It’s a point that’s hard to argue, especially given how much time Penn Badgley, the actor who plays Joe, has spent on Twitter trying to dissuade the show’s fans from falling in love with a psychotic, misogynistic killer.Ī: He is a murderer - Penn Badgley January 9, 2019 Badgley’s performance is as a highly charismatic, magnetic murderer, which means that while you’re watching him be a murderer, you’re also watching him be magnetic. It is still centering Joe’s perspective, even as it’s trying to turn him into a monster. It is still giving Joe the voice and making Beck the victim. Because in the act of satirizing them, You also straight-up replicates them. Goldstein’s further point is that it doesn’t matter that You tried to undermine and satirize all of the romance plots that are culturally coded as sweet, but which are actually abusive, manipulative nonsense. “Was it necessary - was it even remotely good television - for an entire episode to be devoted to Beck’s being psychologically tortured until she gets killed?” But a story that gives a violent male character a full, complicated history (or, I should say, attempts to do that) while never revealing more about its female character beyond what said male character can discern and/or chooses to project onto her is not subversive, at all,” Goldstein writes. “It feels like You wants to be edgy and subversive.
In her recap of the final episode, Jessica Goldstein asked exactly this question, and comes away with an unequivocal no, it is not good. Is it good that a show about a psychotic, narcissistic, self-absorbed killer - a show about a dude who bears a surface-level resemblance to swoon-worthy romantic Prince Charming tropes but who is actually an abusive, violent stalker - exists? Is it good that You prioritizes Joe’s point of view over everything else, putting us in the head of a man who murders people and who can only see life through the filter of his own needy obsessions? Is it good that Beck’s perspective gets only part of one episode, while Joe dominates everything else? Is it good for us, the viewers, to watch yet another story about a woman trapped in a cage begging for her life?
Those questions are also questions about the whole series. The first kind: Is it well-made? Does it deliver on the story the season had been building toward? Does it feel like a fitting conclusion for the previous nine episodes, are the performances good, does the final twist make sense, is it an entertaining hour of television? Does it hint toward what’s to come in a second season? The second: Is the ending of You … good? Beyond the storytelling and structural ideas, is it good for the world and for its viewers that this is how Beck’s story ends? There are two kinds of questions to ask about this ending. The woman is Joe’s ex-girlfriend Candace, the woman whom Beck assumed he’d killed, and to his astonishment (and ours!) she’s not dead. We can hear his intrigued inner monologue as he follows a faceless woman into the aisles of his bookstore, analyzing her appearance for what he imagines is her intended appeal and possible vulnerabilities. Then, in the last moments of the season finale, we watch as Joe’s internal stalker engine starts all over again. In the end, Joe posthumously publishes Beck’s work, which has conveniently fingered Beck’s therapist as the murderer so Joe escapes suspicion. She writes a magnum opus, an essay about the falseness of romantic tropes that’s an effort to re-seduce Joe so she can escape, but her attempt fails and Joe murders her. Finally, she discovers his hidden box of serial-killer trophies and the inevitable happens: She’s trapped in Joe’s snazzy basement dungeon, scrambling to strategize her way out, desperate to avoid what she’s sure happened to Candace, Joe’s last girlfriend who’s been mysteriously missing for months.īeck does not succeed. We the viewers have known this from the jump, because You puts us inside Joe’s head from the first moments of the show, but the entire first season of You is the process of watching poor hapless Beck fail to recognize the danger she’s in.
#Candace you netflix serial
In the last episode of You’s first season, romantic heroine Beck finally realizes that the gorgeous, thoughtful man she’s been dating, Joe, is actually a monstrous serial killer who’s been stalking her, manipulating her, and will probably kill her.
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