An addictive new season of You has arrived on Netflix as serial stalker Joe heads to
LA in search of a fresh start and perhaps a true Love story.
Yippee-ki-yay, movie lovers!
I'm Jan and in this video I'm discussing the ending of Season 2 of You, revealing all the
clues that predicted the big twist in the finale, and explaining what that final shot
really means for Season 3.
We will be talking spoilers, of course, so take care if you're not all caught up.
The final episode of Season 2, appropriately titled "Love, Actually", explains the twist
that Love is as dark and warped as Joe and also a serial killer like him.
"We're soulmates Joe."
At this point, Love has just murdered Candace in cold-blood, something foreshadowed right
from the very first episode when Joe arrives in LA and sees the body of a red-head girl
lying in a pool of blood.
That was just an actress filming a scene, but the placement of the heart-shaped sunglasses
and the black leather jacket were the first sign that Candace wouldn't make it out of
LA alive.
And as Love reveals how and why she did what she did, the parallels between her and Joe
become even more striking.
Love killed Delilah and Candace, because they were both obstacles in the way of her forming
a family with Joe, similar to how Joe killed Benji and Peach in Season 1 when he saw them
as being in the way of his relationship with Beck.
Right from the moment they met, Love latched on to Joe as a means to fulfil her fantasy
of having a happy family: "I knew right away, in my gut, I recognized
something in you.
A little darkness that made you less storybook, more real.
I started to fantasize again."
In in the first episode, it's Love who makes a move on Joe, scuppering his plan to accidentally
bump into her.
And like Joe, Love is able to charm those around her, something he immediately picks
up on.
"You have a way with people, they just like you."
Again the same as Joe, Love is perceptive and she immediately recognises the darkness
in him and compares it to herself.
"Yeah, I thought about getting you something happy.
But let's face it, what you're more interested in is something smart and complex.
A little dark.
That's what makes you feel at home.
How do you know that?
Well cause me too."
After Candace reveals the truth about Joe's real identity to the Quinns, Love begins to
investigate him more thoroughly, but his dark past doesn't deter her one bit.
She steals the keys to his creepy lock-up where she finds his cage and figures out the
truth about Beck and Joe's relationship.
"I devoured your dead ex's book All the articles, all the think pieces, reading between the
lines.
And I realized, Guinevere Beck was unspecial and mediocre.
She didn't deserve you."
And it's very similar to how Joe felt about Beck's original boyfriend Benji.
"I do understand something about you now, Beck.
You somehow think this guy is all you deserve."
Love even seems to admire Joe's brutal actions seeing them as a mirror of her own violent
past.
"Yeah, you did some terrible things but that's what sensitive people do when they're trapped
in a bad relationship."
By the way, Love's affinity for knives and murder was signalled early on in the season
when we see her butchering a rack of ribs in a scene that's intercut with shots of Joe
chopping up Jasper's dead body.
And Love's preference for slashing her victims in the throat was also hinted at when she
fake attacks Joe in the neck with a toy wolf during her family's wellness weekend.
So, Love may be what Joe originally considered his soulmate, but he actually seems disappointed
in the love he found in her by the end of the season, and he ponders this at Lucy and
Sunrise's wedding.
"All I've ever wanted is to love and be loved by someone real and true.
[Joe] Me too.
Is that what we are? Soulmates?
Is this what real love is?
Knowing and accepting anything."
I think his state of unease stems from his twisted beliefs about romantic love, mixed
with his confused feelings over whether he's really a good or bad person.
On the one hand, Joe still harbours delusions of himself as a nice guy and saviour.
"The hero races to the cage, he raises the door, and steps inside,
eager to set Delilah free, and begin the rest of his life."
And in the first episode, he even claims he's a changed man.
"I don't fantasize to some impossible version of a woman I barely know."
However, we quickly see he's repeating similar patterns to what he did with Beck, and by
the time of the finale, Love herself accuses Joe of glossing over the truth with his own
warped version of reality.
"Because while I was seeing you, really seeing you, you were busy gazing at a goddamn fantasy.
A perfectly imperfect girl.
You saw what you wanted to see."
In Season 2, Joe keeps making the point that he's trying to change, especially after a
vision of Beck confronts him over her murder in the second episode.
Unlike Benji who he caged then killed in season 1, he lets his first captive Will go free,
and the two murders he does commit don't seem to be premeditated.
The first is in self-defence when Jasper attacks him, and Henderson was pushed down the stairs
as he tried to escape.
As Joe's original plan was to have Henderson confess his crimes on camera.
But we have to remember that much of what we see in You is presented through Joe's point-of-view
and that he is an unreliable narrator who spends a good deal of time rationalising his
own often creepy and violent behaviour.
Joe may have saved Ellie from Henderson, but after he traps the sleazy celebrity, he's
forced to consider how much difference there really is between Henderson and himself.
Joe believes his actions are noble, but Henderson quickly dismantles that illusion.
"You feel like you're a piece of shit so you're trying to be a hero.
Ruining my life is not gonna save you from your demons, all right?"
We're the same.
[Joe] No, no...
I'm nothing... like you."
We know of course that Joe has manipulated, drugged, knocked out, and trapped people to
fulfil his own desires and he's even killed them.
Henderson has done similar, minus the killing, except he's targeted underage girls.
So who is worse?
It's a difficult and unsettling question, that Joe is definitely not willing to address.
"We're nothing alike.
He's trying to win with words and ideas that add up to nothing.
He is bad.
Someone needs to stop him and he knows it."
In a way, Henderson and Love are two sides of the same coin for Joe as they both force
him to look at himself and reflect on his own actions and he feels threatened and absolutely
terrified by that.
"No, this isn't me.
This isn't me anymore.
I didn't want to do that.
I didn't do that."
As co-creator Sera Gamble has said, part of what they're exploring in the show is "the
ultimate question of how self-aware Joe can get" and even the showrunners say they "don't
really know the ultimate answer to that yet."
Joe's inability to properly confront and deal with his past crimes continues through the
season.
In the sixth episode, he plans to go to Candace's Airbnb to abduct her and presumably kill her
once and for all.
And in the eighth episode, when Forty pretends to be Beck to re-enact her murder, Joe begins
to hear Beck's voice accusing him and he can't handle it.
"[Beck] You're not special.
You're broken.
I could never love you.
You are the bad thing.
You are the thing that you should have killed."
So he begins to strangle Forty for real just as he did with Beck.
Then later, when Forty asks Joe "How do you think Dr Nicky hid his sociopathy
for so long?"
Joe justifies the actions of Beck's killer - that's himself of course - with yet more
self-delusions.
"Why does he have to be a sociopath?
Maybe he's a man who would do anything for love."
Later on, a vision of Joe's mother tells him: "People like us don't change.
I've changed.
So why are you already thinking of ways to get rid of Forty."
Like Lady Macbeth, Joe sees his own culpability and complicity in the deaths of those around
him, in a vision of his own bloodied hands.
And then when Joe discovers that Forty has actually cracked a code hidden in Beck's autobiography
that it was her ex-boyfriend who killed her and not Dr Nicky, he grabs a piece of glass
and goes to kill Forty.
He doesn't follow through, but that's only because he hears about Forty's childhood trauma
with the family's murdered au pair.
And after Joe thinks that he's killed Delilah himself, he begins to believe that he deserves
to be punished: "I'm done with excuses.
I'm done blaming everyone else for the things I've done.
But it's time I take responsibility.
Accept the punishment for my crime.
That a cage is where I belong."
This idea fits in with the literary reference to Dostoevsky's novel "Crime and Punishment"
which appeared in both the first and last episodes of Season 2.
"In Crime and Punishment, the hero willingly walks into exile.
He is killed, but he's also found love.
And if he repents, he can be redeemed.
He and the woman he loves can be saved."
Dr Nicky echoes a similar idea about deserving punishment when Forty goes to see him in prison
with evidence that could prove the therapist didn't kill Beck.
Dr Nicky refuses to co-operate even though he knows that he's innocent of that crime,
because he believes he should be punished nonetheless for his other sins.
"I didn't kill Beck, but I am guilty.
I'm guilty of using her.
And she's not the first.
No, I'm a bad person.
I'm exactly where I deserve to be."
However, Joe seems willing to switch how he feels about whether he deserves to punished.
Although he says he's now trapped in a cage, forced to live with a woman he no longer loves,
which you could see as a sort of fitting punishment, in the very final scene we see him quickly
revert to his old tricks.
"I had no idea that the cage I was building all this time was a trap for me.
But that's not how destiny works, is it?
This is just the beginning... because this is where I had to be, exactly...
where I had to be to meet... you."
As we can see, Joe has started on a new delusional path, twisting reality, and pretending to
himself that falling for Candace, Beck and Love were just errors in a greater scheme,
blips along the path of destiny to meet a literate and literal girl next door.
Now this scene is clearly teasing a setup for Season 3, and just before I get to that
and explain why we're very likely to get at least two more seasons before Joe perhaps
gets the justice he deserves, I want to let you know that thanks to this
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So, to understand what will happen next season, we need to remember that by the very end Joe
isn't in love with Love anymore.
After she revealed her true nature to Joe, his romantic illusion was shattered, and when
Love refused to let Joe out of the cage, he said to himself that he would do what Beck
did to him and "pretend" to love her.
"What did Beck do in this situation?
[Beck] I love you.
[Joe] Right.
She pretended to love me.
You're asking me to see you, to love you.
I don't know what to feel, Love.
But I know what to do."
In fact, Joe almost kills Love, until she reveals that she's pregnant and carrying his
baby.
This is the only thing that stopped him from murdering her, as protecting children is something
that Joe responds to in particular.
He went out of his way in both seasons, even putting himself in danger, to protect both
Paco and Ellie.
And he even tried to help Delilah perhaps because of what Henderson did to her as a
child.
This all probably relates back to how Joe feels about his own troubled childhood and
so he sympathises with children and wants to help them.
At the end of the season, this is how Joe sees himself:
"I'm ready to be the good father I never had.
To make the family I always dreamed of.
The one she deserves."
However, whether Joe really sticks around is immediately undermined at the very end
as we see him beginning to stalk the woman next door.
We know he believes he's trapped himself in a cage with Love, so it's quite likely he
will try and escape, perhaps with his daughter even, and run to somewhere far from LA.
For anyone who isn't already aware, this TV show is based on the books "You" and "Hidden
Bodies" by author Caroline Kepnes and she already has two new books planned in the series.
According to EW, "the third book will see Joe move to the Pacific Northwest with a plan
to become a family man in his own unique way."
Now, the TV show has deviated from the books in various significant ways, but if Joe needs
to leave LA in a hurry, say because Love catches him creeping on their neighbour, and tries
to kill him, then fleeing to another state feels like something he would do, given that's
what he did when Candace returned to confront him in New York.
He might also run off with his daughter to get her away from the clutches of the powerful
and corrupt Quinn family.
And remember that he's still in contact with Will in Manila who could help him get set
up with new identities in a new location.
And given the popularity of the show, I can't see the showrunners wanting to end Joe's story
in the third season either, especially as there is at least a fourth book planned in
the series.
Which means, that I expect it's unlikely Joe will see justice for any of his crimes until
season 4, at which point perhaps Candace's prediction will eventually come true.
"Murder has a way of following you, and you're not getting away with it."
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So, how do you feel about the ending for Joe and Love in Season 2?
And what would you like to see happen in Season 3?
Comment with your thoughts below.
And if you enjoyed this, I'll be reviewing new seasons of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina,
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Thanks for watching and see ya next time.
Yippee-ki-yay, movie lovers!