When I first heard about the Netflix series, YOU, I was not interested because it seemed like another show about boring white people. I wasn't entirely wrong but since the first episode, I have been hooked. It's not a typical thriller because we as the audience are always watching the action from multiple perspectives as the story goes on but the Joe's origin is what really drew me in. I love psychoanalyzing people and that includes fictional characters. I knew there had to be childhood issues that created Joe into the monster he doesn't think he is. Season 1 introduced us to Joe; season 2 gave us more backstory and season 3 basically finished the puzzle. Season 2 also introduced us to Joe's counterpart, Love. They both have maternal issues since childhood, causing them to be obsessive, possessive and murderous. But before I get too far in, if you want to know if you should watch it or not, watch it. (TW: Murder, domestic abuse, drug use, missing person)
Season 3 Overall Thoughts:
I hate bingeing tv shows because there really isn't enough interesting content for me to consume so I like to savor what I can. I watched Season 3, one episode a night at dinner and I do not regret my decision. Season 3 places us in the white suburbs. At first, Joe was having the most trouble connecting with their son because he is afraid that he will create a monster in his son and that his son knows he is evil. Love is dealing with postpartum life and adjusting to the new superficial community. I feel like Love mirrors how Joe felt when he first got to LA. Joe hated LA because he felt everyone was superficial. This is a nice touch because it shows how similar and different they are. Joe finds someone to take care of and someone to obsess over to handle living in LA. Love tries to assimilate and ignore her feelings about them in order to have the perfect suburban life for her, Joe and Henry. So throughout the season, watching Joe and Love navigate murder, marriage and a newborn was entertaining and a bit depressing.
I hate how marriage is portrayed in the media. I get most people watching don't analyze things like this but it really frustrates me to see either perfect marriages or broken marriages. Marriage has only recently become about love but I still believe most people marry people because they think it's love. This may sound naive but I truly believe a relationship between two healthy people who are aware of their feelings, emotions, trauma and responses and are dedicated to being healthy within themselves first, would know if a relationship is serving them or not. Granted, Love and Joe only got married because she was pregnant which is a sad reality but not enough to have a marriage founded upon.
Love was dedicated to murdering anyone who Joe was obsessed with but what she failed to realize was that he doesn't love her, no matter if she killed every woman in the world. He can't love her because she is a murderer of 'good" people. I don't think Love was a bigger monster than Joe. I think it was hard to tell because we weren't in Love's direct thoughts, only Joe's. I think they tried to make it seem like she was worse because she would come up with elaborate stories to cover their tracks but that didn't do enough for me. I feel like if they wanted to make Love the antagonist, they should have made her enjoy the kills and revel in them. Slowly but surely embracing her bloodlust and for the murders to slowly stop being about family.
The dynamic between Joe and Henry was interesting. Joe was trying to turn a new leaf and become the father he never had which, if this was the last season, could've been a really good moment for his character development. I imagine him learning to be a father and learning what love really is. We could get some internal dialogue about him rejecting everything his father was about so that his child would never follow his path. It could become a commentary on fathers and childhood. It could also work because he would see the evil in Love being murderous and have to fight for the ideal family he never had or fight against Love because ideal families don't exist. Instead, we have around 3 episodes of Joe finding ways to connect with Henry which were cute but I felt the development was short since he ended up leaving the baby to another family anyway.
Joe's library love interest, Marrienne was interesting. She was on Joe out of mistrust which was smart on her part and she also listened to Love when she told her to run away because Joe was dangerous. I know its a tv show so they have to develop characters and plotlines quickly but it seemed very out of character for her to fall in Love with Joe. I never understand why people fall in love with someone because they are nice or because they listen to you or because they are interested in what you have to say. One, people are great actors. Two, that's normal and healthy. People should be nice if they care about you but that doesnt mean its love. The tea is, when Joe finds out something that does not fit the perfect version of Marrienne he's created or if she wants to be with someone else, he will murder her. It's his pattern. I appreciate that the only two Black women on the show this season weren't murdered. We see enough Black murders in real life with no justice so there is no point in putting those gruesome scenes on tv. I also appreciate how both characters were more complex after we got past the surface. Marrienne's storyline about how the system protects her no-good white baby-daddy wa interesting. I think they could've done more but what they showed was exactly what happens in real life. White people's connections and money can get them further and that's not even counting implicit and explicit biases. I kept begging Joe to just kill that guy and to be honest, he did it way too late and way too messy. Both Love and Joe's murders were pretty messy and not at all like serial killers who are really meticulous about their murders. Otherwise, Marrienne was cool, artsy and smart enough to run. I don't think we need to see her next season because I can only imagine this going bad for her and her child.
There were some moments in the show where I was literally on the floor laughing. Joe’s reaction to their neighbors’ antics will always get me. Sherry and Cary really grew on me. At first, they were bizarre but hilarious and at the end they were still hilarious i just got over my hate of them. Joe’s internal reactions to Cary were my reactions to Cary and it was great. I wish we got to see more development or explanation for Love’s relationship with her mom. When the mom was trying to explain that her grandson was a reincarnated version of her dead son, I couldn't contain myself. I felt bad for her, ironically.
Speaking of mothers, I wish they played more into how both Joe and Love have deeply rooted mommy-issues that manifested in different ways and different coping mechanisms. When we find out how Joe's mom left him, I wanted to fight her. Its bizarre to think that you want to leave a kid behind because his father beat you. She was a dummy looking for outside love in all the wrong places. This doesn't excuse Joe for being a serial killer but it makes sense.
It felt a bit weird to follow Love's perspective when she isn't the main protagonist. We are in Joe's thoughts and feelings but we just watch Love as the audience and I think it's kind of weird, especially with the ending. I feel like even though we didn't get into Love's thoughts like we are in Joe's, we still were seeing her perspective and building a connection with her and so for her story to end like that felt abrupt and slightly out of place. But I guess Love had to die for Joe to move on.
I was not even planning on writing about this show but I was on twitter trying to have analytic discourse only to be met with memes and people lusting after murderers. Penn is sick of yall truly. He explained after Season 1, that the show speaks on how people will forgive a white man for anything including murder. I see it when people lust after Love and Joe and not the actors themselves and it makes me sick. These people are definitely part of the problem. They want to make movies and shows about real serial killers instead of finding them and putting them beneath the jails. And they even have followings.
Notable Characters
Love:
It was interesting to see how Love, as much as she hates snobby culture, try to fit in and ignore her values in hopes of giving Henry a normal life. I like to view these characters as 3 dimensional as I can, even the 'antagonists'. So to me, Love is delusional but will literally kill for her family. In one of their therapy sessions, Love says she must do these things to protect her family because if the outside world knew her true self, they would reject her (presumably). They wouldn't be able to love, accept or tolerate her the way her family does because the are family. We got a glimpse of this in season 2 where Love kills Forty's nanny. I believe she did it because she wanted to help Forty but also so she wouldn't lose him because of everything she sacrificed to be a family. Love mothered Forty because of their parent's issues and that choice left her with no childhood. She was always taking care of someone because she thinks it would make them stay in her life. We also see evidence of this when she explains to Joe her husband's murder.
I believe Love is afraid of rejection at her core. She wasn't popular in school which was dealt with by making friends she can joke about the bullies of society with, hence the "woke" friends in LA. Love also befriends Sherry in the suburbs, a woman who she literally watched gossip about her and her family. She does this as an excuse to get Henry further in their community but I feel like it also had to do with the fact that she was not accepted with open arms as she assumed. Her relationship with Sherry mirrors her relationship with her mother. I'm assuming that Love's mother ignored her child's emotional needs to give them things she never has, cover up their mistakes as opposed to fixing them and to cope with a toxic marriage. And so during her childhood, Love kept trying to take pressure off her mom and be the perfect daughter to gain her mother's approval and ultimately, her love.
Love says that she is used to relationships like the one she has with her mom. Love needs to please and take care of people in hopes that they will see her worth and stay by her side but that is not true love. At its core, its manipulation. Making someone need and rely on you is very manipulative. Surprisingly, her antics and coping mechanisms dont really work. They did not work with her mother, Sherry, or Joe. I wonder how she would have handled Henry as he grew older and more independent since she was already thinking about having another child.
I was hoping to learn more about the mysterious Quinn family but I think we found out enough to move the show along. Some people are speculating that she was still alive and escaped the house fire. If that's true, Joe is done. Love will be out for blood for real. I don't think she would find a new life to live.
Sherry and Cary:
I don't really enjoy interracial relations in media because of the erasure of Black relations since post-civil war. So I was not fond of these two and Sherry's stereotypical suburban voice was nails to a chalkboard. Cary was an extreme version of the meal prepping, body-obsessed guys. But as the season went on, I grew to enjoy them and fear that Joe and Love were going to murder them. Their best scenes were when they were trapped in the box. At first, they were calm and communicating with each other which I thought was cute and surprisingly healthy. They were open about their feelings and their situation. As time went on in the box, they slowly unraveled. When Love told them to choose who would leave the box while the other would be shot dead, I could not stop laughing. At first they were completely against it, but when it seemed hopeless, Sherry was using her active motherhood as a weapon to leave Cary behind. It made sense to me but the gun made them very much crazy. Them shooting each other on accident was hilarious. I was scared Cary was going to die but Sherry, being the brilliant Black woman she is, found out the secret of Love and Joe and their mistrust of each other, leading to her finding a key to get them out. Them creating a brand from their experience in the box was great. Sherry is a businesswoman afterall.
Sherry and Cary also have an open marriage. They require NDA's of course but I think the topic of an open marriage as a solution to bad marriage is interesting. I think open marriages can work for different people and different circumstances but I don't believe that an open marriage is the key to fixing a bad marriage. Again, I've never married so this may be naive of me but I think people who are only focused on sexual pleasure and desire want open marriages because they are insatiable. Marriage to me is more than sex. I never thought sex with one person could be boring because a marriage should mean more intimacy than just in the bedroom. I think marriage should be a safe space in a way. Open marriages are a big topic now because (I think) people are just getting married to people who are close or for the tax benefits.
I do not think Sherry and Cary were foils to Love and Joe but if they were that could've been an interesting development.
Theo:
Theo was giving knock-off/diet Ezra Miller but it worked for me. He was a little naive to be a 19 year old in college. I don't understand how he fell in love with Love. Because she was different than everyone else in the suburbs? Whoopty doo! It's not a strong enough reason to be in love but whatever. I thought he was going to be smart enough to know that Love was playing him to get more information. But he kept failing me. He believed it was Joe and kept trying to absolve Love from her hand in all of this.
I was scared he and his step-dad were going to be murdered. I liked what their relationship was suggesting. They were building while grieving which is something me and my family were going through at the same time. I liked to see how supportive both of them could be because it showed that they really did care about one another at the end of the day. I don't watch a lot of tv but it seems to me that step-parent relationships are usually portrayed as bumpy, abusive and/or nonexistent.
He was a sweet, naive kid so I'm glad he got to live and see who Love really is. So now he and his step dad can build their relationship.
Concluding Thoughts:
I think I am going to miss this little town a bit. I kinda want to see where they go after all the tragedies that have happened to their neighborhood. I think Joe suggested that it will make headlines and everyone will just forget in no time. I am scared of where Joe will go next. We see him in France presumably looking for Marrienne but I hope he doesn't find her because he hasn't learned any lessons and hasn't changed his behavior. I sort of like the idea of him learning to live with hi murderous urges. I think it could be interesting if they play into that idea without being weird about it. I am conflicted between wanting to see growth in Joe so that he can raise children in a healthy family and while being in a healthy relationship or if I want to see him get his karma. In real life, he would go on without punishment and no suspicions until it's too late. I will be tuning in for season four if they announce it!
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