrifying protagonist of You, but You is not really a show about Joe Goldberg. It’s a show about the absurdity of contemporary social life—a bloody, pulpy, twisty, devastatingly funny satire of the overconfident and insufficiently introspective. Penn Badgley’s Joe is merely the scourge of this world, a murderous romantic who’s blind to the obvious flaws of the women he obsesses over, not to mention his own evident psychosis, but can see through the pathetic posturing of just about everyone else. In some senses, You is what you might get if Curb Your Enthusiasm’s “social assassin” Larry David were a literal assassin, violently vanquishing braggarts and navel gazers and empty-headed trend chasers of every variety.
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This is why You, whose spectacular third season is now streaming on Netflix, with a fourth already greenlighted, has had such surprising longevity. In its initial run on Lifetime, the show established a fact that seemed to eliminate any future potential for suspense: Joe would do anything to lock down his dream girl… and that included killing his dream girl. What was left to learn about this vile, deluded, pseudo-intellectual, faux-feminist wack job? Wouldn’t another season of watching him play cat-and-mouse with some poor woman feel like pure sadism?
But instead of repeating themselves after You became a Netflix smash, showrunner Sera Gamble and her team, continuing to take inspiration from Caroline Kepnes’ book series, made an ingenious pivot—to Los Angeles. Even as it satirized the “nice guy” outsider archetype that Badgley once embodied on Gossip Girl, season 1 had just as brutally sent up social media, app-based dating and the young, quasi-literary strivers of New York, Instagramming their way through expensive MFA programs while dreaming of seven-figure book deals. Season 2 brought his, er, unique psychology…
Source : time
