🤐 SPOILER ALERT 🤐

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“A Fresh Start”

Meet Will Bettelheim. Who used to be Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley). Joe — I mean, Will — leaves New York after his ex, the notorious Candace (Ambyr Childers), re-enters his life. She’s read Beck’s book and instantly knows that he’s been up to his old tricks. Candace doesn’t want to kill Joe or even get him arrested: She wants to destroy his whole existence.

Joe is so freaked out that he relocates to Los Angeles, a city he loathes — no one would ever look for him there. Joe moves into a new apartment in Hollywood, uses his new name and declares himself a new man. (He’ll spend only 10 minutes a day peeking into women’s windows.)

“Will” tries not to befriend his new 15-year-old neighbor, Ellie (Jenna Ortega), but she might be too smart and neglected for him not to assume the role of her protector — it’s certainly what Joe would do. He gets a new job at a trendy health food market, Anavrin — say it backwards — where his new boss, Calvin (Adwin Brown), is cool as hell. Everything’s coming up Joe, especially when he lays eyes on Love Quinn (Victoria Pedretti), who’s at Anavrin shopping for peaches. Joe definitely has a type: beautiful women with absurd names. To make her even more irresistible, Joe will be seeing Love every day since she works in the Anavrin kitchen… and her parents own the place.

Penn Badgley and Victoria Pedretti Recap ‘You’ S1 and S2

Joe knows he’ll get obsessed with Love if he isn’t careful, so he tries to stay away — he’s a changed man! Plus, Candace is under his skin, and he gets paranoid that someone’s stalking him for a change, worried that she might have trailed him to LA. He catches Ellie filming him and freaks out, knocking her phone out of her hand and breaking it, even though it turns out she’s just making a movie for school. Now Joe has to do damage control and buy Ellie a new phone. It helps them bond: Joe gives her book recs, Ellie gives him movie recs, and she also helps him create an authentic social media persona. Why does Joe, who famously hates social media, want to create a digital footprint all of a sudden? To get connected with Love, of course… and to beef up his new identity as Will.

Love accepts his Facebook friend request; to his horror, her relationship status is “Married.” Yet she makes his whole life by dropping in on his apartment IRL to spread organic aloe on his first California sunburn. Joe has never met a woman who’s so immediately available and open to him, at least not that he can remember right this moment. Love opens Joe’s eyes to LA’s great writers and generally helps disabuse him of his anti-West Coast bias, cooking him a delicious, very Californian dinner. Love reveals that, despite her relationship status, her husband is dead. She’s experienced real loss, which attracts Joe even more. It’s almost as if meeting Love by chance was almost too good to be true…

Yep, that’s the Joe we know. Nothing that’s happened to Joe in LA so far has been a coincidence: Getting the job at Anavrin, moving into his apartment have all been about getting closer to Love, whom he’s been stalking all along. So much for Will. Well, not quite. Actually, Will is the guy locked in Joe’s new plexiglass cage. 

“Just the Tip”

Flash back to one week before the events of the last episode, to the real origin story of LA Joe and Will Bettelheim.

The real Will Bettelheim (Robin Lord Taylor) is a guy on Craigslist who sells new identities. Joe needed a new name and documents, but instead of buying a fake one from Will, he opted to steal Will’s own. Joe bashed Will in the back of the head with a concrete block and built a plexiglass cage around him in a storage unit — a makeshift version of Season 1’s bookstore basement cage.

All things considered, Will seems quite accepting of his new circumstances. As far as false imprisonment and identity theft go, Joe seems to have found the ideal victim — until it’s revealed that a bounty hunter named Jasper Krenn (Steven W. Bailey) is looking for Will — or in his absence, Joe — who owes him money. Fifty grand, more specifically. When Joe can’t pay, Jasper cuts off the end of his pinky finger. The real Will, who’s now struggling in the cage without his meds, tells Joe there’s a guy named Rufus who owes him 50 grand, so now Joe needs to go collect.

Meanwhile, Love moves fast — she invites Joe to meet her friends. He accepts the invite, but instead of enjoying lunch, he spies on them from outside the restaurant and stalks them on Instagram. That’s the Joe we know! Joe initially dismisses Lucy, Gabe and Melanie as stereotypically LA hippy-dippy posers. But listening to their conversation convinces him that they’re genuinely caring — far superior to Beck’s squad. Later, when Love catches Joe in his lie about missing brunch, he sees a hallucination of Beck (Elizabeth Lail). As much as he’s drawn to Love, he’s afraid he’ll hurt her like he did Beck and Candace.

Back in reality, Joe ventures to a drug-fueled pool party in the Valley to track down Rufus. There, he runs into his neighbor Delilah (Carmela Zumbado), Ellie’s older sister who unsuccessfully tries to avoid a famous douchey comedian named Hendy, who, she later tells Joe, drugged and raped her when she was 17. Not the kind of thing Joe would generally let slide — but, for now, he has other priorities. He lures Jasper to the storage unit, stabs him, gets his finger reattached and dismembers him in Anavrin’s kitchen. We’ve heard of natural ingredients, but that’s a bit much.

“What Are Friends For?”

Joe claims that he and Love can easily stay platonic. Not even Will believes him. (Will has become Joe’s closest confidant, which makes sense since Joe is out there living his life for him. Also, he’s a literally captive audience.) Love’s twin brother, Forty (James Scully) — a self-absorbed LA stereotype with a speed habit — would normally be Joe’s nemesis, but he tries to befriend him to stay close to Love. Joe even goes with Forty to one of Hendy’s comedy shows where he spots Ellie — knowing Delilah’s history with Hendy, Joe’s protective instincts kick in. Ellie is a terrifying teenager who doesn’t want to be protected. But Joe won’t be deterred: He’s already installed spyware on her phone.

Joe turns to Will for advice on how to hack Hendy — turns out hacking a celebrity is harder than hacking a normal person, so Joe braves an improv show and talks his way into a party at Hendy’s house. Forty invites himself along so he can pitch Hendy on his idea for a “psychosexual thriller” while Joe snoops through Hendy’s bedroom and finds his extra laptop. After an agent at the party pooh-poohs his pitch, Forty has a drug-fueled freakout, and Hendy shows his guest some genuine compassion. He also says some sweet, non-creepy things about Ellie, which seems to convince Joe that he could be a nice guy after all. Joe and Hendy, two nice guys!

Joe calls Love for help with Forty, and he sees that, as awful as Forty is, he’s been through a lot and Love has had to step up as his caretaker their whole lives. The show of vulnerability finally makes Joe forget the “just friends” charade, and he and Love have passionate, kinky sex. Love is adventurous in bed, and Joe is very much game. We end with something we’ve seen before: a beautifully lit montage of Joe in blissful love with a woman. We know where this went with women in the past… but Love is totally unlike anyone Joe’s fallen for before.

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“The Good, the Bad & the Hendy”

Joe and Love are stupidly, blissfully happy. Joe even wins over Love’s friends. The only buzzkill is Forty’s neverending neediness, and Love is the kind of sister/caretaker who’ll drop everything to run to his rescue. Joe offers to help Forty write his screenplay — but only as a way to get closer to Love.

Joe has his own human to take care of: the real Will Bettelheim. Unlike Forty, Will is actually useful. Forty had told Joe about a creepy secret sex room in Hendy’s house, and Will’s guidance helps Joe find it. Joe breaks in (hey, to a guy’s house this time), and sure enough, he finds photos of passed-out women and girls that Hendy drugged, including Delilah. Joe drops off the photos at Delilah’s door, giving her proof she needs to write a takedown of Hendy.

But it’s not enough: The photos are useless because Hendy’s not in them. Joe plans to go back and torture a confession out of Hendy, but the plan gets more complicated when Ellie shows up to Hendy’s first. Everything about their interaction looks normal, until Joe sees Hendy slip GHB in Ellie’s drink; Joe then puts way more into Hendy’s, knocking him out. While Ellie’s passed out on the couch, Joe ties Hendy up in his own creepy sex dungeon and tries to elicit a filmed confession, but the two struggle and Joe knocks Hendy down the stairs. He sure looks dead — and Joe has experience staging suicides. 

When he gets back to the storage unit, Joe decides to prove that he’s not a terrible person by letting Will free. Growth, right?

Well, regression is likely in Joe’s future. In the very last shot of the episode, a woman approaches Love and Forty at a music festival and introduces herself as Amy. It’s Candace.

“Have A Good Wellkend, Joe!”

After meeting Forty at the music festival, Candace is already working with him on his movie, and even scores an invite to the Quinn family’s “Wellkend,” a New Age-y wellness retreat, which Love and Joe are attending — or enduring — as well. Joe’s face when he sees Candace is priceless. She’s here just to terrorize him — and, as we see in a flashback, he deserves it.

Back when they were dating, Joe kidnapped her, drove her out to the woods, knocked her out and, thinking he’d he killed her (Joe is often surprisingly bad at checking for vital signs), buried her alive in a shallow grave that she had to crawl her way out of. Yeah, there’s no coming back from that.

In the present, Candace explains that she found Joe via a viral video of Forty’s drugged-out meltdown at Hendy’s party. Candace is a ticking time bomb who might blow up Joe’s life at any minute… but in the meantime, he has to navigate Love’s family. Love’s mom, Dottie, slaps her after Forty makes a public scene; afterward, Love tells Joe the horrific story of Forty’s childhood abuse, which goes some way to explaining both his behavior and her protectiveness of him. Such vulnerability is, of course, irresistible to Joe, and he and Love say, each in their own quirky ways, that they love each other.

After the toxic wellness weekend is over, Forty drops a bombshell: His film project is an adaptation of Beck’s memoir. Clearly, Candace is behind that. Then, worse news: Hendy’s death has been ruled a murder. As Candace says, “Murder has a way of following you.”

“Farewell, My Bunny”

Joe and the rest of the attendees at Hendy’s funeral have to endure an epic, heroic eulogy from Kathy Griffin. Delilah is devastated that she’ll never be able to expose Hendy for who he really was — without more proof, releasing the photos will only hurt his victims. The funeral is also triggering for Love, who remembers her husband’s tragic death. She’s been through a lot, which may explain why she’s so impulsive with Joe — and why she might be open to accepting him for who he is.

Speaking of who Joe is, he’s determined to get rid of Candace before she can destroy what he has with Love. He follows her to Echo Park, but it turns out that someone else is already tailing her: a private investigator that Love hired after catching Candace in a lie at the wellness weekend. Candace is pursuing Joe just as doggedly; going off a tip from the P.I., Love catches her in the act of breaking into Joe’s apartment. Backed into a corner, Candace tells Love about her terrifying history with Joe. Confronted by Love with Candace’s story, Joe admits that Will is a fake name — but manages to convince her that Candace is delusional and is obsessed with him. (The best lies contain an element of truth.) Still, it’s all too weird, and Love has to break up with him… or, really, take a break from him. Without her, Joe has no real reason to stay in Los Angeles, a city he hates. But before he can give up on the town for good, Forty offers Joe a glimmer of hope that Love might come around. Who are we kidding? She’s definitely going to give him another chance.

But first, Joe’s free to have sex with Delilah. It’s not cheating on Love, because… They are on a break! And Joe’s nothing if not a rule follower, right?

“Ex-istential Crisis”

Love is on the rebound with Milo (Andrew Creer), the conventionally hunky best friend of her dead husband James (Daniel Durant), which has Joe feeling upset, powerless, paranoid and obsessive. But, you know, more so. Forty hates Milo for Love, too, and suddenly he’s Joe’s best advocate. But Love still isn’t over Joe lying about everything, so, with a mighty sigh, he gets on the apps, including the hilariously named Flingr. An old-fashioned guy, Joe really isn’t built for 21st-century dating, so he reverts back to his comfort zone: spying on Love and Milo like a creeper.

Joe finally finds a worthy rebound in Delilah, who pops in to thank him for encouraging her to keep writing the article about Hendy. The piece is brilliant, and Variety is interested in running it. Nothing like a taste of literary success to get Joe aroused — so much so that he and Delilah get caught by the cops having sex in an alley. Forty bails them out, and they’re free to sleep off their hangovers at Joe’s… and agree to just be friends moving forward. Delilah’s cop friend-with-benefits, Fincher (Danny Vasquez), calls her to let her know that he recognized Joe from the night Hendy was murdered. Delilah tries to ignore her suspicions, but she’s too good a journalist, and looks around in Joe’s apartment until she finds the keys to his storage unit. Another exposé may be brewing…

Delilah goes to the storage unit, where she finds the plexiglass cage as well as plenty more evidence of Joe’s many (so many) crimes. The last person who did something like this was Beck, and she ended up dead. Guess Joe learned from the time she snooped around his apartment because his new place is rigged up with nanny cams. Joe arrives at the locker in time to trap Delilah in the cage. He promises not to kill her, for Ellie’s sake… but then, Joe has a habit of “accidentally” killing people he promised not to.

“Fear and Loathing in Beverly Hills”

Delilah begs Joe for her life, and Joe vows to free her for real — just like he did with Will — but not without making some arrangements first: He’s going to skip town. He puts Delilah in time-release handcuffs that will free her automatically after he’s gotten far enough. Joe writes a heartfelt goodbye letter to Love, but before he can leave, a couple of henchmen in a black car kidnap him and Forty.

Joe assumes it’s people who want revenge for killing Hendy, but it turns out that the motive for the kidnapping is way stupider: Forty arranged the whole scheme as a way to lock him and Joe in a hotel room together while they write their screenplay; if either leave, they’ll get shot. (This is an even more elaborate writer’s retreat than the one Joe set up for Beck in the cage.) To make things even worse, Forty got Ellie involved — she’s in the hotel room too. Joe figures that if they just write their screenplay quickly enough, he’ll still have time to leave before Delilah’s handcuffs release… but then Forty freaks out after Ellie’s critique of the script (maybe the whole thing seems a little… forced?) and escapes out the hotel room window. Joe has no choice but to follow.

Forty leads them to a speakeasy-style bar, and they have drinks… that Forty has laced with LSD in an attempt to lure the “muse.” Joe tries to stop himself from tripping through force of will. He runs into Love outside the bar, but isn’t sure if she’s real or if his willpower has cracked under the influence. He can’t speak or move as Love and her awful mom Dottie run off.

Joe blacks out, then awakens back in the hotel room with Forty. This is a very bad trip, and it gets worse when Forty starts acting out Beck’s book — i.e., Joe’s sordid past. Joe has the feeling that he might have done something terrible during his blackout — maybe even committed a murder. But Forty reveals a traumatic memory before Joe can: He killed his childhood au pair, the one who abused him. The only one who can guide Joe through his trip is Love, who professes her love to him all over again over the phone. Joe has a revelation: He’s going to stay in LA after all and find some way to persuade Delilah to stay silent. 

Once the LSD wears off, Joe races back to the storage unit to make sure Delilah has been freed. But lo and behold, poor Delilah is on the floor of the cage, very much dead. Whether or not Joe murdered her during his blackout, he’s responsible.

“P.I. Joe”

What did Joe get up to during his blackout? He’s piecing together timelines, rereading old text messages and interviewing witnesses to figure out what happened the previous night. Many have found themselves in a similar situation before, and many will again. But only Joe Goldberg would be desperate to figure out whether he murdered the innocent woman he had locked up in his plexiglass murder cage… or, if not, who did. Joe has certainly been known to exhibit such behavior in the past, when not freaking out on LSD. This person, though, he genuinely didn’t want to kill — like, genuinely genuinely, not just the usual oh-I-never-meant-for-this-to-happen sob story.

At Anavrin, Joe learns from Calvin that he and Forty indeed stopped by during his blackout. He retraces his steps to Forty’s house, where Forty tells Joe that he dropped him off to see Delilah, which further convinces Joe that he could have murdered her. After Joe leaves, Candace comes by Forty’s place and helps Forty realize that, while working through the script’s plot, he actually figured out the truth about who killed Beck. She’s able to track Joe down to the storage unit where Delilah’s body is decomposing and gets a bit of her long-cherished revenge: She pepper-sprays Joe (twice!) before locking him in his cage. She texts Love to come by so that she can show her who Joe really is. 

Love learning the truth about Joe would be the worst thing that could possibly happen to Joe, a fate worse than death. Right? Well, maybe. But not for the reason he thinks.

From inside the cage, Joe finally admits to Love all the horrible things he’s done and apologizes to Candace. But Love doesn’t call the police. Instead, calm as you like, she stabs Candace in the neck with a broken bottle.

With Candace very much dead, Love frees Joe from the cage. So, uh. What’s her deal?

“Love, Actually”

Fresh off murdering Candace in cold blood, Love confesses her psychopath origin story to Joe. Turns out, she’s more Joe than Joe. She’s the one who murdered Forty’s au pair abuser when they were kids and framed her own brother for it. Joe wasn’t the one who chose Love and stalked his way into her life — Love was the one who stalked and lured him, seeing a kindred spirit who could help her build a family that would be the opposite of the one she was born into. She already knew exactly who Joe was and wanted him because of it, not in spite of it. And she’s the one who murdered Delilah.

To protect Joe, Love comes up with a scheme too diabolical even for him: Set up Ellie for Hendy’s murder, then stage Delilah’s death as a suicide in reaction to the fallout from her Variety article. Joe’s fantasy vision of Love goes up in flames, and he wants to kill her the first chance he gets… but then she reveals she’s pregnant with his baby. A romantic like Joe can’t possibly pass up the chance to be the father he didn’t have, so he makes the momentous decision to go all in with Love and raise the child with her. He deals with the Delilah mess by giving Ellie money and telling her to skip town before Child Protective Services comes for her — a seemingly heroic gesture from the guy who ruined her life.

Another unexpected twist: Forty switches into full hero mode, visiting Dr. Nicky in prison to confirm his innocence — and to research his screenplay, of course. Dr. Nicky warns him that Joe is dangerous, and Forty is determined to protect his sister from him.

Since they’re so far steeped in blood already, Joe and Love still attend Lucy’s beachside wedding. Forty threatens to kill Joe to keep his sister from living with a psychopath, but Fincher the cop shoots Forty dead before he can. Love is devastated, but then pulls the coldest move yet: She pins the murders of Hendy and Delilah on Forty, enabling her and Joe to get away with everything.

They’re free to build the picture-perfect lives neither of them had growing up. They move to a beautiful little house with a literal picket fence. Maybe these two crazy kids will be able to clean up their acts… right?

To find out more about You, check out all of Tudum’s coverage, here.

You Season 4 Part 1 TrailerNew year, new country, new persona. And yet Joe can’t seem to shake off his past.