Just as I suspected, Joe has also had his sense of what constitutes romance shaped by the deranged influence that is Jane Eyre, a tale of a horrible man and the clueless young woman he dupes into marrying him while he is still hitched to his attic-wife. Hilarious supercut here of every woman Joe has ever dated telling him that he is the problem. Joe’s conclusion: He has been afraid to show his girlfriends his true self! That’s why he’s never found true love. Yeah! That’s it, babe, for sure.
Anyway, great news: Louise is the love of his life! And if she’s not, that’s cool, he is just going to have to murder her probably! When Louise wakes, Joe explains away the handcuffs by saying he didn’t want her to walk on her sprained ankle by mistake. Yet another totally normal thing for this normal guy to do. I love how normal he is! He uncuffs her and her ankle does appear to be in really bad shape. (I was waiting for the twist where he was the one who twisted it, but I guess that’s not the direction we’re going here.)
Much of the Joe and Louise back-and-forth in this episode is a drag. We’re usually great at keeping things moving on You, but here we end up just retreading a lot of stuff that we already know — Bronte’s backstory with Beck, the fact that Joe is a psychopath — while these two dopes try to figure each other out. I spent much of their time together simply BEGGING Louise to drop a pin or text Dom, but she does none of these things and is committed instead to driving me insane from afar.
Elsewhere on the ranch, we’re making some progress. There was DNA evidence against Joe in Rhys’s murder, and Kate made it go away. (It’s not that I’m all about carceral justice, but Teddy is right about Kate! She SHOULD face consequences for this!) Nadia tells Kate she must know that Joe was the “Eat-the-Rich” killer. Remember how Kate had a boyfriend when Joe met her? And then this Eat-the-Rich killer took out not only that guy but also some of Kate’s wealthy friends, and for a while, his murders were trending? Kate, preposterously, never even CONSIDERED Joe’s involvement in these killings. See my previous recap re: idiot plot. (Is this episode called “Folie à Deux,” because everyone is acting like a joker? Discuss.) Nadia, speaking for us all: “I take it it’s now landing on you how obvious this all is?” Kate assures Nadia that she will get her out of prison and put Joe away forever. Given her previous work, I would not find this promise especially heartening.
Over at Joe’s place, he and Louise are getting vulnerable with each other in the sort of practiced way where you’re obviously keeping your worst secrets to yourself. Louise says she wants to be with Joe; he’s the reason she hasn’t gone back to Ohio. She allows him to lead her into the basement with her busted ankle because she is the dumbest woman on the block. Who do we find in the human aquarium but Dane, the guy from the van. Joe brought him back here as a gift, like when a cat kills a rat and leaves its corpse on your doorstep.
Joe is trying to be his most authentic self, and so he tells Louise that this is what life with him would look like: just an endless parade of dirtbags in the human aquarium, being tortured, murdered, and disappeared. (Or, as he spins it: He’d never let anyone hurt her again.) In the language of empowerment, Joe loves to co-opt for his own purpose; he encourages Louise to regain her power by doing whatever she wants with Dane. At the end of the day, she decides to let him go with a warning. Rather than respect her wishes, Joe finds this dude and stabs him in the street.
I’ve had this issue with You before: Obviously we are aware that the world is full of violent misogynists; they’re well-documented and not that interesting! What’s much more intriguing is the, to quote Maddie, soft boi-misogyny of Joe, which of course is going to look (grading on a curve) less vile than the “you’re a stupid fucking whore” style of scumbaggery — you know, before you see Joe shove a corpse through a meat grinder. I’m also tired of the recurring theme that all these violent men are only violent because their mothers were either too loving or too withholding — incredibly, their dads never come up! It’s just another way of blaming male violence on women. And I really could’ve done without the whole rigamarole of Dane maybe having some redeeming qualities, but then he doesn’t really because he’s the guy who put zip ties in the back of the van so he could kidnap a woman he heard about on the internet.
Joe can’t babysit Dane and Louise because Maddie has called him with a 911. After seeing Harrison be a very sweet dad to Gretchen, Maddie-as-Reagan wanted to have sex with him; alas, she got caught up in the moment and called him “baby,” which gave the game away. Poor, concussed Harrison finally figured it out: Maddie has been pretending to be Reagan all this time.
Maddie “bonked” Harrison, knocking him out, but now she’s at a loss for what to do. When Harrison regains consciousness, he finds himself — as people in the You-niverse are wont to do — duct-taped to a chair. Joe wants to handle this in the usual fashion (murder), but Maddie begs him to spare Harrison’s life and use his “mind magic” instead. This is another sequence that really drags on as we hear things we already know (the boat plan, normies thinking that “murder is wrong”) and watch someone behave in a way that makes zero sense. (Why wouldn’t Harrison just pretend to be on board with Joe’s plan so he could get out of there alive?) Maddie accuses Harrison of having no moral leg to stand on, given his history with her; Harrison weeps that he’s a piece of shit for being an adulterer. These relationships are such a great advertisement for being single. Ultimately, Maddie and Harrison agree to stick with the plan, happily saying that they are monsters who can love each other anyway. This was all pretty dull, but I loved Joe stabbing the shit out of that chair, followed by his line reading of, “Whooo! Okay, don’t make me regret this.”
In London, Kate and Henry reunite with Lady Phoebe. (Sidebar: I can’t with the cloying improbable child who wants sushi for dinner and never begs for TV time!) Kate fills Phoebe in on Joe’s whole deal regarding all the homicides. Then Kate has Nadia released from prison, asking her to be an eyewitness so they can get Joe once and for all. If I were Nadia I would run for the fucking hills, but she returns with Kate to her hotel. Henry storms off — he is NOT afraid of his dad, who threatened Uncle Teddy with the giant knife, thank you very much — and finds Phoebe’s phone, which he uses to call Joe. Not usually a stickler for this sort of thing, but Phoebe’s phone doesn’t have a passcode. In what world?
Henry tells his dad his whereabouts for the next 48 hours and that “Mommy says you’re going to jail.” Because no one involved in this plan has anything resembling a plan, Kate FaceTimes with Joe rather than just hanging up on him immediately. Joe rages against the “vengeful cunt” he once adored; just to make sure we’re all getting it, he checks the basement cameras, sees that Louise let Dane out of the cage, and decides this means she’s “not the one,” which means he has to kill her. It’s almost like Dane and Joe aren’t that different after all … shocking!
But when Joe gets back, Louise is still there. Good LORD. She explains her vision — eternal surveillance for Dane, but no extrajudicial slaughter — and tells Joe she knows that was a test. (I also feel like Dane would’ve just attacked her as soon as he got out. The room is full of weapons, and she can barely walk.) So she locks herself in the cage, having now decided that the plexiglass prison is a special place where a person cannot lie. Having answered Joe’s questions to his satisfaction, Louise gets out and asks Joe to go in. I was really, really hoping this meant she was playing the longest of long games, but nope, she just finds out about his stint in the sad haunted home for boys (longtime readers of these recaps will remember this as the Queen’s Gambit Tranquilizer Den for Separating the Weak From the Merely Abandoned) where his mom left him. Remember, it’s always a woman’s fault! Joe also pinkie-swears he’s never killed anyone innocent. If she’s so sure this cube is a human lie detector, why not just ask him point-blank if he killed Beck?
Joe confesses that he enjoys killing people, but Louise refuses to accept this. Joe, she says, has convinced himself he needs to murder people in order to deserve love. I wonder how she’s squaring all this away with everything she knows about Beck’s book. She frees him, and they are back in bed together, advancing from “enemies to lovers” to (ugh) “she fixed him.” At this point, I am not rooting for either of them to survive.
In London, Kate learns what should have been obvious to her from the get-go: The legal process is a slow one. Nadia’s testimony will clinch it, but it will take years. So Kate comes to the only natural conclusion here: She needs to kill Joe. Again, I encourage Nadia to get out before she winds up in prison for the second time.
Joe FaceTimes Kate — why is she taking his calls?! — to sound completely insane and remind Kate that she’s killed children with her bad pipeline. Kate tells Joe she will tell her son that Joe is “a fucking serial killer.” YET, AGAIN, I ASK: If she is so sure Joe is a serial killer, why is she baiting him? Does anyone on this program have one iota of a survival instinct in their doomed bodies?