Joe and Louise are in writerly, readerly bliss. Joe asks where she’d go if she could go anywhere, and she says a mossy castle in Ireland. I think: God, it would be SO easy to kill her there. This show has changed my neutral pathways forever. I also laughed when Joe asked if there was room for Henry in this fantasy, and Louise was like, “Of course he can come!” in a tone of voice that tells me she was absolutely not saving a spot for Joe’s cloying little kid in her fuckfest fantasy.
Joe has decided to extricate himself from all things Lockwood and then New York, his typical playbook, wherein he starts all over again with a new life in a new place as if he will not still be THE problem when he gets to wherever he’s going. Step one: Plant Reagan’s teeth in Harrison’s gym bag since Joe doesn’t trust him to stay quiet; then put Maddie as the conspiracist to murder, landing both of them in prison and out of his way. I’m just relieved we didn’t have to watch Joe yank out Reagan’s teeth. Remember his first teeth-yanking when he thought he didn’t have the stomach for it? Anyway, I love that we have a shorthand now, us and You. Step two: Track Kate, using the earbuds she (apparently) forgot he could follow. Step three: Carry around an engagement ring to make “forever” with Louise official. When you know, you know!
Maddie calls Kate from prison in a panic. (I Love Kate reminding Maddie that she’s on a recorded line, lol.) Nadia is very impressed with Joe’s work, but at least the girls are one move ahead of him: Kate left her earbuds connected on purpose, knowing Joe would stalk them. Just when I think I was wrong about fair Kate and that she was not in over her head, she says that she called off her hit man. Well, never mind! Kate says they need Joe’s confession, or they’ll be stuck in prison. Nadia is livid, as you’d expect. But Kate says it’ll work because they will promise Joe freedom if he fesses up. Freedom from where you ask?? THE HUMAN AQUARIUM, BABY.
But first, Joe has a mysterious arm injury that is so obviously not from stitching up books. I am struggling, as I have been for several episodes, to believe that Louise has any critical-thinking skills. (When would he have even had time to work at the bookstore? Is Mooney’s ever even open?) The question is, where DID the injury come from; my best guess is he got injured during the Dane stabbing.
Louise has apparently heard all about Harrison and Maddie supposedly killing Reagan. How she can still think it’s not suspicious at all that so many people connected to Joe keep winding up dead is really testing me. Sometime between these extracurricular efforts, Joe managed to send Louise’s pages — sans her knowledge or permission; sweetheart, are you sensing a theme?! — to some publishers, one of whom wants to meet with her THIS afternoon. Just to really sell the fantasy, Joe literally googles “mossy castle in Ireland,” but as he tries to access the funds, he’d need to spontaneously buy this absurd piece of real estate — red flag, Louise! RED FLAG — he discovers that Kate emptied his supposedly separate account and evicted Joe from the bookstore and the upstairs apartment. Locks have been changed and everything! It’s all very satisfying.
Because Joe is Joe, he says Kate has to die. She’s busy meeting with Teddy — she’s resigning from CEO, not that any cares at this point — while Louise is meeting with the publisher, who, what do you know, is not actually interested in her romance novel so much as in her tell-all about her relationship with the viral #JoeGoldberg. Joe encourages this; after all, theirs is “the most romantic story ever!” I would encourage Louise to get an agent and start backing her work up to the Cloud. (Her laptop is in the apartment from which she and Joe were just evicted.)
Joe thinks he’s following Kate into the garage, but it’s a DECOY. One of Kate’s goons injects him with whatever makes people lose consciousness instantly on these shows — a key Rx in the Inviolable Rules of Television Health and Medicine cabinet! When he wakes up, he is in the human aquarium. Nadia reads Louise’s terrible vampire fiction, and Kate plays with the engagement ring Joe bought for his new soulmate. Kate says her terms are as follows: Joe will record a confession that liberates Harrison and Maddie, then they’ll let him go to an island with no extradition treaty. Given that Joe has made this offer to so many people over the years, he must see it for the sham that it is. He never seems all that bought in, even when they explain their big plan in the event of his noncompliance: starting a carbon monoxide leak that will make his death look like a suicide.
Louise breaks into the upstairs apartment to get her laptop back. (But not her wallet?? Is this girl EVER thinking straight?) Kate follows her in to have a real talking-to and remind her of Beck. “You really think he didn’t kill her?” Louise is rattled but does not cave. Kate gives her ten minutes to get her stuff and get out.
Meanwhile Joe is trying to play mind games on Nadia. I worry about the psychological constitution of every single person in this program. Nadia spills the obvious truth: They were never going to let Joe live. Oh, she also wants him to confess to Rhys’s murder because she’s worried her own mom doubts her innocence. Joe would apologize, except he’s not that guy anymore, so he can’t. When you think about it that way, he and Nadia are equally innocent — how beautiful.
Nadia asks Joe if he’s ever haunted by Marienne Bellamy. And then, who appears but Marienne herself (Tati Gabrielle)? Marienne, from beyond the grave.
As tends to happen as a series nears its end — especially one like You, that is always going for the big mic-drop moments, dialogue-wise, to the point where everybody is spelling out everything in increasingly improbable fashion — we get a lot of clunky, oOOOOoooh lines here, the sort of thing you can imagine them practicing in the bathroom mirror but that no one would ever say out loud. Such as Marianne’s line, “You should’ve killed me better, Joe,” when she enters.
Joe’s angle here is that he’s glad Marienne is alive. He’s very committed to having a “real” him that is NOT scary. We get another of these shouting-the-thesis-out-loud lines — “You are not a white knight, Joe. You are a fucking abuser” — which Joe, naturally, refutes. He has devoted his LIFE to SAVING women from abusive men!
Marienne needs a break, and so do I. She pops upstairs, and who is at the door to Mooney’s but Louise. I was very nervous when Marienne opened the door, but fortunately, these two recognized each other. (Marienne’s daughter “watches a lot of TikTok.”) Marienne gives it her all with Louise, talking her through the Joe Goldberg playbook. Tati Gabrielle’s performance really sells it. “You’re not stupid,” she tells Louise. “And as long as you are alive, it’s not too late.”
Downstairs, Joe tells his captors they’ll never get away with this. Unfortunately for him, they actually don’t care; Kate is prepared to go to prison, and she has arranged for Henry to be sent to his dad’s in Madre Linda (THANK you!). Nadia is over all this back and forth and just pulls out a gun, demanding Kate open the door. OBVIOUSLY, opening the door would be a huge fucking mistake. The women go upstairs for a sidebar, which is also, obviously, a huge fucking mistake — why would you leave him alone?!
I laughed out loud at Nadia saying it was “shockingly easy” to get a gun in America. The women agree on a next move: Kate will kill Joe alone; the other women have been through too much and Kate, the white, privileged member of this trio, is prepared to do penance for her multitude of crimes and criminally complicit acts. So she sends the others away. I don’t know why everyone is so into doing things all by themselves. Can we not see the strength in numbers? Whatever happened to community?
Meanwhile, Joe gets a secret third key to the aquarium out from INSIDE HIS ARM! So the injury was not from the Dane attack after all! Somehow, he was able to do this without, I don’t know, getting tetanus or dying or whatever would happen if you did that in real life … I almost Googled, “Would you die or something if you cut open your body to hide a key inside it?” but then I thought, You know what? I can live with not knowing that.
Out in the street: Louise is trying and failing to get Dom on the phone. Maddie is pacing like a maniac because Harrison confessed to Reagan’s murder, which means she’s out of prison, but he’s in it for life. Maddie cannot let this stand. She MUST commit arson.
Downstairs: Kate looks in horror at the empty aquarium. Joe bashes her over the head with a hammer. Maddie is inside the bookstore, preparing to burn it all down. Joe begs to be let out of the basement — just like Beck, right before he killed her — and says that Kate is down there, too, but Maddie doesn’t believe him. Joe screaming “I am your fucking boo-boo!” is extremely funny. Maddie lights a match and watches the place go up in flames.
Because this is TV, Kate is still alive; she bashes Joe in the head, and he is ALSO still alive. (We get a lot of these “Tiny Tim, who did NOT die” sequences on You.) Everyone is somehow still conscious and coherent enough to have a real conversation. Joe admits that he killed Kate’s dad; Kate says she already knew. “All your wives dying in fires,” she says, which prompts Joe to say that, well, that’s not actually how Love died. He admits he poisoned her and started the fire to get rid of the evidence. Kate was recording it all and is sending that voice memo to Nadia, who will get it to the police. Great work, for whatever it’s worth!
Louise leaves a message for Dom: She’s sorry, Marienne is alive, she got lost in her love for Joe, but she sees the light. Then she realizes she doesn’t have her wallet — I swear to GOD — and goes back to Mooney’s apartment (literally just start a new life, it’s not like you have any money!) and sees that the bookstore is on fire. She runs inside (!) down to the basement (!!) instead of calling the fire department (?!?).
I burst out laughing at the music cue here. What did you think? Olivia Rodrigo’s “Vampire” too on the nose? Or is this the kind of show-and-tell-and-tell-us-one-more-time-to-make-sure-we-really-get-it storytelling you’ve come to know and love from this series? Louise, with her busted ankle, manages to rescue Joe from the basement. Despite her certainty of his guilt, she does not want him to die. On the sidewalk, Joe figures that as long as he’s already on his knees, he may as well propose. Louise gets the voice-over to tell us that she wants justice and answers, so she says YES. “I’m the only person in the world that can stop you.” I mean, if she had waited like three more minutes, the fire could have stopped him. If she lets this guy slip through her fingers, I SWEAR.
