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Joe Goldberg is starting yet another new chapter by the end of You season 4. After plenty of murder, kidnapping, and psychotic breaks, Joe and Kate have fled London and started anew in New York City. Joe has been more forthcoming with Kate about his murderous ways than his past loves, and she has accepted him as he is. So, is Kate different? Or could she end up like Beck and Love? HollywoodLife spoke EXCLUSIVELY with You showrunner Sera Gamble about Joe and Kate’s future.
“I think when we leave them at the end of the season, they’re pretty happy with each other,” Sera said. “We don’t know exactly how much he disclosed, but whatever he told her, she has not lived a life where she’s going to be scared away by the word murder. Her dad was her dad, so her setpoint for behavior is a little different than most of us. But I think the answer is in the question, it’s like, I’m not sure that there is a ‘one.’ The ‘one’ has to be Joe not looking outside of himself for all of the stuff that really is about him, his own way that he moves to the world, his own honesty. So for as long as he continues to think he’s going to have the perfect life because of some woman, I think there will be a problem.”
In the final moments of season 4, Joe looks at the window and sees Rhys’ reflection in the mirror. Joe became obsessed with the real Rhys Montrose after capturing Marienne. Following a psychotic break, Rhys became a figment of Joe’s imagination, the source of all the darkness in Joe.
“I don’t know for sure,” Sera said about whether or not Rhys will be back in a potential season 5. “I will say that we adore him. I think that the question we leave with is: what does a truly integrated Joe look like?”
Sera noted that Joe has been consistently “lying to himself” in previous seasons about his intentions. “The only reason he hasn’t learned from the 15 or so people he has killed is that he keeps telling himself that was a one-off, and he’s not a murderer. We were very curious to know what it’s like if he isn’t impinged by that if he doesn’t have the same feeling of guilt that he used to.”
The showrunner pointed out that the show pulled a Fight Club in season 4, and the Rhys/Joe storyline had been in the works for some time. “It’s kind of the reward and success for getting to a season 4,” Sera told HollywoodLife. “When you establish that your character’s mental health is not improving over the course of this season. He isn’t facing a lot of consequences necessarily in the outside world. He’s getting away with a lot, but you can’t run away from what you’ve done on the inside. He has really eroded his own mind over the course of everything he’s done that we’ve seen. We knew we wanted to construct somebody who essentially could embody all of those misguided survival instincts, but also had none of the ‘good Joe’ hesitation. It was more of a question of: what does that person look like? Should we write a male or female character? Will they be British? All of those kinds of questions.”
In the past, Joe’s obsessions have been rooted in romance. Joe’s obsession with Rhys showcased a new side to the character. Sera opened up about exploring other kinds of “deep love” in season 4.
“When we first pitched the show, we said each season we will deep dive into love and obsession in some way,” Sera said. “But we always said there will always be romance. Joe is such a romantic guy and lives for romantic love. But there are a lot of kinds of very deep love, and there are a lot of ways to fall in love with somebody. This was sort of our erotomania season if you will. It just struck us that maybe he would become stalker-level obsessed with a public figure if he had a strong enough parasocial relationship with them.”
One of the biggest twists of season 4 was that Marienne never escaped Joe after he found her. He kept her locked in a cage in London. With Nadia’s help, Marienne was able to free herself from Joe’s grasp by faking her death. HollywoodLife asked Sera if we’ll see Marienne again in the future.
“Marianne is not in a position to be motivated by vengeance,” the showrunner stressed. “She knows that if he’s aware that she’s alive, then she and her daughter are in jeopardy and no one has fought harder to just have a basic ordinary life with a kid than she has. But that being said, we don’t even really have this specific story worked out yet, but we have always had this idea that anyone who remains alive who knows the deal with Joe, especially people whose lives he’s completely destroyed, of which there are several, any one of them could come back.”
Speaking of returns, Love and Beck returned in one of Joe’s nightmares as his suppressed memories came to the surface in his mind. “We felt strongly that we did want to bring back some of the aspects of the previous seasons of the show. I think it’s kind of fun to see him show up clean-shaven at the end because it’s like Joe 1.0-ish has returned to home to New York. Seeing Beck and Love again, for us, felt like a way to make all of these seasons a little bit more of a circle,” Sera explained. You season 4 is now available on Netflix.
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