You Season 3 Finale – So, it appears that the unavoidable has finally occurred. Season three of You concluded with the murder of Love by the vile Joe Goldberg. From a historical perspective and based on our mutual infatuation and murderous tendencies, it’s clear the season was always headed for this dramatic conclusion.
Joe not only murdered Love, but he also chopped off his own toes and set their house on fire to make it look like he had died, thereby neatly framing Love as Madre Linda’s deadly femme fatale. Now that he’s committed several murders, abandoned his young kid, and faked his own death, what is a man supposed to do? Of course you should visit Paris!
You Season 3 concludes with Joe reading Eat, Pray, Love for the first time. This is really interesting material. Getting Joe out of his suffocating neighborhood and giving him a hard reset was perfect. The man doesn’t appear content with his current situation, however. Marienne (Tati Gabrielle), his most recent fling, is actually the one he’s looking for (not to be confused with his former love, Love). Love had given Marienne an ominous warning, so she and her daughter Juliette escaped the suburbs. With a burning desire to find her, Joe sets off for Paris. In the face of throngs of onlookers, he promises, “All I know, mon amour, is that I’ll scour the globe for you if I have to.”
Nothing new is revealed regarding Joe’s new life in the finale other than the fact that he now goes by Nick and is confident enough in the city to visit a bustling café without his baseball cap. The fame he had in the United States for his real crime exploits apparently didn’t extend to the French press. The fact that Joe would go to the city of love after losing Love makes sense, as he can indulge his twisted romantic fantasies there. For the time being, let’s picture his daily routine at that location. He’ll go by bakeries that make him miss his ex-lover Love, and every time he sees a fresh tart, an ache will rise in his breast. When he’s not dodging American visitors in the Latin Quarter, he’ll spend his time in Père Lachaise Cemetery observing murderous gang members. When he discovers no one else does it, he’ll go back to wearing a baseball cap.
It seems certain that the spirit of Love would follow Joe into the next season, even if Joe transforms into a living incarnation of a winking “Paris is always a smart idea” poster. This is partly because Victoria Pedretti was a highlight of the program. (“We’re not idiots — we know Victoria is wonderful!” showrunner Sera Gamble told Variety, justifying the decision and adding that Love was only only intended to have a two-season run.)
To be fair, Love has become an intriguing subject for true crime enthusiasts due to Pedretti’s fame in real life. As Joe recounts, “Once the sickness went, people were voracious for her,” adding that her violent deeds and the “quasi-feminist” context in which he presented her had turned into a folk hero for many. After that shocking revelation, The Cut shows a faux feature piece on the terrible murder-suicide of Madre Linda. I’m driving through Madre Linda, California, when I’m struck by how regular it all seems….” begins journalist “Neil Ronald” with a great lede.
True crime enthusiasts have made love a posthumous celebrity. Joe remembers his season one infatuation, Guinevere Beck, who died and went on to become a best-selling novelist, saying, “More famous even than her.” Having Joe assassinate women who become legendary after their deaths for fictitious moral reasons is a fascinatingly sad tradition that the program is establishing. (Also, maybe unintentionally, a critique of the media’s obsession with hapless, young, white women in love.) And who knows? Maybe it’ll be the thing that finally breaks him, putting a stop to his murderous—and now global!—rampage.