You Season 3: Love in the Suburbs

 You Season 3: Love in the Suburbs

Warning: This review will contain spoilers for You Season 1-2.

Who doesn't enjoy a good love story? There's nothing quite like watching characters who you're rooting to get together to fall in love and finally achieve that happy ending. Although, in the case of You, that happiness is never always what it seems. Following the exploits of the obsessive Joe Goldberg, You is a series about one man's attempt to get find true love via stalking, killing, and eventual betrothal to the woman he loves. Season 1's target, Guinevere Beck, turned out to be someone Joe hoped she wasn't, a girl whose bouts of freedom left Joe in the dust. After disposing of her, however, past relationships and attempted murders come back to haunt him, causing him to flee his home of New York City for sunny California. Once there, he meets Love Quinn, whose name alone he takes as a sign that this is the woman he's destined to be with. As Joe continues stalking and killing people in order to get closer to her, though, it is revealed that she too has fallen in love with Joe. Her own killer instincts, though, are less refined than his, as she dispatches of those in her way with less tact and more clues left behind. Realizing that he can't fall in love with someone so similar to himself, Joe decides to kill her...until learning that she is pregnant with his child. Given the oligarchical power of the Quinn family, she and Joe are able to move to a California suburb as a married couple expecting a child, trapping Joe in a world he doesn't want to be in.

Season 3 of You picks up six months after Joe's son, Henry, is born. Having fallen out of love with Love, Joe ends up catching the eye of their neighbor, Natalie, who he begins to obsess over for a few weeks. Joe doesn't do this just because he's in love with her, though; he also wants an opportunity to escape. Unfortunately, Joe has conflicted feelings about his own morals, realizing that, if he plays along with loving Love, he can construct some twisted version of the happily ever after he's been vying for. While trying to make his marriage work and at the same time keeping a window of escape open, Love starts to question the vitality of their relationship, though in a more chaotic way than he does. Given her suspicions of Joe already and how much the two of them share the same wavelength, it isn't long before Love starts to suspect something is going on. And thus, a downward spiral begins as Joe attempts to fix his marriage while Love tries to do the same--her own way.

This season of You was a much different take on the series than its preceding seasons. While a typical season of You sees Joe doing everything in his power to get whoever he's convinced himself is the girl of his dreams, this season adds the twist of him already having a girl of his dreams. The show does a good job at convincing us that Love is Joe's enemy now, but also makes her sympathetic enough to the point where we start to question who the "bad guy" really is. Both are crazy in their own ways, but it's a kind of crazy that intersects so well that it's impossible to be sure who is in the right and who is in the wrong. It makes for a very entertaining season as Love and Joe continue to create problems for themselves that the other has to somehow fix, whether through direct intervention or by manipulating the people in their cozy little town. It makes for good drama and adds to the overall insanity that transpires throughout. Though adding Love to the mix makes things more interesting, I can't say the show differentiated the formula enough for me to be impressed. To talk about my gripes with this season, however, I'll have to spoil some later elements that add to how they change things up. So, if you haven't seen You Season 3 yet and are planning on it, you may want to stop reading here, since there will be spoilers.

[BEGIN SPOILERS]

The first episode of the season sees Joe skirting the line with his neighbor Natalie, much to the chagrin of Love who discovers Joe's signature "box of stuff" in the basement. This "stuff" being Natalie's underwear and a bloodied rag from when she cut her hand on broken glass during his visit to her house. Under the guise of wanting to open a bakery, Love lures Natalie to the basement of a vacant building she's trying to sell. Love then impulsively kills her, prompting Joe to have to abandon his mission of bonding with his son--and also his mission of being together with Natalie--to cover up the murder. Here is where You Season 3 shines, as the major driving force behind Joe's actions are no longer him trying to get a girl to fall in love with him. Instead, it's about Love and the relationship between the two of them, all the while trying to keep Natalie's disappearance a secret. I liked this change, as it broke away from the formula of the last two seasons by indicating just how formidable Love is while turning the show into what feels more like an escape/Stockholm syndrome type of series.

Though, even with this brief change in the formula, not everything was perfect. At one point. Joe and Love's son, Henry, is diagnosed with the measles, as Love's mother never got him vaccinated. Eventually, it's revealed that one of their good-natured friends in the town doesn't get his children vaccinated, which led to Henry contracting the illness. This prompts Love to beat him with a rolling pin and shove him in the basement of her bakery. Which is fine enough, though the dialogue regarding the vaccines could have been a little less on-the-nose and "timely" with its presentation. Though this does lead into an episode that assists with Joe and Love's attempt at covering up Natalie's death, something that the show pulled off really well. Outside of a strange decision to put a suicide warning at the start of the episode, though, effectively spoiling that the trapped neighbor would kill himself in the basement. Nonetheless, I was impressed to see that much of the Natalie storyline was resolved in the first four episodes of the show. I was excited to learn where it would be going from here and just how many more twists and turns were in store for this season.

That was until the very end of the episode, where Joe starts to get the feeling that his boss at the local library, Marienne, is flirting with him. After another six-month time skip between episodes four and five, the show re-establishes itself as Joe vying for the love of another woman. I can't say I was surprised by this decision, though the first few episodes were layered with a bit of disappointment. It didn't feel like the writers knew what they wanted to do with this storyline right away, resulting in some points of filler involving Joe going camping with a bunch of dudes and Love trying to struggle out the budding relationship she's having with a college student next door--and also Natalie's step-son. It felt like enough was going on this season to where Marienne's introduction as a love interest wasn't necessary. For two whole episodes, I began to wonder what the point was. I started to think about how interesting it would have been if Natalie was the only competing love interest this season and the show focused instead on Joe gaining full autonomy not just from love, but from his quest for love as well. Maybe that would be asking too much of the show and perhaps it would be out of character for Joe to do a complete 180-degree turn over a single incident. But I guess I was just looking forward to something newer than anything we've seen before.

Nonetheless, I continued, and did eventually feel well-rewarded by the show. The plot involving Joe and Marienne's relationship was spiced up by her ex-husband, child custody cases, and Joe's attempts at playing against someone who already knows Joe's game. It was often riveting and intense to see Joe plotting how to ensure Marienne could take custody of her child, away from the hands of an ex-husband that didn't care for their daughter at all. I think changing the girl from a random woman that gives Joe the time of day to someone even the audience can admire alongside Joe helped to built the case for Marienne in a better light than Beck or Love could have ever been shown in. Even if it was hidden behind some rather slow, meandering filler, the show eventually knew where it wanted to go and executed its narrative with great precision. While I did appreciate it, I also do still feel like two hours of the series could have been cut out entirely without much loss to the overall plot. I get wanting to keep the show at 10 episodes because that's what previous seasons have done, but it also feels limiting when you need to tell a set story in a certain number of episodes, forced to write in filler chunks to ensure audiences don't feel cheated on time watched instead of on quality. This season is well done, but I think it would have been a lot stronger at 7-8 episodes instead of 10. The quality of their second story arc faltered because of it, even if it did manage to pick itself up near the end.

[END SPOILERS]

One of the things I think this season of You did better than its previous storylines was knowing how to tie all of the characters together in a tight, convincing way. While Season 1 was more Joe-centric and Season 2 had more going on that ultimately felt slightly unresolved and pointless at the end, Season 3 managed to create concise stories with its characters who the audience could feel for, including those deemed antagonists. Even if this season behaves the same way as its semi-anthological predecessors--with the audience never seeing anyone outside of Joe and a select few returnees in the future--it doesn't feel like we would be losing out on anything. And this is because, instead of dropping Joe in, causing some chaos, and taking him out, the show utilizes him and Love's relationship to create stories for its side characters that make them feel so much more humanized. It's an admirable thing to see, giving us as the audience a better look into the lives of the characters that come into conflict with Joe and Love. It also makes things tense when lives are on the line, with the audience unsure of who to root for and ultimately feeling conflicted about what transpires.

Though what transpires does feel like it could be depicted at a faster pace. While the first four episodes of the show are very well done (with episode 3 being a bit of a drag here and there), the pacing starts to mellow out considerably after this point. While mentioned in the spoilers above, I don't find pacing to be too much of a spoiler type of thing, as it's only the point in the show where I felt things started to drag along a bit. Maybe it's because I typically watch shows 1-2 episodes at a time, but the middle of this season felt like it was going on for far too long with a bit too much filler. There were points in time where I just wanted the show to get on with things already, though whether that impatience was personal or not is anyone's guess. I do still feel like the show could have been a bit tighter with its presentation had it not spent two episodes on plots that ultimately added very little to the series as a whole. Though once it squeezes through its slow-paced middle, it manages to find its footing again and delivers an enthralling third act that is sure to be remembered by fans of the show for a long time to come.

Ultimately, You Season 3 feels different from its predecessors while mostly keeping up the same level of intrigue as before. This intrigue does dip at times, though, ultimately because of filler episodes and writing that isn't always on par with its previous seasons. Nonetheless, when the show is good it hits it out of the park, with Joe and Love's actions leading to harrowing situations that grow ever more complex as the season unfolds. The new focus on side characters as well as our major cast creates individualized stories that become a sort of backbone for the season, making it feel different in a very refreshing way. Despite being a mixed bag, I would still say You Season 3 makes for good television. If you're interested, you can find the whole thing on Netflix. If you want to continue to see where Joe's love quest takes him, then this season is for you.

***

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