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Illustration by Sevinch Rakhmon-Zoda

You Season Four: Penn Badgley’s soapy thriller is awful(ly entertaining)

The fourth season of Netflix’s hit-series You released two weeks ago… but is the series still all that it is hyped up to be? Or does the plot reflect lazy writing, causing its viewers to not think too much about what is actually happening?

Feb 20, 2023

This review contains spoilers.
Hello, You. Joe Goldberg’s (Penn Badgley) infamously menacing voiceover is guaranteed to send chills down the spines of all those who watch Netflix’s stalker hit series, You. Coming back for its fourth season, which dropped its first five episodes on Feb. 9, Joe’s murder-fest pulls off an Agatha Christie–style whodunit, and spoiler alert, somebody dies!
Over the past seasons, we have seen Joe fall in (and out) of love with a few unlucky ladies. In season one, we are introduced to Guinevere Beck (Elizabeth Lail), an intriguing writer who becomes Joe’s fixation. Although they go on to date throughout the season she ultimately pieces together his murderous and stalkery tendencies, given his scary obsession with her. However, Joe seems to always be one step ahead of his lovers. Before she even gets the chance to process what is happening, he already has her locked in his underground cage where he eventually murders her. Yikes.
Season two seemed to be heading in the same direction, but this time Joe seems to have met his match. You had made the mistake of pairing Joe with a woman called Love (Victoria Pedretti), who shared similar tendencies to Joe, to say the least. Love constantly tried to keep the relationship stable by proving to Joe that she was just as willing to kill for him like he did for her. Yet, that wasn't enough for Joe. Only months into their dysfunctional marriage, he had already found his new love interest, bookstore worker Marienne (Tati Gabrielle).
And even though Love was just as unhinged as Joe, he always seemed to outsmart her. By the end of season three, Joe deemed her too much of a killer for him. Like Beck, Love had to go, leaving us with the ongoing antic about whether or not it is Love or love they’re talking about in this new season.
So, where are we now? After murdering around in the US, specifically New York, LA, and Madre Linda, and having burned all his bridges — and cut off a bit of his foot, You’s brooding stalker finds himself in London after a failed attempt at re-stalking Marienne. He goes under the alias of Jonathan Moore, where he teaches English in the middle of Spitalfields. He rents a flat in Kensington from a Skippy called Malcolm, who introduces Joe to his high society friend. An heiress named Gemma, an artist and billionaire’s son named Simon, a socialite named Lady Phoebe Borehole-Bloxworth — yes, really — and a gallery manager, Kate (Charlotte Ritchie), the daughter of “the most powerful man in the world”.
Again, viewers might find themselves rooting for Joe because these characters are obtuse, morally questionable, and just so ridiculous. But before the first episode has even gone through, he has already seen a stunning woman, who happens to be Kate, the gallery manager. In less than a hundredth of a second of seeing her through a window, Joe fell entirely and irrevocably in love with her in a way, which so far, always seemed to end up in a perspex cage. Yet, we do not see this sort of rush this season, instead, in Joe’s twisted mind, he seems to somewhat respect her enough not to fall back to his old habits.
Joe still inserts himself into this friend group though, even accepting Malcolm’s invite to a night out with the group. Everything is all jolly hurrahs until his belated good intentions are thwarted when a member of his posh clique is murdered, and the group starts to be picked off, one by one, by a mysterious “eat-the-rich” killer, who isn’t Joe. Suddenly he finds himself in a whodunit, which he voices as “the lowest form of literature.” Ouch!
But Joe, or maybe Jonathan, is now a changed man. Since killing women is obviously very horrible, he is entirely over it, and this invites precisely the kind of attention he wants to avoid now that he has undergone rehabilitation. After a wild night at the prestigious Soho members' club Sundry House, Joe awakens to discover a dead body inside the opulent South Kensington apartment, in what appears to be an attempt at framing him. He then disposes of the body by running it through an industrial wood chipper and dumping the leftovers into the London sewage system, presuming that he killed the unfortunate aristocrat since, well, he has quite the background in that area. Funnily, the hunter now becomes the hunted as Joe finds himself caught in what seems to be a cat-and-mouse game. The “eat-the-rich” killer seems to have it out for Joe and appears to be a step ahead of Joe, uncovering his alias, his murderous past, and becoming his competition as this season’s stalker. In his morally superior and delusional mind, Joe is actually appalled by the killer’s efforts — how dare he stalk him and find out every detail of his life?
The beauty of You is that the less you think, the more enjoyable it becomes. If you question it too much and try to intellectualize it, it is not hard to see how the show is deeply flawed, with numerous plot holes. But part of Netflix’s ambiance and its essence is that while what it produces is entertaining, it is also rather awful. So much so that in the case of You, the viewer finds themselves rooting for Joe, which is rather unsurprising given Penn Badgley's charismatic demeanor. His manner and body language switch from amicable and charming to maniacal and self-loathing in the span of a dialogue piece.
This rollercoaster of emotions and the dropping of a decent number of plot twists every episode does not give the viewers time to fathom the plot. As we have seen in previous episodes, all Joe has to do is look at a woman through her window, and all hell breaks loose, which is the pleasure of watching a show like You, and why it is so addictive. You will always be guaranteed some sort of tumult and a thrill ride dressed in a tweed jacket that verges on a self-parody. Whether You is good or bad is part of its satirical nature. Season four is quite ambivalent, and there is plenty to unpack. However, even with Joe’s typical pattern becoming tired, there is still fun to be enjoyed by the viewers. Sure, You isn’t going to make people's lists of the greatest TV shows ever made, but I'll leave you with this: don’t look too hard, and you will have a great time.
Naya Alafifi is a Staff Writer. Email them at feedback@thegazelle.org.
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