Editor's note: The below contains spoilers for Part 2 of You Season 4.Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) is back in all of his glory for Part 2 of You. The first five episodes go down a different path in which Joe, now going by Jonathan Moore, is the one attempting to solve who is behind the Eat the Rich killings. It's a complete 180 from the first three seasons and offers a refreshing look at the lead being a fish out of water. Yet, when we pick back up with Part 2, it doesn't take long to feel back at home with Badgley’s character.
The fourth season is a whirlwind as it truly feels like two different shows because of the twist and turns that unfold, particularly in Part 2, and if you're left wondering what or how something happened, you're not alone. Showrunner Sera Gamble and the season's writers got quite creative in their storytelling this season and utilized some misdirections to set up a thrilling finish to the fourth season. So how did You pull off all of those surprises, including that big reveal?
Joe Is Rhys, But Rhys Isn’t Joe
The biggest fakeout to date in You is dropped in the eighth episode when it's revealed that Joe was actually behind all of the murders that played out in Part 1. That's because Joe is hallucinating the entire time, with a second personality of his depicted as Rhys Montrose (Ed Speleers). When viewers see Rhys in Part 1, he actually isn’t there, as the show explains in Part 2. The killings that were supposedly carried out by him, which include Malcolm (Stephen Hagan), Simon (Aidan Cheng), and Gemma (Eve Austin), were actually all of Joe’s doing — though in his mind, he had removed himself so far from that darkness that he had no clue this other personality of his was actually the one responsible. What sets forth this reveal is Joe going and finding the real Rhys, tying him up in a barn, and torturing him because Kate’s (Charlotte Ritchie) father, Tom Lockwood (Greg Kinnear), wants him dead and believes Joe is more than capable of doing so — since he knows all about what transpired in Madre Linda back in Season 3. Joe ends up killing the real Rhys, and that's when the fake Rhys returns on screen, setting forth this wild turn.
Part 2 goes on to explain that Joe didn’t just randomly settle on Rhys becoming this second personality of his. It was a calculated approach, one in which Joe stalked the real Rhys and learned everything he could about him, including taking endless notes on his autobiography and keeping one of his signature boxes tucked away in his bookshelf. We’ve seen Joe do this before through each of the first three seasons, so it was very on-brand for him to continue this trend once again. How he got to this point was a reveal explored through flashbacks, as Joe dealt with the realization that he had killed his wife (Victoria Pedretti), left his son, and was unable to track down the one who he thought was right for him in Marienne (Tati Gabrielle). What actually sets him down this new path, however, is the next reveal: Marienne is the one he's been keeping in a cage the entire time!
The Cage Makes Yet Another Appearance
I posed this question previously when wondering how long the premise of You can last, but seriously, how is it this easy to pack up this giant plexiglass structure and transport it across international waters? Let’s just suspend our disbelief, because the show reintroduces Joe’s infamous jail cell, with Marienne inside of it, when Nadia (Amy-Leigh Hickman) is the one to discover her there. Professor Moore’s student has this gut feeling that something is off with him and breaks into his flat, where she finds a clue pointing towards Tandoori Tradition, a restaurant that just so happens to have a creepy and vacant shelter next to it. She winds up finding this lair of his and stumbles upon Marienne, who is still alive but struggling to hang on because she hasn’t been fed in quite a bit of time. When we last saw Marienne in Part 1, Joe had tracked her down in Europe, chased her through a market, and eventually followed her to a train station before she headed off — seemingly on her way to a new life. That was, in fact, not the case as Joe had slipped something in her drink when he intentionally bumped into her at the station, kidnapped her, and transported her to his apartment before eventually taking her to the cage.
So why did it take up until the final scene in the seventh episode to see Marienne in this cage? That’s eventually explained, as is how Joe’s personality is split (or at least the moment in which we see that switch go off in his head). Episode 8 retells the story through Marienne’s perspective, some of which we have seen, but the rest of the tale explains the key parts that Joe had turned a blind eye to. In it, we see Joe’s obsession with Rhys beginning as he’s watching videos of him online in an effort to study him, seemingly blocking everything that’s going on in the room including Marienne as he’s in a trance with the video playing. Once he transports her to the cage, he begins to lose it, banging his head on the glass, and it’s in that fleeting scene when he snaps into his new persona, the one we previously saw play out as the fake Rhys. It’s also at this moment that he erases everything in his mind about Marienne, never returning to feed her (throughout the Part 1 episodes, presumably) or check in on her. He ends up becoming so detached from reality that he blocks everything out that he did and everything that he ends up doing as the Eat The Rich killer because he’s so steadfast on changing and beginning a new life — but in reality, he can’t escape the grasp of this dark side in him.
That Bridge Scene Where it All Seemed Over
Upon his realization of all that he had done, from killing the real Rhys to the prior three murders and everything that he had done to Marienne, Joe finally realizes how dangerous he is. For the time in this series, it appears that he understands that he’s the problem — and the show cleverly incorporates yet another Taylor Swift song when “Anti-Hero” is heard playing (Season 3 featured “Exile” in the finale). Before that high-stakes bridge scene, Joe discovers Marienne has died in his cage, and he understands that he must be stopped. He takes her body to a local park and leaves it there on a bench before heading to the bridge. However, what Joe doesn’t realize is that Marienne and Nadia had concocted a plan in which Marienne would fake her death with an injection that would slow her heartbeat down just enough to make it convincing — and Nadia would follow Joe to the park to revive her after he leaves.
Believing he has killed Marianne, Joe makes his way to a bridge where he battles his inner demons. His other personality attempts to beg for his life, desperately trying to remain a part of Joe. In a flash, Joe tosses the fake Rhys over the bridge, metaphorically throwing his demon out of the picture. He doesn’t stop there, however, as he stands on the side of the bridge and takes the plunge to the bottom of the water in an attempted suicide. The writers really pull out all the stops in this episode to convince the viewers at that moment that this is it for the show, especially with no word on a Season 5 renewal. A few scenes go by, though, and it’s later revealed that his suicide efforts were thwarted as his body washes up ashore, and Joe later awakens in a hospital bed with his only visitor being Kate.
Joe Lays All the Cards on the Table to Begin His New Life
It’s pretty impressive how Joe continues to find women who aren’t totally deterred by his actions. Kate never seemed like someone who would tolerate Joe's past, but we see him explain who he really is and that he has been responsible for killing people before. She somehow looks past that and the two eventually move back to New York City (where Season 1 began) with Kate in charge of her father’s company. Prior to Joe's attempt at suicide, we also see Joe kill Kate’s father, as well as his personal bodyguard, when it's revealed that Tom has been behind every one of Kate’s successes to her dismay.
In the middle of an interview between a journalist and Kate and Joe, the episode flashes back to the final loose end is handled with Nadia. Once Joe learns that his student knows all about him and Marienne, there is no way he is going to let her take him down. He confronts her outside on a quiet street where he gives her the option to remain alive or join the others he's killed. Nadia ends up in prison after Joe frames her for all the other murders. With everything all wrapped up in London, we return to that scene in New York. The important takeaways before the end credits kick in are that Joe bought a bookstore that was about to close down (most likely it’s Mooney’s), he and Kate aren’t married yet — though he tells the reporter he’d love to elope — and through Kate’s connections with power and money, his entire doings in Madre Linda are scrubbed away. In the public’s eyes now, Joe escaped an abusive partner in Love, placed Henry in a safe position away from his mother, and is now considered this white knight for how he was able to escape this concocted harm.
After a Part 1 that felt out of place, You delivered on all fronts over the final five episodes. While it felt disconnected from its traditional narrative in its first half, the show was able to bring it all together in a way that felt like a real Joe Goldberg story and one that actually contained some stakes. After all, the final episode was titled “The Death of Jonathan Moore,” with the show infusing a certain amount of doubt into viewers' minds about whether this would conclude Badgley's time on the show. Instead, You finds itself all set up for a renewal. By going back to the Big Apple, there is a full circle finale waiting to happen if Season 5 does end up being the series' last. It would be a fitting way for Joe’s story to conclude in the place where it all began, but for now, we still need to take a moment and catch our breaths after Part 2's captivating finish.
All four seasons of YOU are now available to stream on Netflix.
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