Warning: MAJOR SPOILERS ahead for You season 4.
The highly anticipated You season 4 part 1 finally ends an issue with antihero Joe Goldberg. Over the past three seasons, Penn Badgley’s Joe Goldberg has tried to hide his obsessive and homicidal tendencies under the guise of being a well-adjusted, even charming, neighborhood man. Joe’s psychological fixation on finding love and feeling romance continuously leads Joe into a cycle of failing to curtail his obsessions, stalking and killing, and then scrambling to cover it up.
This exhaustive cycle is accompanied by a need to reinvent himself every so often for his own sake and for the sake of avoiding detection from the legal system. To Joe’s credit, this makes for a fresh and exciting viewing experience, as with every new persona of himself, audiences are given a whole season of familiar but new, thrilling content. You season 4 is repeating Joe’s character reinvention trend already, but is also taking the opportunity to address and finally break one of Joe’s biggest problems in an effort to bring audiences something they have not seen in previous seasons.
You Season 4 Part 1 Breaks Joe’s “Love” Storyline Trend
As Joe is brought to London in order to avoid detection and to settle his business with old flame Marianne, season 4 of You is filled with opportunities for Joe to find a new niche, interact with different persons, and hopefully avoid kindling his propensity for killing. When things don’t fare well with Marianne, Joe tries even harder to curb his compulsions. Met with the range of new characters You season 4 brings, Joe teeters between replacing his love lost with a new infatuation and rectifying some semblance of his psychology to become better.
It’s not easy for Joe to take either side, though, for the group of Londoners includes the enticing Kate Galvin and someone trying to frame him for the murder of a group member that, this time, he actually had no ties to. Despite still very quickly falling for Kate, Joe decides to instead pour his obsession into finding out who is manipulating him into a puppet for murder. This breaks away from previous storylines by pointing and centering his obsession toward You season 4’s Eat The Rich Killer and away from his love interest in Kate.
Why You Season 4 Part 1’s Ending Hints Joe Has Permanently Changed
The entirety of season 4 part 1 makes Joe pent-up with paranoia and eager to solve who may be framing him, and his obsessive nature guides him to resolving the unsuspected mayoral candidate Rhys Montrose as the Eat The Rich Killer. Rhys, with his similarities to Joe – tragedy in his history, feelings of isolation in his social sphere, and disdain for the snobby – is quite evidently a formidable opponent and is able to guess Joe’s actions before he makes them. In the face of everyone Joe has killed in You thus far, he is a lot more intimidated by Rhys, as his antagonist actually has the matched ability to take Joe on.
Distracted by this, Joe cannot come to his usual level of fixation to focus his attention fully on Kate Galvin, and therefore has permanently changed. In fact, Joe notably pulls back from pursuing Kate by literally closing the door on her advances for a relationship in the last episode of part 1. To move his obsession over to Rhys, an opponent, is incredibly striking and the change in Joe Goldberg’s ritual actions is invigorating for season 4 part 2 of Netflix’s You.
