The second season of You is packed with easter eggs including secret Beck and Benji references,
Forty discovering the truth about Peach Salinger's murder, plus the iconic carpet from The Shining.
Yippee-ki-yay, movie lovers!
I'm Jan and in this video I'm revealing 18 killer details you might have missed in Season
2 of You.
There will, of course, be spoilers so take care if you haven't caught up.
LA life and its obsession with health and wellness in particular are satirised in Season
2, especially by Joe, who coming from New York finds Angelenos particularly irritating.
Interestingly though, Moon Juice which Forty declared essential to safely tripping on LSD,
was actually referenced in an amusing moment in Season 1 when Joe's colleague Ethan raves
about the Moon Juice cookbook.
"Amanda Chantal Bacon has a dope recipe in 'Moon Juice Cookbook: Cook Cosmically for
Body, Beauty, and Consciousness.'"
[Joe] Kill me.
Sounds great, Ethan."
Another Season 1 call-back pops up after Joe and Love break up and Ellie sends him a Top
10 list of Dating Apps.
At number two is "LoveHooks", an app co-created by one of Joe's previous victims.
"Benjamin J. Ashby III.
Two failed careers.
Model... oh, boy.
And cocreator of a dating app that connects people through musical tastes called LoveHooks."
One of the best hidden links to Joe's past life in New York is the name of the store
where he meets Love for the first time: Anavrin.
"Obviously, Anavrin is wait for it "nirvana" spelled backwards."
"Nirvana" is actually the name of the store right next to Mooney's bookstore back in New
York.
Beck also wore a Nirvana T-shirt in Season 1.
And, in one of the second season flashbacks, Joe's mother is also wearing that same T-shirt
design.
So, it seems all this is likely a hint that Joe is especially drawn to things he connects,
maybe unconsciously, to his mother.
The original meaning of the word "nirvana" is a state of bliss and tranquillity.
And the fact that Anavrin is the opposite of this word might be the first indication
that the Quinns who own the grocery store are not quite as lovely as they might first
seem.
The drug-fuelled eighth episode of Season 2 was particularly crazy, and there were also
numerous fascinating easter eggs which the showrunners and production designers snuck
into the episode.
A version of The Shining hotel's carpet with its characteristic hexagonal pattern appears
in the corridors of the hotel where Forty takes Joe and Ellie to work on his screenplay,
which seems especially fitting as Jack Nicholson's character also uses The Shining's hotel as
a place to write.
The scene where you can spot the carpet plays out in a similar way to the iconic vision
of the twins that Danny has in The Shining.
In You, Joe is out of his mind on Forty's spiked LSD, and as he turns the corner of
the hotel's corridor he sees a vision of Candace, which actually turns out to be Dimitri.
As you can see, the colour of the carpet is different compared to the one in The Shining,
but it's the same distinctive pattern.
The second Shining reference comes from the hotel room that Forty locks Joe into as the
room number 217 is the same number as the haunted room in Stephen King's original
novel.
In that haunted room in The Shining, Jack Torrance sees a vision of a creepy woman in
a bathtub.
And during his LSD trip, Joe also sees a ghostly vision of his mother appear to him while he's
freaking out in the bathtub.
And similar to how the ghosts in the Overlook Hotel incite Jack's violent rage, so too does
the vision of Joe's mother spur him on to almost murder Forty.
It was Forty's sudden realisation that Beck was killed by her ex-boyfriend, not Dr. Nicky,
that led Joe to almost kill Love's brother.
But even before this ultimate revelation, Forty was also figuring out other secret details
about Beck which we can spot by looking closely at his whiteboard.
Here, we can see that Forty has also figured out that Peach didn't commit suicide, as the
official version of events state, but that she was murdered.
Joe is well aware in Season 2 that Peach's murder could come back to bite him one day
given the Salinger family had a P.I. investigating her death at the end of Season 1 and that
he accidentally left behind evidence that he was at Peach's family home in Greenwich.
"What if they take DNA?
Not like there's a crusty jar of piss in Peach Salinger's house or anything."
Joe's paranoia about the Salingers tracking him down may well have revealed itself when
he went back to Anavrin for snacks and Moon Juice during his crazy LSD-filled adventures.
The next day, when Joe asks Calvin to tell him what happened when he found him in the
store in the middle of the night, Calvin says: "Okay, you gotta remember the part where you
were ranting about how all the peaches were mad at you."
And it's no coincidence either that during his first encounter with Love, she jokes to
him: "Does this peach look like a butt?"
There's a funny bit of meta-commentary about You's first season when Ellie passes critical
judgement over Forty's script for his adaption of Beck's book 'The Dark Face of Love'.
"First off, the script is predictable."
"I was staying true to the source material."
"And the female perspective is sorely lacking."
"Beck was real.
She humps a pillow multiple times!"
It's a humorous recognition by the show's own writers that, like the original book,
almost everything in You is told from Joe's point-of-view, with one small exception in
the fourth episode of Season 1 where some of the episode was told from Beck's perspective.
"What was that?
Eight seconds?"
There's also a joke about the somewhat ridiculous alias Candace uses to hide her identity when
she arrives in LA: "You also said your name was 'Amy Adam', which,
come to think of it, sounds really stupid.
What, was 'Britney Spear' already taken?"
The name "Amy Adam" is also an easter egg to the book "Hidden Bodies" which Season 2
is based on.
In the novel, Amy is a completely separate character from Candace.
Basically, she's an ex-girlfriend of Joe's who runs away from New York after she scams
him.
Joe then leaves New York to hunt Amy down with the intention of killing her.
The TV show neatly reverses this by having Amy, aka Candace, track Joe down instead.
The show also gets to play around with our expectations of what will happen by the end
of Season 2 by getting Forty to deliver a little red herring early on in the season
when he sits down with Joe to discuss his script, "Bang Marry Kill".
"In the end, our guy has to murder all three women.
It's like... the ultimate irony."
Now, when you watch this for the first time, you might think it means that Joe will end
up killing the three main women in his life right now: Candace, Delilah, and Love.
Especially when you think back to how he basically did the same to three women in Season 1: Beck,
Peach, and Candace, who Joe assumed he'd killed.
However, it's a bit of a red herring, as the surprise villain of the second season is Love
who ends up killing Candace and Delilah.
And if we add that she also killed her family's au pair Sophia, that makes Love the one to
kill three women by the end.
Season 2's writers also have some fun with the famous dramatic principle of "Chekhov's
Gun", which, for anyone who's unfamiliar, is the basic idea that every element in a
story should serve a purpose.
And that, for example, if you draw attention to a gun, then that gun must go off at some
point in the story.
In You it's used as a big clue to who the secret killer of Season 2 will actually be
when Forty begins to drunkenly explain his feature film idea at Henderson's party.
"It's Chekhov's knife.
And as soon as we see it, then you know throats are gonna get cut.
But we don't know whose, and we don't know why.
She's cutting an apple right now.
But the audience is gonna be subconsciously terrified..."
This is a major hint that when we see Love expertly use a knife to butcher a piece of
meat, we should realise that she will end up butchering several people by the end of
the season.
"Now hold your knife like this."
"Up here?"
"Mm-hmm."
By the way, we owe the principle of "Chekhov's Gun" to influential Russian playwright and
short story writer Anton Chekhov who hated any element in a story making "false promises"
to the audience.
And the writers of You joke around with this idea when Forty tells Joe about how his script's
developing: "I don't think False Promises is gonna happen.
It's a short story, not a feature film."
"Chekhov's Gun" also pops up when Joe breaks in to Henderson's basement looking for evidence
of his crimes against underage girls.
There he discovers a robot vacuum cleaner that starts up automatically.
In a case of "Chekhov's Roomba", the device comes into play on Joe's next visit after
he kills Henderson, when it switches on automatically and mixes Henderson's blood with Joe's blood
from his nosebleed.
The psychological thriller Gone Girl gets some interesting references in this season
of You.
First of all, there's a very deliberate decision to name Delilah's police officer hook-up..
"David..
Fincher.."
That's the same name as the director of Gone Girl, a little detail that doesn't escape
Joe's observation.
"Like Officer other David Fincher."
And the ending of the second season also has numerous parallels with the ending of Gone
Girl.
Spoilers for that movie ahead, but you can skip to this timestamp in case you haven't
seen it.
In the final episode, Love tells Joe she's pregnant, which is the only thing that stops
him from killing her and leaving, similar to how Rosamund Pike reveals she's pregnant
to Ben Affleck with his child at the end of Gone Girl, which again is the only reason
he decides to stay with her.
And the twist in both Gone Girl and You Season 2 is that the main female protagonist is revealed
to be a psychopath or sociopath who secretly engineered numerous key events in the story.
Office Fincher is also used for a humorous reference to a famous TV detective when Joe
snarkily comments that Fincher "operates with all the nuance of Columbo."
And true to Joe's observation, in the final episode, before Fincher lets Ellie leave police
custody, he uses Columbo's trademark catchphrase.
"Oh, and one more thing."
"Oh, one more thing Sir.
Oh!
One more thing.
Just one more thing Sir.
Yes Lieutenant?"
The final scene of Season 2 is clearly setting up the third season.
But there's a very subtle musical and audio easter egg in this scene that signals Joe's
about to have his attention drawn to yet another woman.
You need to listen very carefully because as Joe walks out into the garden and thinks
about his fate, there's a little bell sound in the music that reminds me of the doorbell
at Mooney's that rang when Beck first entered his life in the pilot episode.
"But that's not destiny works, is it?"
[Bells ring.]
"Well, hello there."
That doorbell also rang when Candace came back into Joe's life at the end of Season
1 and a little bell is now ringing for Joe at the end of Season 2 as a brand new woman
seems set to become the object of his obsession.
One of the earliest clues the writers laid for us about the ending of Season 2 was right
in the opening scene of the first episode when we see the body of a red-headed actress
on a film set lying in a pool of blood, complete with Candace's signature leather jacket and
heart-shaped sunglasses.
And I go into that and all of the other secret clues about Love's dark nature in my Ending
and Twist Explained video.
Tap the screen here or there's a link you can follow in the video description.
So, did you spot any other cool details or easter eggs in Season 2?
And what were your favourite moments or new characters?
Leave your thoughts in the comments below.
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Thanks for watching and see ya next time.
Yippee-ki-yay, movie lovers!