You Season 3 is now streaming on Netflix. Some plot points (but not major spoilers) discussed below.
After Season 2 of You ended abruptly following the big reveal of Love Quinn's (Victoria Pedretti) surprise pregnancy, it was clear the series was headed in a new, albeit uncomfortable direction. After learning of his impending fatherhood, Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) made what he felt was the life-affirming decision to ensure his relationship with Love worked, no matter what — including trading in the rough-and-tumble lifestyle he once lived as a book manager in New York and the new life he attempted to weave in Los Angeles. With Season 3, we see the fruits borne of those decisions, and how rotten they can truly be.
His first step was moving to the quiet California suburb of Madre Linda with new wife Love and son Henry. An idyllic, simple life for the cozy little family, with another new start for the obsessive, toxic Joe, or at least that’s what they all believed they’d be signing up for. But just like you can't take the country out of the cowboy, you can't take the serial killer out of Joe. Or Love, for that matter.
Season 3 makes it all too clear that suburban life in a small town isn't doing much to quell either Joe or Love's murderous impulses. From the very beginning, Joe ruminates over the faults with his "happily ever after," a recurring theme when we watch him struggling to deal with son Forty, er, Henry's birth and feigning excitement over living with the tiny son he thought would be a daughter. It’s tough for him, and he’s clearly going through the motions. His heart, as Love notes, isn’t in it.
Parenthood isn't immediately appealing to Joe, but he takes to being a protector like a duck to water, surprisingly enough given his propensity to kill. Unfortunately, there's no connection there, no bond with his child — and Joe knows it. The halcyon days of settling down with “the One” don’t seem to be happening here, with Joe quietly cursing his predicament and grappling with Love’s grief over brother Forty’s death as well as the hormones and adjustments she finds herself struggling with post-pregnancy. He tries to masquerade as a loving husband and father, but it’s clear this life isn’t for him, doing it out of a sense of duty rather than infatuation or personal responsibility.
There are bright pockets for Joe, who spends much of his personal time reminiscing on when he was a bookseller, and sends the profits he's made to Ellie in a surprisingly touching gesture. When he isn't thinking about his "old life," he's openly hating his new one. He laments how often Henry cries, how little he and Love leave the house, and all of the other frustrating things that come with being a parent. Meanwhile, Love is left to do much of the labor in terms of taking care of Henry, which leaves her haggard and frustrated, and noticing more and more how little Joe is actually “there.”
Meanwhile, Joe begins the season obsessed with neighbor Natalie, which openly frustrates Love — the catalyst for the pair needing to come to terms with who they really are, and what they’re going to have to do to stay together and maintain a relationship. For two cold-blooded, toxic killers and people in general, that’s a lot. Especially when there’s open derision between the two about some of the very things they used to be in love with each other for. It's bizarre that Joe shows revulsion toward Love's murderous tendencies when the two are so ridiculously similar. It's fine to deride Love for wanting to kill, as if Joe is some sort of innocent saint who's somehow been forced into a lasting relationship with a "monster."
You Season 3 is waiting in the weeds to outsmart you.
The back-and-forth of Joe and Love feeling this way, playing off of each other as two very troublesome, terrible for the other foils, ping pongs throughout the season as Joe does something wrong and Love does something even worse in a bid to fight back continues to escalate throughout the series. And while they reconcile sometimes and learn to cope, things are never truly “better.” They sloppily murder people and hide bodies in some of the most preposterous ways possible, two amateurs slinging corpses around suburban California with a squealing infant in tow. It’s absolutely unbelievable that they’ve ever gotten away with a single crime before.
There's one major murder that the pair believes they've truly gotten away with that becomes the "big bad" of the season, but it comes with such an unbelievable setup and cover-up that it's obvious it'll become problematic in the long run. It absolutely does, and that’s about when this season goes off the rails entirely.
You may think you know exactly where Joe and Love will end up, but Season 3 is waiting in the weeds to outsmart you. It could have taken a sharp downturn had it continued focusing only on the domesticity between Joe and Love and their child. But thanks to some hilariously silly wild leaps, it ends up completely transforming into a story that feels almost unrecognizable by the end.
The miraculous thing? Season 3 of You remains absolutely addictive, exciting TV that you can’t look away from, no matter how stupid it gets.
