Not many actors have been able to break out of the teen star mold and craft a different persona quite as drastically and successfully as Penn Badgley. He was best known for playing Dan in the prep school soap Gossip Girl for six seasons, until he took a gig playing the lead in a Lifetime thriller based on a book about a stalker, which told its story from the stalker’s perspective. Season 1 of You proved so popular that when it was canceled by Lifetime, it got picked up by Netflix, where Badgley won over audiences with his ongoing performance as Joe Goldberg, the serial killer we all find ourselves rooting for and then feel increasingly weird about.
And now Joe is back. The first half of You Season 4 drops on Netflix on Friday, February 9, and will see everybody’s favorite murderer with an inner monologue on new shores. When we last left Joe at the end of Season 3, he was in Paris, and when we are reunited with him in Season 4 he has hopped the channel and constructed a new identity and life for himself as a college literature professor in England.
Of course, not all of us are quite as obsessive as Joe, and it has been well over a year since we last saw him (Season 3 arrived on Netflix in October 2021). So just in case you’re having a hard time remembering the story so far, we’ve got you covered.
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What happened to Joe and Love in You Season 3?
After killing Beck, the object of his affection in Season 1, Joe relocated from New York to Los Angeles in Season 2, and immediately transferred his dangerous affection to Love Quinn (Victoria Pedretti). But plot twist! It turned out she was just as unhinged as he was, and after a blood-soaked courtship which ended with Love revealing she was pregnant, the two serial killers got married and moved out to the suburbs, which was where we met them in Season 3.
But the course of married life doesn’t always run smooth when you’re a pair of psychopaths, and after Joe found a new woman on whom to fixate in the form of their neighbor Natalie, Love’s possessive side resurfaced, and she killed her. Her and Joe’s relationship only suffered from there, and it wasn’t long before Joe became obsessed with someone new: Marienne, the librarian and single mother played by Tati Gabrielle. Marienne eventually fell for Joe, and they hatched a plan to start a new life together with her daughter Juliette and his son Henry.
How did the You Season 3 finale end?
On the night that Joe and Marienne were due to run away together, Joe went to collect Henry from kindly librarian Dante and his husband Lansing, who had been babysitting him, only to learn that Love already picked him up. What followed was a tense showdown in the Quinn-Goldberg household: Love injected Joe with a paralyzing agent and planned to murder him, but she misjudged the dosage and Joe physically overpowered her, and killed her.
Knowing that he now had a trail of bodies leading right to him, Joe faked his own death: he cut off his own toes to leave behind as proof, then framed Love for his murder, making her death look like a suicide. And he burned down their marital home for good measure, to eradicate any evidence that didn’t fit the narrative he had constructed.
The final moments of Season 3 show Joe alive and well, living in Paris and presumably still pining for Marienne, given that he pays particularly close attention to a young woman who bears a striking resemblance to her. “All I know, mon amour, is I’ll search the world if I have to. I will find You,” he says in voiceover.
What happened to Joe and Love’s baby in You Season 3?
One of the recurring plot points in Season 3 was Joe’s fear that his son would grow up to be just as destructive as his parents, especially given how much death he had already witnessed as a baby. Following Love’s death in the finale, Joe decided that Henry’s best chance at a normal life would be if he was raised by somebody else. After faking his death, Joe left Henry in the care of kindly librarian Dante and his husband Lansing, accompanied by a letter expressing his “dying wish” that they raise him as their own, knowing they would both be better parents than him and Love.
And that’s what you missed on You!
Philip Ellis is a freelance writer and journalist from the United Kingdom covering pop culture, relationships and LGBTQ+ issues. His work has appeared in GQ, Teen Vogue, Man Repeller and MTV.
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