Blog: ‘You’
I did not see that coming. I thought I was mentally and emotionally prepared for season two of You and there wasn’t a whole lot they could surprise us with but I was wrong.
This is your official warning that this article contains SPOILERS about season two of You! So if you, for whatever absurd reason, have not finished watching it- stop reading this minute, go turn on Netflix and hop to it friend. And if you haven’t even watched a single episode of the show entirely, you are missing out on some seriously great content.
The new season takes us away from New York City to the other side of the country: Los Angeles. After Joe’s relationship with Beck (Elizabeth Lail) didn’t uh, exactly work out, Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) sets his sights on a new town and a new leading lady: Love Quinn (Victoria Pedretti). Mind you, the only reason he left New York was to get away from his scorned ex-girlfriend Candace (Ambyr Childers). Joe thought he had killed her but oops, she’s still alive and she’s out for blood. It’s only a matter of time before she finds out where he is and when she does, it’s so, so good.
As they started releasing teasers for the second season, I wondered how the writers had made it different. The first season was damn good but they couldn’t repeat the same formula: Boy sees girl, boy becomes obsessed and stalks girl, they date, it doesn’t end well, boy kills girl. If they wrote the second season in that same way but just substituted a new girl, I don’t think the audience would have been receptive to it. It would have been predictable and boring. The moment Love picked up that broken glass bottle and struck it to Candace’s throat, that right there sent me through the roof. What a twist! Every moment from then on, my eyes were bulging and my jaw was to the ground. I did not see that coming.
I think the writers did the work by sprinkling in the Quinn’s backstory leading up to that moment we find out that Love is arguably more batshit crazy than Joe. This bombshell of a plot twist wouldn’t have made a whole lot of sense without it, don’t ya think? If Love’s reasoning for killing Delilah and Candace had only been because she simply loves Joe and is sympathetic to his motives, I don’t think that would have been good enough justification for the character. And I loved this new situation for Joe: he’s the one stuck in a cage, referring to Love as a psychopath, trying to think of ways to trick the crazy person into letting him out. Oh, it’s just hilariously ironic.
Can we give a round of applause for the acting in this show? Hot damn is it brilliant! I can’t even tell you who I loved seeing on screen more because each character was so diverse and fascinating to watch with great character development. But good god you guys, can we stop referring to Joe Goldberg as Dan Humphrey from Gossip Girl? I get it. That was Penn Badgley’s iconic role and he does a fine job at playing moody and broody but Dan is not the same as Joe y’all. And for the record, none of you women should be saying that you wish Joe would stalk you. I would like to think that you wouldn’t want to end up dead and chopped into pieces alongside your family but hey, maybe that’s just me.
And how about that ending? For a second there I thought that season three was going to be a completely different storyline as we follow Joe and Love into abnormal parenthood. But when we get that last scene of Joe outside with his book, walking over to peek at his new neighbor through the fence and then he delivers that iconic line of “and then I saw you,” I became unhinged. This show has yet to let me down. It continues to slap me in the face with surprise over and over again.
The downside to releasing full seasons on a streaming platform like Netflix is that you’re waiting at least another year for the next season. I have no doubts that there will be a season three and in the meantime, I’m fancying the idea of rewatching both seasons. I have this ongoing struggle though- I want to rewatch so many shows (Stranger Things, Looking for Alaska, The Office) but I can’t justify doing so because there is so much other content out there that I haven’t seen yet. But people like rewatching shows and movies that they love. It’s familiar and in an odd way, gives us some sort of comfort. It makes us feel good. What do you think?
Season two of You is available now on Netflix.
