You Netflix: What Happened In The First Three Seasons? Read Before Season 4
You Season 4 Part 1 debuts today February 9, 2023, on the Netflix streaming platform. Before embarking on this new adventure, however, let’s take stock of the situation: where were we? What has Joe Goldberg been up to over the years? Here is our recap of the first three seasons of You. Before Marienne was the mysterious woman beyond the fence. Before her, however, there was Love Quinn and before Love, there was Guinevere Beck. Our story begins with her, the first woman we met who had the misfortune to lay eyes on Joe Goldberg, the owner of an independent bookstore who enjoys various extracurricular activities that include stalking and murder.
The Recap of The First Three Seasons of You: Joe and Beck?
In You Season 1, Joe works at a New York bookstore when he meets and becomes infatuated with Guinevere Beck, an aspiring writer. Joe’s obsession with him leads him to persecute Beck and commit various murders to eliminate anyone who stands in the way of their “love story” (in his distorted view), returning to an old pattern that he promised himself to abandon for Always. During the first season, Joe left behind a trail of corpses before fleeing like hell to Los Angeles.
First up is Benjamin “Benji” J. Ashby III, Beck’s ex-boyfriend/situation when Joe set his sights on the girl. Benji treated Beck in “not nice” ways and that brought Joe to his breaking point. He’s back on his old pattern of madness and psychopathy. Joe lures Benji into the basement of his bookstore and then stuns him and locks him in his cage, making him his first victim that the public has the pleasure – so to speak – of seeing. Benji tries to convince the boy to let him go but his fate is already sealed. Joe kills Benji with peanut oil – to which the boy was allergic. We spare you the details of his death and what Joe then had to do to get rid of his body.
You Season 1: A Toxic Friendship
Peach is Beck’s beautiful and privileged best friend, clearly in love with the latter. If we think about it deeply, in fact, Peach and Joe have nothing in common, except for one small thing: the obsession with Beck. As the episodes go by, we will begin to understand that Peach is a particularly toxic friend, who wants to control Beck with the excuse of “taking care of her”. Joe, who sees eliminating Beck’s toxic friends as a necessity to keep her “safe”, kicks off her plan. He first attempts to kill Peach while she is jogging in Central Park. He hits her on the head with a rock, knocking her unconscious and leaving her in a pool of blood. To the amazement of the audience, Peach survives the attack, though not knowing who attacked her. Only when Peach convinces Beck to stay with her at her family’s vacation home in Greenwich does Joe make a last-ditch move to eliminate Peach for good.
He follows the girls to Greenwich and hides out in Peach’s house until she catches him. As Joe runs to escape, Peach manages to shoot him in the leg. He pretends to be unconscious before tripping her and killing her with his gun. Eventually, Joe will make everyone believe that Peach committed suicide. Later in the series, we learn that Joe had killed before. He had killed Elijah Thornton, the music producer with whom Candace, Joe’s ex-girlfriend, cheated on him. We also learn that Joe tried to kill Candace, his ex-girlfriend. Finally, among Joe’s victims, we also find Ron, the neighbor, and poor Guinevere Beck.
You Season 1: Season Finale
Episode 9 concludes with Beck finding Joe’s secret box, filled with everything one would never want to discover in one’s boyfriend’s ceiling, most notably a jar of teeth. Joe horrified, knocks her unconscious before she can escape. When she wakes up she discovers that she is locked up in Joe’s cage. During the final episode, the tenth, Joe does everything possible to make Beck understand why he behaved in that way, even going so far as to kill people. He reveals to Beck that Benji and Peach were dangerous to her, showing her evidence and videos that back up her story. He’s also keen to point out that, unlike them, he was just trying to keep her safe. He begs her to understand that for love she would do anything for the other. But Beck is naturally terrified.
Joe insists and desperately tries to make her understand his love for her. At one point Beck realizes the power of deception and feigns affection for her Joe, even convincing him to let her out of the cage just so she can use the bathroom. Joe, easily swayed by Beck’s emotional performance, pulls out the key when Beck makes a crucial mistake and takes a look at the ladder. With deep disappointment, Joe tells her that he can’t get her out of her. At that point, Joe leaves and goes home. After helping neighbor Claudia’s son Paco fix Ron, Joe returns to Beck. The girl manages to dupe Joe, who lets her out, starting the final phase: Beck locks Joe inside the cage and rushes at her on the stairs.
To his terror, he discovers that the door is locked, and he needs a key. Just as he bangs and shakes the gate, Paco appears. When the woman begs him to let her out, telling him that Joe is a murderer, Paco slowly backs away before running out of the shop. Beck runs downstairs to look for the keys when he discovers that Joe had a spare key hidden in the cage and managed to get out. The rest, well, you can imagine. However, things do not end here: with a twist, we discover that Candace, the ex-girlfriend we thought was dead, is not. She is alive and well and she has only one goal: to ruin Joe’s life.
You Season 2: Los Angeles and Love Quinn
After his disastrous relationship with Beck, and Candace’s unexpected return from the dead, Joe has no choice but to abandon New York and move to the most unlikely place in the world: Los Angeles. Our favorite killer decides to abandon love (which he has continually lived in a distorted way) and to give up, once and for all, having someone next to him. Like many other wandering souls who came to Los Angeles before him, Joe uses this move as an opportunity to reinvent himself, even changing his name. So please welcome Will Bettelheim. Here too we have beard make-up. Will is the pseudonym of another man who has spent the last ten years of his life fortifying this identity of him. Thus, Joe’s false identity is someone else’s false identity.
The thing is, Joe doesn’t have ten years to invent and plant a false identity, so he just kidnaps and traps “Will” so that he, Joe, can become Will. Our Will/Joe begins the season locked away in Joe’s special homicide cage that he has rebuilt in a warehouse in Los Angeles. The real Will is good at hacking and Joe keeps him alive for some time so he can help with some errands. Eventually, Will makes it out alive but keeps in touch with Joe for some strange reason. Often, however, Joe also behaves like a human being. In Los Angeles he has a job: the boy works at Anavrin, a grocery store that is also a bookstore. And it is precisely here that he runs into another love interest with an unlikely name: Love Quinn.
When Joe and we meet Love, the girl seems to be his next victim. Everything about their chance encounters was staged by Joe, who lives across from her and has been spying on her since she arrived in Los Angeles. We then begin to worry about the girl. However, the series will reveal an unlikely and incredible twist. Over the course of the episodes, we will understand that Joe and Love are perfect to be together because she is perhaps crazier than him. After discovering the past – the real past – of Joe, Love seems to be even more in love with the boy. We also learn that the girl killed her in the past, only that her family covered up everything because, in short, you can do anything with money.
The love story between Love and Joe begins and it too is inevitably stained with blood – of others, of course. Among the victims of Netflix’s craziest duo, we remember Delilah, Joe’s neighbor with whom the boy had a couple of nights of passion, or Ellie’s older sister, whom many of you have known as Wednesday Addams. Joe finds Delilah dead in her cage, in a pool of her blood, after he locked her in when she discovered his secret life as a cold-blooded killer. Joe has no recollection of what happened and assumes he was the one who killed her. Even Candace, after discovering the girl’s lifeless body, assumes it was Joe.
Then, after locking him in his cage, Candace calls Love to explain what happened. At that point, Love reaches Candace and to protect Joe from her he cuts her throat. But the twists don’t end there. After this event, we will find out that it was Love who killed Delilah, again to protect Joe. The most tragic death, however, will always remain that of Forty. Indeed, in the season 2 finale, Forty begins to put the pieces together and learns the truth about Joe. He had already discovered and accepted that Joe had used a false name, but once it is known for certain that Joe is a murderer, Forty runs to warn Love. Of course, Forty doesn’t know that Love already knows everything there is to know about Joe and is hatching a plan with the latter to calm Forty and convince him that his beliefs about Joe are just illusions. In the showdown at Anavrin, Forty holds a gun to Joe’s head. The protagonist closes his eyes and seems to accept his fate when Los Angeles police officer David Fincher, Delilah’s lifelong companion, bursts in and shoots Forty.
Your Season 2: Season Finale
Joe is locked in his cage and Love watches him from outside. After admitting to her murders, she confides in him that she understands him and that they’ve both been forced to do bad things to protect the people they care about. Love points out that she and Joe are equal, they’re soul mates and in a way, we can’t blame her. Joe is horrified by those words and Love’s confessions about the deaths of Candace and Delilah. At that point, therefore, he wonders what will happen to little Ellie. Love reveals that he has already thought of a plan for Ellie. He framed Ellie for Henderson’s death, but only so he could set her up with the Quinn family’s attorney, who will drop the case due to lack of evidence and the fact that Ellie is a 15-year-old girl. Then, Delilah’s body will be found with a suicide note, revealing Henderson’s true nature and making her a feminist icon, effectively closing Ellie’s case.
Finally, Ellie will walk away with compensation that will keep her for life. Joe is dumbfounded – and so are we. Despite this, Joe convinces Love to let him out of the cage. As soon as he comes out of the cage, Joe tries to kill Love but she immediately drops the final bombshell: she’s pregnant with her. Joe, amazed by her revelation, realizes that he can’t kill her. He resigns himself to spending his life with Love to be the father he never had, even as his image of Love is completely shattered. In the final scene, we see that Joe and Love have moved to the suburbs of California. Love is far into the pregnancy and Joe delivers his final monologue of the season. The protagonist can’t wait to meet his son, even if he says he has resigned himself to living in a cage he built himself. Until he realized that fate works in mysterious ways. All the traumatic events that have occurred up to this moment have led him to the perfect place to meet… “You”, the mysterious woman who lives on the other side of the fence.
You Season 3: A Disastrous Marriage
Our recap of the first three seasons of You continues with the final season, the third. The first episode of the third season moves quickly showing us that the couple is struggling to adjust to their new environment. However, that doesn’t stop Joe from finding his next obsession, their neighbor Natalie. His obsession knows no bounds, as he steals some of her possessions as souvenirs and kisses her before she stops them from going any further. When Love discovers her possessions, she becomes enraged and kills her in the basement of her new bakery. Unfortunately for her, the dead woman’s husband, Matthew, immediately begins to suspect something. Before the couple can act, both Henry – Love and Joe’s son – and Joe contract measles.
Love discovers that Gil, an anti-vaccine neighbor who refused to vaccinate his daughters, is responsible for the incident. Love flies into a rage and knocks him unconscious and, as usual, the pair lock him in the glass cage in the basement. They don’t want to kill him, so they dig into his past for something they can use against Gil. They eventually discover that their son is a sexual predator, but this news devastates Gil so much that he hangs himself in the cage. Desperate Joe and Love decide to frame him for Natalie’s murder, thus also explaining the reason for her suicide. All of this is pretty much a regular hitch for the couple, if only they worked to keep the peace.
Life as a mother isn’t easy for Love, who no longer feels the passion between her and Joe. At that point, therefore, the woman begins a relationship with Theo, Matthew’s son, while Joe begins to persecute Marianne, his new boss. She is a recovering drug addict who is fighting over custody of her daughter with her ex-husband Ryan. As Joe’s obsession with her grows, Love discovers Matthew is illegally stalking the neighborhood and starts dating Theo again to keep tabs on her father. Meanwhile, Sherry, a friend of Love’s, reveals that she and her husband Cary want to try swapping with Love and Joe. Joe accepts, hoping this will allow him to find a cause for separation from his wife. But it all backfires on her when Love confronts him by revealing that she thinks he’s interested in someone else. She reminds him that she killed Natalie for the sake of their marriage. This conversation, however, is overheard by Sherry and Cary, who are locked in the basement by Joe and Love. Oops, here we go again.
Your Season 3: Season Finale
The pair’s murderous misadventures continue when Joe kills Ryan after the latter catches the former tailing him. This murder also ends the custody battle for Marianne. Unfortunately, when Theo shows up to meet Love with the backup of the deleted footage, he sees Sherry and Cary being held, hostage. Before he can do anything, he is knocked out by Love. Technically, Joe was supposed to go along with Love’s plan, but it seems he’s up to something of his own. He takes Theo to the hospital and asks Love for a divorce. But she injects him with a poison that completely paralyzes him. After discovering that he is in love with Marianne, Love considers killing her but changes her mind when he sees her daughter. Instead, Love warns her about Joe and tells her that she killed Ryan. Love returns to Joe intending to kill him, but he outsmarts her.
He injects her with the same drug he used on him, effectively rendering her unable to move. At that point, all of Joe’s thoughts turn to Henry, who deserves a better family. He decides to leave his son with his colleague, Dante and then returns to his house, where he cuts off two toes and sets the house on fire. Joe wants the world to believe that Love killed herself after killing him. Also, he writes a note blaming her for all the murders in town. At the end of season three, we see that Henry is in safe hands with Dante and that Sherry and Cary have become more famous through the publication of their ordeal. Matthew and Theo are also getting closer. Joe leaves for Paris, probably to find and stalk Marianne. He has freed himself from the chains of his “perfect match” and can finally go back to doing what makes him happiest: stalking and killing.
