The Post’s front page had deemed our psycho protagonist “Joe Goldmurder.” Underwhelming headline, if you ask me. I believe the Post could’ve done better! However, though Joe loathes tabloids and the media, he has another enemy in his sights: Louise/Bronte. He’s also not thrilled with his wife. He keeps leaving her these desperate, insane voice-mails you just know Kate’s saving for her lawyers.
Speaking of lawyers, Joe finally has one. In news that will shock no reasonable person, the lawyer advises Joe to lie low. He also tells Joe that Clayton was Dr. Nicky’s son and that the family is pressing charges. Joe is advised that his “image and reputation” are his most valuable assets and that he’ll need to wait this out for at least a few months. For someone who was so hard on Maddie for not being able to endure a monthlong wait to stop lying to every single person in her life while pretending to be the twin sister she’d just murdered, Joe is VERY unhappy to be told he must be patient, too. Rather than take this counsel, he shows up looking utterly deranged at Henry’s school so he can give this administrator a copy of The Three Musketeers for Henry to take home. She, in turn, ignores the rules of their custody arrangement and agrees to pass the book along to Henry. What a sucker!! Of course there is a tracking device in the book.
Ah, I see we’re all ignoring the experts today: Kate’s crisis manager tells her to put out a statement, a big swing against Joe, saying that she’s horrified by all this and was blindsided by the affair. Great advice! Kate, don’t lose your bite now! But Kate says she can’t turn on him yet because they’re “entangled.” She begs Teddy and Teddy’s invisible husband to take in Henry at the West Village safe house she will provide. Teddy relents, and he will absolutely regret it.
Because later, Joe uses his tracking device to stalk his son (normal!) to the safe house, where he tricks the security guy — incredible for this bodyguard to be so lax right after Joe murdered a guy on-camera, but okay!! — and forces his way into the apartment. Teddy is here; of course, his husband, who may or may not exist, is nowhere to be found. (If we’re never going to see this guy, why not just make Teddy single?) Teddy tries to defend himself with a giant knife, which Joe wrests out of his hands, just in time for poor Henry to see the whole scuffle from the stairs. Teddy texts security to have Joe thrown out while Joe assures his son that everything is totally fine. I am BEGGING someone to send this child back to Madre Linda!!! Teddy tells Kate he is OUT. He also has finally realized that he was the lucky one for not being involved in their father’s toxic bullshit. He doesn’t even want to be a part of this family. Complicity, he says, is Kate’s M.O. She is still more worried about her PR than justice or her safety.
Meanwhile, Louise (we’re dropping Bronte) successfully alienates everyone in her life. Her friends want her to be the (white, telegenic) face of their takedown videos. But Louise can’t do it, and Dom manages to get her to admit that she loves Joe and told the cops it was self-defense. Louise moves out, and Dom and Phoenix move forward without her, getting #JoeGoldberg trending as they share their dirt. We get a great tour of Joe’s early victims. (Remember Benji?) They ask anyone with stories about Joe to stitch their video, and boy, do the people deliver.
I love this review of Joe’s early work. It is a very clever way of providing the last-season fan service of bringing back our favorites. We have Dottie Quinn, Love and Forty’s mom (reminds me of how truly insane Kate’s “rescue” of Henry was, considering his maternal grandmother was alive and willing to care for him); season one’s Annika, who says Joe killed Peach (that’s Peach Salinger, yes, that Salinger); CAGED authors and swingers Sherry and Cary, who pipe in to say that Love was also a genuine-article psychopath; Paco, the original stairwell urchin, who tries to defend Joe but whom Dom and Phoenix connect to Ron Baker, a “missing person” since 2019 (whom Joe killed in season one); Beck’s brother; and Ethan, played by Zach Cherry, whom you’ve seen more recently on Severance but whom real ones remember as Joe’s sweetheart of a co-worker at Mooney’s, who is here to report that, while he cannot “definitively” prove it, the basement of Mooney’s was 100 percent haunted (that’s why he never went down there!) and “Joe Goldberg murdered a fuckton of people.”
I also loved one of Joe’s students from London just jumping into the fray to say that Joe was always canceling class early, “to kill people?” and Joe screaming back at the phone screen, “I was DISASSOCIATING.” We know it is truly Joe’s nightmare to be destroyed by social media, the thing he loathes the most. Also, as you might expect, following the whole break-in-and-knife-fight stunt, Joe’s lawyer reports that Joe had fucked his chances of getting Henry back. Joe blames Louise for this, naturally.
Kate thought she could get Maddie on her side by sending her to a place that’s “more of a spa than a rehab” and offering her an exit strategy where she gets everything she wants, which is what Joe promised her. But Kate does not have what Joe has: video footage of Maddie cradling her sister’s corpse in the human aquarium. How, exactly, Joe could release this footage without incriminating himself is not totally clear to me, but Maddie agrees to help him out in exchange for having the video destroyed. I love the callback to Joe’s snotty description of her as “a vaguely PR person” and her icy response, “No, I specifically work in PR.” As Lady Gaga once said, “I don’t believe in the glorification of murder. I do believe in the empowerment of women!”
Maddie sets up an interview for Joe with Kim Kramer (Saturday Night Live favorite Heidi Gardner). She’s “barely a journalist,” Maddie says; she’s an influencer-interviewer beloved by millennials and zoomers. Maddie gives Joe the playbook: Apologize “if you’ve caused any pain,” tease some childhood trauma, do NOT cry, and he can mostly coast on being a hot white guy with great hair. Joe, who has previously enjoyed shoving corpses through a meat grinder, finds this repulsive. I, for one, am dying to know where his lawyer is now. I can’t imagine he’d sign off on this!
The interview starts fine before veering into crisis mode when Joe brings Kim to the basement, where, while describing Mooney’s “harsh” treatment of him as a child, he breaks down into ugly sobs, but ultimately course-corrects when he gets a text from Louise, who has bought a bus ticket and, in my opinion, cannot get out of town fast enough. She tells him that she told the police he was defending her. Suddenly, Joe is singing a different tune. No longer is Louise “the biggest regret of [his] entire life.” No, she is someone he LOVED. “I have a lot of privilege,” he says. “But at heart, I am a normal guy.” (That’s what I’m always saying about Joe.) He explains that he thought Louise was in danger: “I had to save her because I loved her.”
And so the online tides have turned. It’s a lot of “wish Joe would kill for me”–type stuff. Incredible Easter egg for the fans with that Cardi B. tweet: “When there’s allegations but he’s a ten!!” But Joe is confronted with an uglier side of this whole thing: He has become an icon for the manosphere, and Louise has become its latest target. It looks like he’ll have something else to save her from! Just before Louise gets kidnapped off the street, Joe — who was, conveniently, stalking her at the time — swoops in to brain that dude with a brick.
While Joe is otherwise engaged, Kate tells Henry they are fleeing to London “to make a bad thing better.” It’s interesting that she’s allowed to take him out of the country, given their delicate custody situation, but here we are. We next see Kate in prison visiting Nadia with a plan: “We’re going to take Joe Goldberg down.”
Back on the home front, “L-O-V-E” is playing, Joe’s on the cover of the Post but in a fun way, and he’s dancing around his sunlit apartment. I thought we’d pan to the basement and find Louise in the cage! But, no, Joe is a romantic now, and he’s getting onboard with her kinks: He’s got her handcuffed to the bed.
