by Jeff Alan, Contributing Writer
At the end of the last season of You, Joe (Penn Badgley) had killed his psychotic wife Love Quinn, left their baby boy with two friends that would give him a good home, and faked his own death in the effort to travel overseas to search for his newest obsession, Marienne (Tati Gabrielle), who discovered Joe’s past thanks to his late wife. The new season picks up much later, with Joe living a quiet normal life in London under the moniker of Jonathan Moore, a professor of literature at a prestigious university. He has seemingly given up on finding Marienne, and has vowed to leave his old life behind and engross himself in being a good person and a good teacher. This proves difficult when a peer of Joe’s named Malcolm (Stephen Hagan), a wealthy professor who got Joe the job, attempts to befriend him further. Joe also finds himself slipping into old habits from his previous life, and in his internal monologue, we hear his struggle to be good and keep his obsessive and violent urges to himself.
After reluctantly saving Malcolm’s girlfriend Kate (Charlotte Ritchie) from a mugging one night, Malcolm invites Joe to join him and Kate at an exclusive club with all their high society friends, and Joe accepts, also reluctantly. At the club, he meets socialite Phoebe (Tilly Keeper) and playboy Adam (Lukas Gage) (a couple), social media influencer Sophie (Niccy Lin), Oxford socialite Gemma (Eve Austin), wannabe artist and Sophie’s brother Simon (Aidan Cheng), Nigerian princess Blessing (Ozioma Whenu), aristocrat Roald (Ben Wiggins), sportsman Connie (Dario Coates), and author Rhys (Ed Speleers), whom Joe spends part of the night bonding with over shared childhood traumas and their equal distaste for the “rich” society they seem to be part of, before departing for a flight. As the night progresses, Joe grows increasingly bored and urges desperately for Malcolm to drive him home. After growing impatient and attempting to leave, the friend group gives Joe several shots of absinthe, which makes him black out and forget the rest of the night.
The next morning, Joe walks up in his flat to find Malcolm dead on his kitchen table with a knife sticking out of his chest. Believing he let his violent urges go during his drunken state, he quickly disposes of the body and goes back to his life, being invited into the friend group by Kate and Phoebe. But just as he is about to enter the club with his friends, he gets an anonymous message on his phone from someone who knows what he did with Malcolm’s body, and Joe believes it to be someone in the friend group. This sets off the story of this season and brings Joe to becoming his own detective to discover who killed Malcolm, and wonder if there will be more killings because of it.
Badgley is as wonderful as ever, and it’s fun to see how Kate and Joe interact with each other, with the inclusion of Ritchie. The supporting characters are fine as well, but I found them to be forgettable, and I honestly didn’t even remember a lot of their names as the episodes went on. Joe’s journey of finding the killer takes him back into thinking like the killer he is trying to leave behind, and it’s a fun watch to see him juggle these two worlds. The biggest flaw in this story is the absence of Marienne, after Joe making a big deal of finding her in the finale of the last season, and now that whole mission is just over too quickly, which will become more clear after watching the full first episodes of Season Four. I was just expecting that mission of his to be more fleshed out in this first part of the season. Which brings me to my biggest issue with the season, and the major glaring problem I have with this chunk of episodes: the fact that this season is split into two parts.
It’s official. I am sick of networks releasing “Part One” and “Part Two” of TV shows that don’t deserve or need to be released into two separate parts, Netflix being the major culprit of this movement. I would understand if you had a season of a TV show that got a new season pickup with more episodes than you would typically get, and you feel the need to break the season apart for easier viewing. But this show only puts out 10 episodes a season, and by cutting it in half for each part, the block of episodes is over before you know it, and you are left feeling like you were robbed of something. By this season doing that, these five episodes feel incredibly rushed, and like they are trying to get to their midseason cliffhanger in the quickest way possible, because they knew the season was going to be split in half.
Not to mention that this half-season ends on a “cliffhanger” that barely leaves me feeling like my time rushing to my TV to watch these new episodes was worth it. Their “twist” was one I saw coming, and frankly, deserved to be saved for a later episode if they had a full season release. It’s not like with Stranger Things,for example, where their latest season was so intense and story-heavy, and the episodes themselves were longer and actually left you wanting more, that their decision to split their season felt like the right call.
In You’s case, it cheapens the idea of the two-part system and feels intentionally incomplete, and I don’t like that. If you are reading this and are looking for a word of advice, I recommend waiting until March 9 when the full season is available and watching it then. You won’t be missing anything important until that time.
Score: 5/10
You is currently streaming on Netflix
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