Explanation of the Season 3 Finale of You
Season 3 of You follows the terrifying Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) as he reluctantly moves to the elegant California suburb of Madre Linda with his wife, Love Quinn (Victoria Pedretti). He tries to atone for his sins and attempt to be a good husband and father to his new son, Henry. But his plans quickly derail.
What follows is an extremely fun meditation on parenthood, marriage, and what happens after "happily ever after". It's a fairy tale that ends with a body count. But what really happened at the end of Season 3 of You? We're here to provide some answers.
Image: Netflix[/caption]
Although it seems Love and Joe destroyed half of Madre Linda in their pursuit of suburban happiness, the death count they are directly responsible for this season is on par, if not lower, than in previous seasons. Anti-vax Gil technically killed himself, the excitable teenager Theo lived thanks to Joe's quick thinking, and the king and queen of Madre Linda, Sherry and Cary Conrad, actually managed to escape from Joe's glass cage.
Sherry (Shalita Grant) and Cary (Travis Van Winkle) are initially painted as insufferable social monsters. Cary is a brother who loudly and frequently boasts about his intermittent fasting routines. Sherry runs a mommy blog, uses gossip as currency, and invites other couples so frequently to engage in "playful" sexual activities with her and Cary that they have a non-disclosure agreement on hand for the occasion. When Love and Joe accept the invitation, all hell breaks loose and both Cary and Sherry end up in the cage.
But as they fight for their lives, the couple begins to reveal some humor and humanity. And they become characters worth rooting for. So it's important to know that they earn the honor of being only the second and third people to escape from Joe's cage alive. (The first was Will Bettelheim in Season 2).
When building the cage, Joe and Love hid a key inside the structure, just to be safe. As Sherry and Cary desperately try to figure out how to survive, Sherry realizes that Joe and Love don't trust each other. She searches for a key and finds one.
Of course, once out of the grip of mortal danger, the couple immediately goes back to being insufferable, capitalizing on their near-death experience by giving pretentious lectures and pitching their new show, "Caged: A Radical Couples Therapy". Actually, Joe might deserve some royalties, right?
Do Sherry and Cary escape?
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Image: Netflix[/caption]
Although it seems Love and Joe destroyed half of Madre Linda in their pursuit of suburban happiness, the death count they are directly responsible for this season is on par, if not lower, than in previous seasons. Anti-vax Gil technically killed himself, the excitable teenager Theo lived thanks to Joe's quick thinking, and the king and queen of Madre Linda, Sherry and Cary Conrad, actually managed to escape from Joe's glass cage.
Sherry (Shalita Grant) and Cary (Travis Van Winkle) are initially painted as insufferable social monsters. Cary is a brother who loudly and frequently boasts about his intermittent fasting routines. Sherry runs a mommy blog, uses gossip as currency, and invites other couples so frequently to engage in "playful" sexual activities with her and Cary that they have a non-disclosure agreement on hand for the occasion. When Love and Joe accept the invitation, all hell breaks loose and both Cary and Sherry end up in the cage.
But as they fight for their lives, the couple begins to reveal some humor and humanity. And they become characters worth rooting for. So it's important to know that they earn the honor of being only the second and third people to escape from Joe's cage alive. (The first was Will Bettelheim in Season 2).
When building the cage, Joe and Love hid a key inside the structure, just to be safe. As Sherry and Cary desperately try to figure out how to survive, Sherry realizes that Joe and Love don't trust each other. She searches for a key and finds one.
Of course, once out of the grip of mortal danger, the couple immediately goes back to being insufferable, capitalizing on their near-death experience by giving pretentious lectures and pitching their new show, "Caged: A Radical Couples Therapy". Actually, Joe might deserve some royalties, right?
What happens to Love?
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Image: Netflix[/caption]
Maybe it was Love's devastating final words that got to Joe. Or maybe it was the realization that he couldn't flee the country and start a new identity with a baby by his side. It's not entirely clear why, but in a heartbreaking moment, Joe decides to abandon his son at the end of the season.
This is certainly the right decision, but given that the crux of Joe's mental health issues in You is built around his abandonment problems, it's a cruel twist. Joe makes sure to leave baby Henry in good hands. Joe chooses to leave his son with his blind coworker Dante. We don't know much about Dante except that he's blind, he's a good friend of Marianne's, he's ex-military, he loves kids, and he's married to a man named Lansing, who has two teenage sons. It seems like a solid choice.
Dante and Lansing eventually decide to raise Henry and, as Joe asked in his note, "protect him as if he were theirs", while Joe flees the scene.
Image: Netflix[/caption]
Paris. And his name isn't Joe anymore; it's Nick. This guy has more lives than a cat.
Joe's internal monologue is still focused on Marianne, and it's clear he's searching for her. Once, she told Joe that she had fantasies of quickly taking her daughter to Paris, and this is where Joe decided to start this new chapter of his life. It seems pretty unlikely that Joe will find Marianne, but he will certainly find a new object of obsession in the City of Love.
