It’s the last day of class for Joe, who has decided to kill himself, but not before he runs a few final errands, like teaching his young charges about Tobias Wolff’s story “Bullet in the Brain” (just in case you were wondering where we were heading). Conspicuously absent from today’s seminar: Nadia. Class is cut short by the news that Rhys Montrose’s dead body was found in the woods.
Where was Nadia? Busy assuring Edward that he is not just her fling or her drug dealer: He is the only person she can trust. To this end, she shows him that story about “The Murder/Suicide of Madre Linda” that ran in the Cut, hi!! (How are there no photos of Joe in that story?) Nadia brings Edward to the decrepit basement but the human aquarium — which she neglected to photograph! WHY? — is gone. Still, Edward believes her and her explanation for why they can’t call the police, from whom Joe will only squirm away yet again. Later, Edward delivers quite the gift: a USB stick with everything his dad had on the Eat-the-Rich murders and Rhys Montrose so they can catch “Professor Goldberg.”
While Joe crafts a suicide note, Hallucination Rhys/Shadow Joe suggests turning his attention elsewhere: Tom Lockwood wants him gone and may well frame Joe for killing Rhys. (I mean, it’s not really framing since Joe did, in fact, kill Rhys … it’s just pointing everybody in the right direction, no?) As Joe contemplates this, he gets a text from Kate, “Come over 999,” which, as we know, is British for 911, so he rushes over.
“How much do you know about stalkers?” is Kate’s unintentionally hilarious question for her stalker boyfriend before she explains how her dad was interfering with every single detail about her life, including keeping a file on “my menstrual cycle and every blowjob I’d ever given.” Yikes! Kate sobs that her dad owns her and that she fears Joe (who she is still calling Jonathan) is also not real. Oh boy. Joe and Hallucination Rhys/Shadow Joe agree: Tom Lockwood needs to die.
Joe has decided to accept that Hallucination Rhys/Shadow Joe is Joe. They are all Joe! But JOE — the one who is going by Jonathan — is the one who is in control. Hierarchy established, it’s time to work together. Hallucination Rhys/Shadow Joe knows Kate’s passcode (Rothko’s birthday), and they use Kate’s phone to text Lockwood as Kate about meeting at the workshop.
Joe arrives at the workshop in his murder-y finest and is ready to chloroform Lockwood, but then his shoes squeak on the floor. He thinks very quickly on those squeaky feet and cops to sending the text as Kate, but only because he couldn’t exactly send a message to Lockwood’s assistant like “Hey, I need a quick chat with Tom about the guy I killed for him.” Apparently, there’s DNA on Rhys’ body, though Lockwood assures Joe it won’t be a problem. HMM. Joe doesn’t trust this. As tends to happen to people who meet Joe Goldberg, Tom Lockwood loses consciousness and wakes up cuffed to a chair.
Lockwood knows that Kate told Joe all about his, ahh, very hands-on parenting. Hugo, a Lockwood lackey, arrives, giving Joe no choice but to do an in-cold-blood murder, just a full knife to the jugular situation. Hallucination Rhys/Shadow Joe suggests they kill Lockwood and make Hugo look like a murderer. Lockwood — who is impossibly calm considering he just watched Joe slash a dude’s throat — tries to pitch Joe on a deal wherein Joe can be “very rich in a couple of seconds” if only he’ll hand over his phone. Lockwood tries to reach Joe in that tender place of “I too grew up with nothing” or whatever; he says the classic villain line of, “You and I are the same!” But it’s no use. Joe suffocates him with a plastic bag and duct tape. Hallucination Rhys/Shadow Joe approves.
Joe learns that Lockwood loved codes and ciphers and such, so he figures out Lockwood’s banking information with improbable swiftness and then sets it up so it looks like Hugo stole $2 million from Lockwood, then got carried away and killed him, and then vanished. As Joe buries Hugo’s body, he tells himself this is the LAST corpse. No, but seriously this time he MEANS it.
I don’t enjoy watching murders as a general rule, but this is one of the sequences of the episode that made me feel like the whole season was such a missed opportunity. We spent nine episodes watching Joe chase his tail, be totally in the dark, and whiff at everything. It’s way more fun to watch this guy in his ZONE. This is jumping ahead a bit, but the way he deals with Nadia is so cruel and delectable — that swagger that makes him such a great bad guy is back. His torment is nowhere near as compelling. A deeply confused protagonist/antihero/central character makes for a dull, annoying narrative.
Joe goes to the Thames (I assume? Probably there are other important bodies of water around, you tell me) and chucks his phone into the water rather than take a call from Kate, with whom he has decided he has no future because — epiphany alert — he realizes he will kill her. “Every time I try. I make it perfect. It’s never enough.” He sees now that Hallucination Rhys/Shadow Joe is “full of shit,” though he says as much with warmth. Hallucination Rhys/Shadow Joe is so hurt that Joe despises him(self), since he loves Joe. Joe gives him(self) a hug, throws Hallucination Rhys/Shadow Joe into the water, and then jumps in … and instantly regrets it. Why is he giving up on fair Kate, who does not know him at all and would despise him if she did because he is just like her father, who has made a mockery of her entire existence?!? He wishes he had fought harder for her!
Meanwhile, Nadia and Edward have a very sweet moment in the library where they proclaim their deep affection for one another. Nadia gets Edward to swear he’ll never tell anybody this, and then she reveals how she and Marienne relied on a super-secret plan B to get Marienne out of the human aquarium: Nadia saved her own phone number under Beatrice’s name in Marienne’s phone, so when Joe thought he was texting with Juliette’s sitter, he was actually confabbing with Nadia. Marienne left a fake suicide note for Joe and took beta blockers to slow her heart rate wayyyy down. Then Nadia followed Joe as he left Marienne on a park bench, staging her “death” like an overdose. Once he split, Nadia injected Marienne with … ketamine? Some other drug? Whatever would wake somebody up; I’m not a scientist. And it worked! The girls realized that if Joe couldn’t die, the next best thing was for him to believe Marienne was dead — that was the only way he’d ever leave her alone. Eventually, we see Marienne reunited with her daughter and presumably maintaining the lowest of profiles for the rest of her traumatized days. Edward says Nadia is a “superhero,” but she’s still on edge: Joe will never let anything go, she says. “He’s an obsessive.”
Personally, at this point, I would’ve taken the win and run for the hills. But brave Nadia and Edward decide to return to Joe’s flat to see where he would have kept souvenirs from his victims, so they have some hard evidence.
Joe regains consciousness in a hospital. It turns out he died in the water, but just briefly before the police pulled him out. Hallucination Rhys/Shadow Joe is nowhere to be seen, but Kate is here looking quite appalled. He admits that he did not fall but jumped and tells her, for the ten millionth time, that he’s done terrible things. FINALLY, she asks for specifics, and he says, “I’ve killed people.” Kate is being REMARKABLY CALM about that! For a woman who was so critical of Phoebe leaping into marriage with Adam, our Kate shows an equally damning lack of judgment here!! Especially considering her dad WAS JUST MURDERED. Girl, put two and two together!
Kate knows Joe killed Rhys because Lockwood “made” him do it, so she had the crime scene futzed with so the DNA on the body would be “inconclusive.” Her father, she says, left her everything. She is relying on Joe as a character reference because as long as he is there, she can’t be a bad person?! KATE. Though she has spent her entire adult life fleeing from the cage her dad built for her, and his death offers her the first real shot she’s ever had at escaping from his world, Kate decides that with Joe at her side, she can take over the company after all. Joe is deliriously happy. His girlfriend, who helps cover up murders and such, and he, a serial killer, can “keep each other good.” She asks what she needs to know about his past to move forward, so he takes it from the top and tells her his real name.
Nadia finds Joe’s box while Edward keeps watch. Edward tells her to take pictures of everything and GET OUT. I wish she would text these photos to him or save them in the cloud or SOMEthing, but she does not, and when she goes to meet him at the car, the man she finds waiting for her is Joe. He takes her phone, deletes all the incriminating pictures, and promises not to hurt her. He has resources now! He can make this work for everyone! But then he doesn’t even make her an offer that isn’t horrible, and instead, she just stumbles over Edward’s dead body. All that matters, he tells her, is NOT that he’s done bad things but that there’s always the opportunity for REDEMPTION. He gives Nadia the knife he used to gut her boyfriend and tells her, in a maniac’s perfect cheery voice, “Tell them all about me. No one’s going to believe you.”
He’ll be stashing the box of Rhys’s things in Nadia’s bedroom; an anonymous tipster, who will turn out to be Edward, will have turned Nadia in, “which is why you killed him,” Joe helpfully explains. “You have so many gifts. I’m looking forward to seeing what you do next.” As the season ends, she’s in prison, having said not a word in her own defense. Joe approves. And I say: Ughhhh, this is GREAT! This is so much more fun than everything else we’ve seen all season!! WHY did we have to spend nine hours watching this guy try to be good and feel all conflicted and confused when we could’ve watched him Jack-the-Ripper his way through London in his ill-advised quest for redemption through carnage?
In case you care about what happened to all the characters we have not cared about all season: Blessing and Sophie bought Sundry House, Roald shot a friend by accident on a hunting trip, Connie fell off the wagon after about a week, but he is still meditating. Phoebe is teaching English to kids in Thailand, leaving her London life and fame behind her. Do we ever learn what Joe said to her in the season premiere? Nope!! A thread left dangling specifically to torture your recapper!
Joe comes out as Joe Goldberg, but alongside Kate and with the phalanx of PR resources now at his disposal, to control his “okay, it’s complicated, but let me explain” narrative: his ex, Love, was “deeply troubled,” and abandoning his son was the best thing he could have done for him. (I don’t want to work a baby into the plot again, but it is very funny that even “redeemed” Joe is making zero effort to get his son back.) Joe and Kate are a philanthropy power couple now — he also bought a bookstore, and they’re back in America — and for this new chapter, I am sorry to report that Joe is clean-shaven and has shorter hair. He’s so excited to have all the tools he needs to make the world a better place! One of those tools is definitely murder. But now he also has money and power. Though not having those things never seemed to stop him before.
As of this writing, we don’t know the endgame for You (like how many seasons they envision doing), BUT as long as we’re going back to America and running out of narrative steam, I will put in my pitch for a series finale: I know Jenna Ortega is quite busy these days, but in my opinion, it would be immensely satisfying for Ellie to be the one who ultimately bests Joe, possibly in collaboration with some of our supporting-cast faves (Sherry from Madre Linda, Ethan from the bookstore). What are your predictions/hopes/dreams/fears? Are you all committed to stalking this stalker until his final days?
